Soul: Do We Really Need to Find Our Purpose?

How often have you been told to find your purpose?

At some point, the phrase can start to sound less like wisdom and more like an assignment. Find the thing you’re meant to do. Discover what you’re good at. Turn your passion into something meaningful. Then, presumably, life will fall into place.

Pixar’s Soul starts with a character who seems to have done exactly that.

Joe Gardner knows what he wants. He wants to become a professional jazz pianist, and he has spent years believing that once he finally gets his chance, his life will properly begin.

There is only one problem.

When the opportunity finally arrives, Joe discovers that he doesn’t feel the way he expected to feel.

And that is where Soul becomes much more interesting than a film about following your passion. It starts asking whether we have misunderstood the whole idea of purpose.

Why Do We Need a Purpose in Life?

Joe has built his identity around jazz.

Teaching music pays the bills, but he sees it as something he has ended up doing while waiting for his real career to arrive. His dream is to play professionally, and the possibility of finally joining saxophonist Dorothea Williams feels like the missing piece.

So when Joe gets the gig, surely this is it.

Except after the performance, he is left with a surprisingly ordinary feeling. He has spent years imagining the moment when everything would finally make sense, only to discover that tomorrow still exists.

Dorothea’s response is almost comically simple: they come back and do it again.

Joe had imagined reaching the top of the mountain. Instead, he has discovered that there is a restaurant at the top and the staff are already asking whether he wants to see the dessert menu.

We often imagine achievement as a finish line.

Once we get the job, relationship, qualification, promotion, creative breakthrough or recognition we have been chasing, we expect to become a different version of ourselves.

But achievements don’t end the need to live. They simply give us another Tuesday.

Joe’s problem isn’t that jazz means nothing to him. It clearly does. But he has made one part of his life responsible for explaining the value of the whole thing.

Joe Wants a Purpose. 22 Wants a Reason to Live.

Before she has even been born, 22 has spent hundreds of years at the Great Before trying to find the mysterious “spark” that will allow her to go to Earth. She has met famous mentors, tried countless interests and remained completely unimpressed by the prospect of being alive.

Joe assumes that she simply hasn’t found her purpose yet.

But 22 has a different problem – she doesn’t want to live because she cannot see a reason to.

Joe believes life will become worthwhile once he finds the right thing to do. 22, in a strange way, has the opposite problem: life already needs to seem worthwhile before she can imagine wanting to live it.

Then 22 ends up experiencing Earth through Joe’s body, and something strange happens.

She eats pizza.

She walks around New York. She feels the wind. She visits a barber shop. She talks to people. She hears music. She notices things she had previously treated as completely unimportant.

None of these experiences gives her a grand mission. They simply make her curious about being alive.

22 doesn’t discover a purpose and then learn to love life. She starts wanting life before she has any idea what she is going to do with it.

Maybe the Spark Was Never Your Purpose

For most of the film, Joe assumes the spark is a person’s defining passion.

His own life revolves around piano, so when he sees a soul with a spark connected to an interest, he naturally interprets it as a calling.

But eventually the film pulls the rug out from underneath him.

A spark isn’t a soul’s purpose.

Purpose is usually imagined as something waiting in the future. Find the right career. Achieve the right thing. Become the person you are supposed to become.

A spark is different. It is what makes someone ready to experience life.

For 22, it isn’t a career or a grand ambition that suddenly makes Earth appealing. It is sunlight, pizza, music, the wind, a conversation, the strange pleasure of noticing something that didn’t seem important five minutes earlier.

Meaning, in Soul, can be something happening while you walk.

So the film isn’t really arguing that ambition is bad either – Joe’s love of music is genuine. The problem is that when a genuine passion becomes so important, everything outside it starts to look like wasted time.

The film’s lost souls take this idea somewhere darker. When a goal or interest becomes so consuming that a person loses their connection with the rest of life, passion has stopped enriching existence and started replacing it.

What Happens When We Keep Waiting to Live?

There is a quiet rebellion against dream culture running underneath Soul.

Modern life encourages us to optimise almost everything. We track progress, measure productivity, refine goals and make plans for the person we hope to become. Every part of life can start to feel like something that needs to lead somewhere.

There is nothing inherently wrong with ambition. The problem begins when ordinary life becomes something we have to endure until the important part starts.

If life must have a grand purpose, the walk home becomes a delay. Lunch becomes fuel. A quiet evening becomes time that could have been spent being productive.

Other films have explored the same tension.

In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Walter spends much of his life imagining experiences rather than fully inhabiting them. When he finally encounters a rare snow leopard in the mountains, it is the kind of moment that should be captured, documented and proven. Instead, he lowers the camera. The moment is allowed to remain a moment.

About Time approaches the idea differently. Tim eventually stops trying to manipulate his days into the perfect sequence and learns to experience ordinary life as it is. The time-travel premise makes the point rather literally: you can have another chance at a moment, but you cannot keep treating the present as a rehearsal for a better one.

And perhaps this is why Soul feels particularly relevant to adulthood.

We’re usually waiting until work settles down. Until we have enough money. Until we know what we’re doing. Until we achieve something. Until we figure ourselves out.

What If We Have Been Asking the Wrong Question?

Near the end of Soul, Joe begins to see his life differently.

He looks back at the small moments surrounding 22’s time on Earth: a slice of pizza, a walk, ordinary encounters that would have been almost invisible to him when he was busy thinking about his next opportunity.

Then he revisits his own memories.

At first, you might expect the important moments to be the milestones: the performances, the opportunities, the moments that were supposed to justify everything.

Instead, the memories that matter are smaller. A walk home at dusk. Music drifting through an open window. A quiet conversation with his mother.

Joe had spent years believing he was waiting for his real life to begin. But it had been happening all along.

Soul doesn’t ask us to abandon ambition or pretend that our dreams don’t matter. Joe still loves music. But eventually, he no longer needs jazz to prove that his life was worth living.

And perhaps that is the uncomfortable question: what if we don’t need to find one great purpose before we are allowed to consider our lives meaningful?

Maybe the search itself can become a distraction. We can spend so much time asking what our lives are for that we forget to notice what our lives actually contain.

There is nothing wrong with having a dream. The trouble begins when every ordinary day becomes something we have to endure until we reach it.

Joe spent years waiting for his life to start. In the end, he realises that it already had.

How much of our own lives are we still waiting to begin?