B-Side

On Purpose

Doing Things on Purpose vs. by Default. The Difference Between a Life Chosen and a Life That Just Happened.

I kept hearing the word everywhere.

It started with Indian Matchmaker on Netflix — if you haven’t watched it, Sima Taparia is the kind of person who will look you in the eye and tell you that you’re a seven expecting a ten, and you will sit there and take it because she’s completely right. What I love about her isn’t just the honesty. It’s the framework. She’s essentially a human algorithm — gathering data, matching patterns, finding compatibility across thousands of variables that people have never even thought to articulate about themselves.

But the phrase that keeps coming back to me isn’t about data. It’s something every matchmaker on every one of these shows says at some point, almost like a mantra: date with intention.

I heard it and thought: yes, obviously. Then I heard it again somewhere else. Then again. Then I started noticing it the way you notice a car model the moment you start considering buying one — suddenly it’s on every street. Intention. Intentional. Intentionally. The word was everywhere. And once I started seeing it, I couldn’t stop.

What the Word Actually Means

Intention sounds like a productivity concept. A planner thing. A vision board thing. And it has been co-opted by enough wellness culture that it’s easy to roll your eyes at it.

But strip all that away and what you have is something genuinely simple: doing something on purpose.

Not by default. Not by habit. Not because it’s what you’ve always done or what everyone else is doing or what was easiest in the moment. On purpose. With a reason. Pointed at something specific.

That’s it. That’s the whole idea. And the reason it keeps showing up everywhere is because most of us are living a significant portion of our lives on autopilot, and somewhere underneath the noise, we know it.

The Matchmaking Mirror

Here’s what I find fascinating about the matchmaking shows specifically: the people who struggle most aren’t the ones with bad values or impossible standards. They’re the ones who have never sat down and actually decided what they want. They have a feeling. A vague sense of someone like this or not someone like that. But they haven’t done the work of turning the feeling into a decision.

Sima will sit across from someone and ask: what are you looking for? And they’ll say something like kind, funny, successful. And she’ll say: everyone says that. Go deeper.

Because kind, funny, and successful isn’t intention. It’s a wish. Intention is knowing specifically enough what you’re looking for that you could recognize it when it walks in the room — and more importantly, that you could recognize when you’re not showing up as the person that person would want to find.

Date with intention means: know what you’re building toward before you start building.

That applies to more than dating.

The Remixology Version

No sugar. No grains. No worries.

That’s not a restriction. That’s an intention. It’s a decision made on purpose, in advance, before you’re standing in the grocery store or sitting at a restaurant or opening the pantry at 10 PM. When you’ve set the intention, the small decisions downstream get easier because they’re not really decisions anymore. They’re just actions that follow from something you already decided.

That’s what living intentionally actually looks like in practice. Not a dramatic life overhaul. Not a vision board or a journaling habit or a morning routine with seventeen steps. Just the practice of deciding — in advance, on purpose — what direction you’re pointed.

What you eat. How you spend a Tuesday. Who gets your time. What you’re building and why. The intention doesn’t have to be grand. It just has to be yours.

Why the Word Keeps Showing Up

I think the reason intention is everywhere right now is because distraction is also everywhere right now — and they’re in direct competition.

Every platform, every notification, every algorithm is designed to pull your attention somewhere it didn’t choose to go. The average person picks up their phone dozens of times a day not because they decided to but because something pulled them. That’s the opposite of intention. That’s living on someone else’s purpose.

So when a matchmaker on Netflix says date with intention — or when a nutritionist says eat with intention or a therapist says set intentions for the week — what they’re really saying is: take the wheel back. Decide what you’re doing before you do it. Be the one choosing, not the one being chosen for.

It’s the oldest idea in the world dressed up in a word that keeps finding new rooms to walk into.

The Practice

You don’t have to overhaul your life to live more intentionally. You just have to pause, briefly, before things — meals, conversations, decisions, days — and ask: what am I trying to do here?

That question changes things. Not always dramatically. But consistently, in the quiet accumulating way that most meaningful change actually happens.

I started noticing the word intention everywhere. Then I started noticing where I was living without it. Then I started, slowly, doing something about that.

On purpose.

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