There is a particular kind of suffering almost nobody talks about: wanting something with your whole chest and having no idea whether it is worth wanting.
You want to quit your job and travel. You want to write that book. You want to move to a new city, start a business, leave a relationship, go back to school. The desire is intense. It feels urgent. It feels like you, speaking in your truest language.
But is it?
Here is the uncomfortable truth: human beings are extraordinarily good at confusing what we genuinely need with what simply excites us in this particular moment. And the stakes of getting that wrong are not small. A calling, followed faithfully, can shape an entire life. A craving, mistaken for a calling, can consume years of one.
So how do you tell them apart?
A craving comes with a fantasy attached
A craving usually arrives with a very specific picture of how things will look once you have it. You can see the apartment, the lifestyle, the version of you who pulled it off. The fantasy is vivid, detailed, and suspiciously perfect.
A calling, by contrast, rarely arrives with a clear picture of the destination. It arrives with a direction. A pull. The sense that something, over there, matters, without being entirely sure what it will look like once you arrive. Callings are, in a strange way, surprisingly humble about their own arrival.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what he called flow, that state of deep absorption in meaningful work. One of his most consistent findings was that the people who reported the deepest satisfaction were not the ones who had reached a specific vision. They were the ones who had found a way of relating to the world that matched something fundamental in how they were built. The destination almost never looked like what they expected. The quality of the engagement did.
A craving shouts loudest when life gets uncomfortable
Pay attention to when the desire shows up. If you find yourself desperately longing for a total life change specifically during periods of stress, boredom, or conflict, that is valuable information. Not because the desire is fake, but because urgency is not the same thing as importance.
Cravings light up when we are in pain. They offer an escape route disguised as a revelation. The fantasy of the different life becomes more attractive exactly when the current one feels hardest. Which is, of course, exactly when we are least equipped to tell the difference.
For a while I worked for the government, and on top of the salary never quite covering what I needed, the bureaucracy had an almost artistic ability to turn any simple decision into a months long process. So when the chance came up to move to China and sell solar energy technology, I did not think twice. I was completely convinced I was on my way to becoming a millionaire while saving the planet, one solar panel at a time.
I spent months between factories and spreadsheets. I learned a great deal, that part is undeniable. But I also discovered, in time, that my enthusiasm had nothing to do with solar energy. It had to do with escaping the feeling of being trapped. The evidence was right there, plain as day: nothing in me genuinely lit up in front of a spreadsheet of photovoltaic panels. What had gone to China was not a calling. It was me, running very far away, by plane.
A craving disappears when the obstacles become real
Here is a simple experiment: take the thing you think you want, and spend thirty minutes researching the everyday reality of having it. Not the highlight reel. The logistics. The boring parts. What is hard even for the people who love it.
If you want to be a musician: what does the actual week of a working musician look like? If you want to start a business: what happens in year two, once the excitement is gone and the problems are still there?
A craving, when it collides with reality, tends to quietly lose interest. The fantasy needed a certain vagueness to survive. It worked precisely because you had not looked at it closely. The moment you give the unknown a name and a detail, it stops being able to hide, and with that, it loses its magic.
A calling does something different. When you discover what is genuinely hard about it, something in you says: yes, but still. The obstacles do not make you want it less. They make you curious about how to navigate them. That "yes, but still" is one of the most reliable signals you will ever find.
One more thing
It is worth saying that some cravings are perfectly fine to follow. Not everything needs to be a calling. You have permission to want things for ordinary reasons, pleasure, curiosity, novelty, and to chase them without demanding they be profound.
The problem is not the craving. The problem is mistaking it for something it is not, and then organizing your life around the mistake.
Why we started The Human Purpose
When I started The Human Purpose, I did not know where it would lead. I did not know exactly who it was for, or how I would turn it into something sustainable. The one thing I knew, with a certainty that needed no explanation, was that I wanted to build a space where people from any background could find real tools to reconnect with their purpose, to align with that inner truth we almost always know how to recognize, even when we cannot quite name it. And that through that process, they could find their place in the world from a sense of wholeness, not urgency. A sense of fulfillment that also served something larger than themselves.
That was not a craving. I knew it because, even without knowing how, it never stopped making sense. Unlike China, this did not need me to be running from anything to begin.
A calling does not ask you to have all the answers. It only asks you to stay present when it shows up, again and again, without asking your permission.
An exercise to find your own answer
We are not going to tell you whether what you feel is a calling or a craving. Only you can know that, from a place of calm, not urgency. This exercise is meant to help you hear that answer, not to hand it to you.
Find a quiet place, somewhere no one will interrupt you for the next five minutes.
Close your eyes, or soften your gaze toward a fixed point. Take a deep breath in through your nose, counting to four. Hold it for a moment. Release it slowly through your mouth, counting to six. Repeat this three times, without forcing anything, just letting the body settle.
Now, bring to mind the thing you have been wanting. Do not analyze it yet. Just let it appear, as an image, a feeling, a word.
Ask yourself, without rushing: does this call to me even on quiet days, or does it only shout when something hurts?
Stay with whatever comes up, without correcting it.
Then ask: if I imagine the real obstacles on this path, does something in me still say "yes, but still"?
You do not need a clear answer today. You only need to have listened, honestly, to what your body and your silence told you. Come back to this exercise as many times as you need. True answers rarely arrive just once. They tend to repeat themselves, patiently, until we finally hear them.