Stop Carrying Someone Else’s Why

Before you set up your 2026 bullet journal, ask yourself whose life you were living in 2025

🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life — from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸

I write about purpose every single week. I’ve read the books, drawn the diagrams, done the journal reflections. I am, by any reasonable measure, obsessed with finding meaning and living intentionally.

I still spent a chunk of 2025 carrying purpose that wasn’t mine.

Some of what I carry is kinda mine but not always in healthy proportions. Work has always given me a huge sense of meaning and self-worth… but of course we also *have* to push hard to earn enough to raise ourselves out of survival mode, to even have bandwidth to do more for others. Both sides of that equation can tip me into fixation if I’m not vigilant.

The person who pays the price? Andrew. My favourite human man. Who enables me to fly as high as I do, and who I never want to feel taken for granted.

If someone watched how I spend my time... I’m not sure they’d conclude he’s my priority, and that thought sits heavy.

Of course I’d argue back that I’m doing all this stuff for him, for us, for our family, to keep building a good life together. But I know there’s better balance, I’m not the best at that. I catch myself treating our time together as something that’ll happen properly “one day” when we retire (if we ever get to), rather than something intentional woven into the everyday. The every hour, even.

So if you’re heading into year-end planning feeling a little bedraggled by a life that looks fine on paper... if you’re wondering why ticking all the boxes doesn’t feel like winning... if the people who matter most are getting scraps while your to-do list gets your best... this one’s for both of us.

What borrowed purpose is (and why it’s not your fault)

Borrowed purpose is carrying a sense of meaning, duty or direction that isn’t actually yours. It’s living by priorities you absorbed rather than chose. It’s being so good at meeting expectations that you forgot to ask whose expectations they were in the first place.

I’m learning that sometimes the trickiest borrowed purpose looks like your own. They were your goals, your ambitions, your drive… just distorted. Scaled beyond recognition or pursued at a cost you never consciously agreed to pay.

Most of us aren’t short on purpose, we’re drowning in it. It’s just purpose that either belongs to someone else, or belongs to a version of ourselves we didn’t stop to question.

This happens to good people. Caring people. People who notice when something needs doing and step up without being asked. It happens because we absorb definitions of success before we’re old enough to question them. We get good at things we never chose, and competence creates its own momentum… people start relying on you, and reliance can feel like meaning.

Women are trained from birth to notice what needs doing and just do it. To smooth things over. To remember the birthdays, track the emotional weather, hold the invisible threads that keep families and teams and friendships functioning. We’re praised for being helpful and accommodating and selfless, until we’ve built entire identities around carrying things that nobody asked us to carry but everybody expects us to keep holding.

Borrowed purpose isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when systems benefit from you carrying their priorities. Workplaces run smoother when someone volunteers to remember everything. Families function better when someone tracks the emotional labour. Communities thrive when someone always says yes.

The problem is that “someone” has a life too, and she’s often a tad frazzled.

The quiet cost

Borrowed purpose doesn’t announce itself with drama. It’s subtler than burnout, almost worse for it.

It’s doing loads, achieving heaps, getting praised for being “so productive”... and still feeling oddly hollow. That “is this it?” whisper at 2am. Exhaustion that a holiday doesn’t fix, because it’s not tiredness, it’s misalignment. Resentment creeping in sideways toward people who never actually asked you to carry what you’re carrying.

See if any of these land.

You host Christmas every year because you always have, and the thought of someone else doing it brings relief, not loss. You stay late at work because “that’s what commitment looks like” not because anyone asked. You’ve built a career your grandparents would be proud of, but you’re not sure it’s one that makes you feel alive. You’re pursuing a vision of the future you don’t really want because that’s what advertising has told you ambition is supposed to look like.

Or maybe, like me at times, you’re so focused on building a future worth having that you’re forgetting to be present in the life you’re building it with. The date nights that don’t get scheduled. The conversations that stay surface-level because you’re half-somewhere-else.

The worst part? You can lose touch with what you actually want. Carry someone else’s purpose long enough, or your own purpose, distorted… and your real priorities get buried so deep you forget they were ever there.

AI makes borrowed purpose scarily easy to scale. You can now be more efficient than ever at delivering someone else’s priorities, with fewer pauses where your nervous system gets to raise its hand and whisper “Erm... do we even like this?”

So before you design another beautiful spread for 2026, before you set goals and choose your word of the year... there’s work to do. It starts with three questions.

The purpose triangle

Most of us are taught agency and acceptance like they’re opposites. Like acceptance is giving up. Like you’re either fighting to change things or you’ve surrendered.

This Purpose Triangle has three points though, not two… and the third one is what makes this ikigai-flavoured rather than just a coping mechanism… alignment.

Question 1 - What can I actually influence? (Agency)

You can choose what you pick up tomorrow. You can set one thing down. You can stop volunteering for tasks nobody asked you to own. You can schedule a date night instead of assuming there’ll be time later. It is ok sometimes to disappoint someone in service of not disappearing yourself.

Agency isn’t about controlling everything. It’s about being honest about the slice that’s yours to shape, and then shaping it.

Question 2 - What can I not change? (Acceptance)

This is orientation, seeing the gap between the story you tell yourself and what’s actually happening.

You cannot change how you’ve spent the past year. The time is gone. You cannot unsend the message your calendar has been sending to the people who love you. You cannot change that your body has been keeping score while you pushed through. You cannot undo the moments missed while you were half-present, building a future instead of being in the life you already have.

Acceptance is looking at all of that without flinching. Not to punish yourself, but to stop pretending.

Because you can’t navigate from where you wish you were. Only from where you actually are. Acceptance isn’t resignation. It’s refusing to waste more time arguing with reality when you could be working with it.

Question 3 - What do I choose because it’s me, not because it’s urgent? (Alignment)

This is where ikigai lives. The worth piece. The decision to spend your one wild and precious life on things that feel like meaning.

Here’s how I’ve learned to tell borrowed from chosen… after you do the thing, do you feel more like yourself, or less?

Borrowed purpose often feels like relief when it’s done. Chosen purpose feels like energy that returns after effort instead of draining away. There’s a sense of rightness even when it’s hard. Maybe a bit of nervousness, because it really matters.

The trickiest part is that familiar can masquerade as chosen. You’re good at it. People rely on you. You get a little gold star. But familiar without aligned is just a well-worn groove taking you somewhere you never chose to go.

Alignment often looks smaller than your ego would prefer.

Aligned purpose might look like writing one clear paragraph that helps your team. Having one brave conversation. Putting one helpful resource somewhere people can find it. Saying no to a meeting that exists solely because no one wanted to be the first to say it’s pointless. Making a five-minute video that saves 200 people an hour each. Taking a walk, because you are not a machine, and a healthy body is not a “nice-to-have”.

Small does not mean insignificant. Small can be scalable, it can be a seed.

As you get ready for 2026, take a pause

As a huge bullet journal nerd I adore this time of year. Shiny new notebook to unwrap, fresh pages, rainbow fineliners, the promise of a clean slate. Two weeks break when you can properly switch off without guilt. Space to think.

I’ve learned the hard way that you can bullet journal beautifully, track habits religiously, design the most gorgeous spreads... and still be organising someone else’s life by mistake. Or your own life, just... badly. With the wrong things front and centre.

2026 deserves to be built on your foundations. Your values. Your definition of enough. Not a colour-coded, washi-taped version of someone else’s priorities, or your own, grown monstrous from neglect.

So before the new notebook seduces you with its endless possibility... pause.

Ask whose “why” you’ve been carrying.

And if some of that “why” is genuinely yours but has somehow crowded out the people and moments that make any of it matter... maybe it’s time to put some of it down.

For 2026 I’m going to remind myself that real purpose might be smaller than ego would prefer. Quieter. Less impressive-sounding than the borrowed stuff, or the inflated stuff, that can take up a lot of space.

But bloody hell, it’s yours. And the people you love deserve to feel that with you. Not one day. Now.

Small can be a seed.

What’s one thing you’ve been carrying that isn’t yours, beautiful soul? Or one thing that is yours but has grown out of shape? I’d love to hear and cheer you on as you right-size it.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS — ✍️ Bullet Journal Prompts for the Purpose Triangle

• Agency: “What’s one thing I could stop doing, or do less of, that I only continue at this volume because I’m afraid of what it means if I don’t?”

• Acceptance: “If someone watched how I actually spent last week (not how I’d describe it), what would they conclude matters to me? Who would they think I love?”

• Alignment: “What’s the smallest thing I could do this week that would feel unmistakably like me, not urgent, not impressive, just aligned?”

The “Worth It” Audit, a spread to close out 2025:

Three columns: What I’m giving | What I’m getting | What I’m neglecting

Underneath: “If I keep doing this next year, what kind of life am I building, and who am I building it without?”

Label each commitment: Mine / Borrowed / Mine But Distorted

Circle one thing to put down or right-size before the new notebook begins.

New to bullet journaling as a life design tool? Start here: Bullet Journal and take control of your life

PPS — 🤖 AI Coaching Prompt

“I’m reviewing my year through the lens of borrowed versus chosen purpose, including purpose that started as mine but may have grown distorted. Here’s how I typically spend my weeks: [describe your commitments, energy patterns, and which activities leave you feeling more vs less like yourself]. Help me identify: 1) Which commitments seem genuinely aligned with my values versus maintained out of obligation, guilt, or habit, 2) Which of my OWN goals might have scaled beyond what’s healthy or sustainable, 3) Who or what is being neglected while I pursue these things, and 4) One small, aligned action I might experiment with, something that looks smaller than my ego would prefer but feels unmistakably like me. Be honest, I’d rather see clearly than feel comfortable.”

PPPS — 🎵 Soundtrack for right-sizing what matters

“Dog Days Are Over” by Florence + The Machine. That explosive moment when you finally stop running from joy and start running towards it. Crank it up, let it build, and feel what it might be like to set down the weight, or loosen your grip on it, and move freely toward the people and moments that make any of this worth doing. The dog days are over, beautiful soul.