Over the last few years, I’ve found myself thinking about a problem that I see almost every day.
It’s not a problem unique to my town, and it’s certainly not a problem that can be blamed on a single cause. Yet it seems to be growing, quietly and steadily, in communities across the country.
The best way I can describe it is this:
The plague of purposelessness.
When people talk about the decline of towns and communities, the conversation often turns towards politics, economics, immigration, or public services. While all of these things matter, I don’t think they explain what I see on a day-to-day basis.
What I notice most is the number of people who seem to have nowhere to be, nothing to work towards, and no real sense of direction.
People standing around for hours with no apparent purpose. Drinking during the day. Taking drugs. Causing disruption. Living the same week over and over again.
It’s easy to look at this and assume the answer is laziness. It’s easy to become frustrated and write people off entirely.
But my experience working as a social prescriber taught me that the reality is often more complicated than that.
Many of the people I worked with weren’t bad people. They weren’t incapable people either. In many cases, they had simply become trapped in patterns that had gradually narrowed their view of what life could be.
If you’ve never experienced structure, you don’t necessarily know how valuable it is.
If you’ve never experienced achievement, you don’t always believe you’re capable of it.
If you’ve never been encouraged to take ownership of your health, your habits, or your future, then it’s easy to spend years waiting for somebody else to fix things for you.
What struck me most was how many people had unknowingly given away responsibility for their own lives.
They looked to services, professionals, medications, support systems, or government programmes as the solution to every problem, while failing to recognise that some of the most important changes could only come from them.
That’s not to say support isn’t needed. Of course it is.
But no professional can exercise for you.
No doctor can develop your discipline for you.
No therapist can create a purpose for you.
No support worker can build your confidence for you.
At some point, every person has to become an active participant in their own life.
The difficult truth is that many people never reach that point.
Instead, they become comfortable in a cycle of low expectations.
And once enough people enter that cycle, it begins to affect the wider environment.
Standards slowly change.
Behaviour that once seemed unusual becomes normal.
People become accustomed to seeing public spaces dominated by idleness, antisocial behaviour, substance misuse, and a general lack of direction.
The danger isn’t that everyone suddenly adopts these behaviours.
The danger is that people become desensitised to them.
What we repeatedly see eventually becomes what we expect.
What we expect eventually becomes what we accept.
And what we accept often becomes the new normal.
This is why I believe purposelessness is contagious.
Not because people consciously choose it, but because drift has a way of spreading.
When nobody around you appears to be striving for anything, it becomes easier to stop striving yourself.
When mediocrity becomes normal, excellence begins to look unusual.
When discipline becomes rare, it starts to look extreme.
And that’s a dangerous place for any community to find itself.
For me, the antidote to this drift was martial arts.
Not because martial arts are some magical solution to life’s problems.
But because it gave me something that many people are desperately missing.
It gave me purpose.
It gave me somewhere to be.
It gave me people to learn from.
It gave me standards to live up to.
It gave me goals that couldn’t be achieved through excuses.
Most importantly, it taught me that progress is earned.
Every belt, every lesson, every improvement required effort.
No one could do the work for me.
No one could hand me the result.
And that’s a lesson that extends far beyond the training hall.
Martial arts taught me discipline when motivation wasn’t enough.
It taught me resilience when things became difficult.
It taught me accountability when it would have been easier to blame somebody else.
It taught me that confidence is built through action, not positive thinking.
Over time, I realised that purpose isn’t something you find hidden somewhere in the world.
It’s something you build.
The mistake many people make is believing they need to discover a grand calling before they can start moving forward.
In reality, purpose often begins with something much simpler.
A skill.
A craft.
A trade.
A sport.
A business.
A responsibility.
A challenge.
Anything that requires effort, commitment, and growth.
For me, that was martial arts.
For somebody else, it might be something completely different.
The activity itself isn’t the point.
The point is having something that demands the best from you.
Something that gives structure to your days and direction to your efforts.
Something that reminds you that you’re capable of becoming more than you were yesterday.
Because the opposite of purpose isn’t failure.
The opposite of purpose is drift.
And drift rarely takes people anywhere worth going.
If there is one thing I have learned through both my professional work and my years in martial arts, it is this:
Nobody is coming to give you purpose.
Nobody is going to arrive one day and hand you meaning, discipline, confidence, or direction.
Those things have to be built.
The good news is that they can be.
One decision at a time.
One habit at a time.
One step at a time.
The plague of purposelessness may be growing around us, but it doesn’t have to define us.
The answer is not to complain about the state of the world.
The answer is to choose a path.
And then walk it.