A central purpose serves to integrate all the other concerns of a man’s life.
It establishes the hierarchy, the relative importance, of his values, it saves
him from pointless inner conflicts, it permits him to enjoy life on a wide
scale and to carry that enjoyment into any area open to his mind; whereas a man
without a purpose is lost in chaos. He does not know what his values are. He
does not know how to judge. He cannot tell what is or is not important to him,
and, therefore, he drifts helplessly at the mercy of any chance stimulus or any
whim of the moment. He can enjoy nothing. He spends his life searching for some
value which he will never find . . . .
The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings
or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of
control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to
have a purpose—a productive purpose . . . . The man who has no purpose, but has
to act, acts to destroy others. That is not the same thing as a productive or
creative purpose.