What is my purpose in life?

Think about how often somebody asks what you want to do with your life. Which course, which job, which city, which next step. Those are useful questions, but they’re questions about arranging a life before anybody has asked what the life is for. We get taught how to earn a living much earlier than we get asked why we’re alive.

Worship sounds smaller in English than it is in Islam. If you only hear prayer mats and fasting, a lifetime can seem much too large for the answer.

The word worship is where many of us make it smaller than Allah did. It includes the prayer, and it can also enter the ordinary things you were going to do anyway. You study because useful knowledge can serve people. You earn clean money so the family in your care doesn’t have to beg. You sleep early because Fajr matters. The act becomes worship when it’s done for Allah and kept inside what He allowed. Intention doesn’t make a forbidden thing holy, but it can make an ordinary Tuesday count.

That changes the usual plan. Get the degree, then the job, then the salary that finally settles you. The target keeps moving because none of those things was built to answer why you exist. Enjoying them isn’t a failure of faith. Asking them to give your whole life meaning is asking a created thing to carry a weight it can’t hold.

Purpose also outlives your mood. Some days prayer feels close and some days you stand there tired, but you haven’t become purposeless because the feeling left. You’re still a servant when work is boring, when nobody notices the good you did, and when the future you planned has to be redrawn.

So your career matters, though it sits inside a larger answer. Ask what pleases Allah in the next thing in front of you, then do that thing well. A life of worship is built there, in choices small enough that most people will never know they happened, while the One you were made for misses none of them.

This is the short answer. Chapter 10 of the book takes it all the way.