Desperately Looking for a Purpose In Life: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

'''King Harkinian''': [[Home Sweet Home|My boy, this peace is what all true warriors strive for!]]<br />

'''Link''': [[You Just Had to Say It|I just wonder what Ganon's up to!]]|''[[The Legend of Zelda CDi Games|Link: The Faces Of Evil]]''}}

Alternatively, the character indeed ''had'' found [[Glory Days|that satisfactory goal of life in the past]], but [[I Coulda Been a Contender|life circumstances had irrevocably separated him from it]]. Broken-hearted, he tries with other things, often without success. In this case, he will abandon whatever he's doing if there is even a minimal chance of going back to the way it was.

 

 

As the first tab below may suggest, there seems to be a specific Japanese variant of this trope, the '(Male) [[Ordinary High School Student]] burdened heavily by ennui at the lack of individual freedom and excitement offered by the modern Japanese lifestyle,' who usually gets swept up into wacky hijinks and this frames a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the audience to relate to, but occasionally he has to cope with that dull world in some way. This variant of the trope is particularly likely to display overt symptoms of clinical depression without them being considered in that light.

 

This is what happens when those that [[I Just Want to Be Special|Just Wanted To Be Special]] and would have [[Jumped At the Call]] [[Missed the Call|never get the opportunity]]. They just never found their [[Goal in Life]].

 

== Anime and Manga ==

** Eventually he builds up a network of allies, revolutionizes demon politics for at least a while, opens a ramen stand, and gets married. Somewhere in 'having loads of buddies,' 'being a major political presence due to being able to punch mountains to death,' 'starting a family,' and 'not needing to worry about spending his time wisely because he's probably immortal,' he seems to find a happy place. And yes, there is a very bad case of [[Power Seep]],[[Power Creep]] going on here. In the first volume, he got blasted into outer space by the ghost of a little girl.

** Note that this is a guy who began the series with only one friend (the girl he ends up married to) and she spent most of their interactions yelling at him. The moments when he started treating Kuwabara as an ally, saved Kurama's life, and trusted Hiei for no good reason respectively set him up to completely change everything at least as much as dying and getting superpowers ever did. And he'd never have survived long enough to recover from his second death without his team.

* Nozomi, from ''[[Yes Precure 5|Yes! Precure 5]]'', is like this at the start of the series, though she finds [[Magical Girl|something to do]] by the end of the first episode. She's mentioned to have joined a series of different clubs, always ending in disaster.

* ''[[Haruhi Suzumiya (Literature)|The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya]]''. Haruhi's titular melancholy comes from the fact that she's desperate for something so fun and exciting that it'll shake up her life. She's joined every club, dated every boy who asked her out (however briefly), and never lasted more than a week with anything but the SOS-dan, which [[Start My Own|she started herself]]. {{spoiler|The irony here is that the things she's searching for are [[It Was With You All Along|right there]], and [[Locked Out of the Loop|trying to keep her from finding out]]}}.

* A darker example happens in [[Zombie Loan]], where {{spoiler|Reiichirou Chiba}} becomes so jaded with his boring life and how predictable his future will be that he kills himself. At which point he comes back to life as a superpowered zombie and becomes a serial killer. So... he did kind of get his wish.

** He is an ''extremely'' happy character. So, yeah. Cruel, psychotic bastard, but quite happy.

* Maon from ''[[Tamayura (Anime)|Tamayura]]'' has this, making her hop from one hobby to the next.

* [[Bleach|Kurosaki]] [[The Hero|Ichigo]] spent three timeskip years like this, after being utterly sidelined at the end of the Winter War by his decision to use the move Mugetsu and sacrifice all his powers rather than experiment with destroying Aizen into tinier and tinier pieces in more and more virulent ways and risking him getting away. Or at least, that must have been his reasoning, since he had a vast advantage in power at the time.

== Theater ==

* The archetypal example here is Willy Loman, the [[Death of a Salesman|salesman who dies]] looking for success and the American Dream in the business world, when his true talent lies in mechanics and carpentry and he's long since turned down the opportunity to go work in the outdoors. Also his son, Biff, who ends up rejecting the dream his father had worked for and decided to make his own way in life, no matter how humble and small it might have been.

* This seems to be part of Nina's problem in ''[[In the Heights]]''. Nina is incredibly smart and talented and is the first person in her neighborhood to go to college. But college was a major struggle and after she loses her scholarship she finds herself wondering how exactly she's going to fulfill her goals in life.

* The entire plot of ''[[Pippin]]'' is the main character's struggle to find his "Corner of the Sky". This being a [[Stephen Schwartz]] musical, it's a massive subversion: {{spoiler|the players explain to him the end that his search for purpose was "doomed from the start", and try to get him to kill himself in a blaze of glory. Pippin declines, but does he find his purpose? Nope - he gives up, deciding that love is purpose enough}}.

* Skull Boy, from ''[[Ruby Gloom]]''. Each episode, he discovers a talent he didn't know he had, and believes he is part of that heretic. In a musical special, he temporarily runs away to find his place in the world.

* Peri from ''[[Spliced]]''.

** The episode ends with Apple Bloom and two classmates forming a [[Power Trio]] called the Cutie Mark Crusaders, specifically devoted to carrying out this trope. They spend various episodes trying to get their marks.

* Depressingly played with in the animated short "The Monk's Purpose," which aired on ''[[Liquid Television]]''. A pilgrim comes to a stone idol in the desert, and asks it, "What is my purpose?" {{spoiler|the idol comes to life and eats him, then spits out his staff onto a nearby pile of similar staffs.}}

* An episode of ''[[Little Bill]]'' played this lite, with Bill going around trying to "find my thing", the thing he's good at.

[[Category:Motivation Index]]

[[Category:Desperately Looking For A Purpose In Life]]