In some ways, December is the weekend of the year. That means that January is a monumentally sobering Monday. I am almost certain that I speak for everyone when I say that we have all experienced that feeling on a Sunday evening when the reality strikes us that the school week or workweek is impending. It looms over like a shadow and hits its height at six or so. There is the last glimpse of daylight that turns into a burnish in the sky—a shade between maroon and pink. Then there is darkness. And if you do not have something to look forward at the onset of the new year, the most daunting Monday of all, you might just find yourself toiling through a rut when you don’t need to. While there is a deeply existential aspect of this universal feeling, there are also some very simple (but not easy) solutions that I intend to explore.

It is my understanding that humans want to turn the vital bits of who they are into jobs. We want to put our best talents to work and feel appreciated for it. If someone is a great painter, he wants people to adore his work in a world-renowned gallery. If someone loves to build things, he wants his gadgets to be used by everyone.

But on a day-to-day basis, it is extremely easy to lose track of initial motivations. But many students do not even understand why that is. “Why do I hate Mondays?” they ask. Well, it starts with the Sunday evening, a buffer zone between the rest, authenticity, and novelty that the weekend brings and the cyclical grind in the days that wait to assail. Then, the staunch idea begins to float around that we do not see ourselves reflected in what we do. For instance, at the beginning of Advanced Physics last year, I was eager to learn more about physics and boost my reputation of having an aptitude in math. But that performance took an emotional tax.

The class environment was contentious—sometimes toxic. By the end of the school year, I felt that I was being constantly compared with other students. At first, I was having a blast in that class. But eventually but my natural curiosity died, and I was just trying to get top grades and meet external expectations instead of learning. Like many, I replaced my purpose with a goal, which is a flimsy disguise. So, on Sunday nights I started to question my place in that class more and more and if I wanted to continue pursuing physics classes.

This school year, however, I have been healed by my enjoyment of the platform I have to express the daily effects of existentialist philosophy. But, since I decided to follow a deep interest of mine that’s rather unknown, my peers continue to jokingly ask me what the ultimate purpose is: the meaning of life—especially after my last few articles. I figure that Sunday night is a good time to put the jokes to rest.

We can only hide so long before the harsh realities of the universe force themselves upon us either way. We can either ignore the equilibrium of the universe—death and nothingness—or try to explain it in an effort to shield each other from the pain. The first step is finding your individual purpose and then zooming out from there.

My own purpose, as stated on my soon-to-be portfolio website matthewturk.com, is “To walk with my role models and go down in history as one of the most influential people in whatever my work will be.” It is vain and vague (on purpose), perhaps, but my purpose is still evolving because I am only seventeen. Like anyone else, I have lots of self-improvement ahead in this year and owe it to myself to take time to reflect on my career, legacy, relationships, and well-being as a whole.

Inside us, we all have a true working self, a set of inner desires and capacities. We typically manage to keep the true self at bay during the week, driven by an immediate need for money or another endpoint. But for me, there is no true endpoint. Thus, the true self reliably comes to haunt me on not just Sunday evenings, but every evening and morning. Like a ghost suspended between two worlds, it has not been allowed to live or to die. It bangs perpetually at the door of my consciousness, requiring resolution.

Existentialist philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Søren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre spent their lifetimes coming up with such resolutions. But philosophers certainly were not the only ones to create lifestyle ideologies; there are actually nine distinct ones that I am aware of. They are altruism, nationalism, hedonism, singularity, religion, capitalism, vainglory, absurdism, and nihilism.

My favorite two doctrines, absurdism and nihilism, are very similar. These doctrines embody some of the core ideas of existentialist philosophy—the fact that life is entirely material, speculative, and random and that humans have no special place in it.

But this point of view is a slippery slope and does not help anyone feel better. But it is also foolhardy to dismiss our angst blithely as “the Sunday blues” either, to be assuaged with something as simple as another Corona or mindless Netflix session. No, we should make the Sunday evening feeling front and center in our lives every day instead of suppressing it. That way, our dread will serve as a catalyst for a sustained motivation that generates introspection and conversations with friends and mentors. And that way you will have more clarity when you define your purpose.

To conclude, to develop your purpose, focus on what you can control, let the aforementioned ideologies guide you, and, the solution to the dread this process brings has two parts: (1) stop hiding from your insignificance and (2) always have something to look forward to.