The Why Café

The Why Café is a book about how to find your purpose and live the life you have imagined, based on a fictional encounter in a simple yet magical cafe.

As humans, we are visual creatures. We love to look at things, feel them, showcase them, and advertisers know it. In fact, this is how they build their successful businesses and manage to get into our minds. They make us think that the key to happiness lies in more and more possessions. They create ads that are meant to be glamorous and desirable. And they promise that once you buy yourself a particular thing, you’ll be happy, or at least happier.

In fact, spending more makes you inflate your lifestyle, increases your desire to buy more and more things and achieve that promised happiness, all while keeping you engaged in this vicious cycle. On top of that, all these things keep you from targeting your focus and resources towards your true purpose. Therefore, to live meaningfully, you’ll have to start adopting a more minimalist lifestyle and try to find happiness in undertaking purposeful endeavors, rather than buying unnecessary luxuries.

Although we may not realize it, we’re wired to the idea that material things bring happiness. Therefore, we pick higher-paying jobs instead of pursuing our dream careers. Then, we feel frustrated and miserable, living every day feeling like we have no real meaning. How disappointing! It’s time to step back and reconsider your priorities. For example, if you’re hardly ever at home, you probably don’t need a condo with a view, right? The lesson here is to find meaning in what you do, rather than through your possessions and spending money to feel better.

For a passionate mechanic, it can be pretty difficult to explain why fixing a car gives him an inexplicable sense of satisfaction and happiness. Still, it does, and even if repairing cars is not your thing, you too have something that sparks a little light in your heart when you encounter it. Frankly, whatever that is, you should pursue it. Material things are just a trap set by profit-seekers, as we’ve discussed. So how about other obstacles you may face? Here our friends and family can help us. Although we may not realize it, the people we surround ourselves with play an important role in our development and our future actions. Most often than not, we’re afraid of what our relatives, friends, and community will have to say about our decisions. Unfortunately, this thought can hold us back from achieving our dreams. In the end, it all comes down to what you love doing. Therefore, mark the times when you feel most alive, when something clicks in…