My thoughts — ‘On Purpose: Ten Lessons on the Meaning of Life’ by Ben Hutchinson

This was such a cute book which made me want to read more literature. It explores two of my favourite topics — the arts, and the meaning of life (not to be deep or anything).

If you’re anything like me, you’ll often scroll though TikTok and be bombarded with phrases like ‘main character energy’. Philosophies on life boiled down to a simple three word slogan, that seem to have become part of common discourse among my generation. I heard someone talking on the phone on the tube the other day about how ‘sometimes you just need to romanticise your life’. It’s easy to forget how such ideas have been explored in literature, art, and music for years and years. Hutchinson’s book is a nice reminder of this, and helps us to reconnect these surface level self-help style slogans to the aesthetic discussions they are grounded in.

Hutchinson takes everything he has learnt from years spent ravenously reading and boils them down into ten lessons for life. It is a joyful celebration of reading somewhere cross between self-help and guide-book through the literary canon. How to read, how to live.

“Art for art’s sake can also be — should also be — life for life’s sake.”

A key thread running through the book, is the necessity of seeing the interconnectedness of life and art, applying lessons from what you’ve read to your actual life. One of the most insightful parts of the book was the third chapter, ‘Making Space for Others’. Hutchinson draws on the work of Edward Saïd and Kafka to explore how literature can help us become more open-minded by exposing us to the perspective of others as we inevitably project ourselves onto the main characters in the stories we read. In this we find the crucial difference between self-help and art.

“The more we read of other people’s experiences and cultures, the more we challenge our own assumptions; the more we put on those tinted spectacles, the more we escape the prison of our own perspective.”

In his ten lessons, Hutchinson touches on the importance of finding your own voice, the pleasure of anticipation, and the need to question authority.

This includes questioning the authority of our author, Hutchinson, himself. His final lesson urges us to think for ourselves, to read and absorb the ideas of others, but to keep an open mind — to look outwards as well as inwards, and ultimately come to our own conclusions on the big questions.

I’m now off to read some actual literature rather than a book telling me why I should read more literature…