It's about ten in the morning, partly clouded but the temperature is nice. Aimlessly I walk down the pier. I’m in Lagos, have been for the past two days. I just had breakfast and now I have an hour or so to kill before I need to get my stuff from the Airbnb and head back to Lisbon. I sit down at the end of the pier next to the light house. It’s a modern light house working on solar energy, which makes me rethink my belief that light houses no longer serve a purpose, you know, because all boats have GPS. Perhaps they don’t, I should google that later. The tide is low, as I sit down and dangle my feet over the edge of the pier, the crabs on the rocks beneath it, scurry into cracks and holes in the corroded stones.

“I’m sorry, I’m not here to hurt you.” I say as if the crabs could understand, could consider my words and upon it would decide to prematurely leave their hiding places to resume their routine of picking bits of food out of the rocks with their claws. Of course they don’t, but after patiently waiting for a minute, one by one the crabs reappear from the safety of the shadows and continue munching on the feast that the shining wet rocks provide. Occupied by the objective of collecting food, they seem completely unbothered by my presence. Almost enviously I think how nice it must be for one’s only objective to be simply to exist, to not have to worry about things like personal growth, and goals, and purpose, for your only purpose would just be to stay alive.

Purposelessness brought me to Lagos a couple days ago. The past week has revolved around endings, and the more things ended, the more it seemed, I was ready for them to end. My internship somewhat unofficially ended the week prior, when I presented my work to my assessors and miraculously received a passing grade – some people say my mentor’s so overworked she couldn’t possibly handle the extra workload of making me improve my report, I don’t know if that’s true, regardless, I am done.

This resulted in me waking up Monday morning with absolutely no clue what to do, there was nothing I had to do, and nothing I had planned to do. People around me were either leaving, still studying, or cramming in trips to make the most of the little time they had left in Lisbon, and instead of doing that too, I just sat around aimlessly. With one month left to enjoy paradise, I got stuck thinking about the things I could be doing if I were back in my apartment in Eindhoven, about the people I would see, about the clothes I could fix if I had my sewing machine, about the desk lamp I wanted to make. In other words, I could be doing things that would give me a feeling of purpose.

Fortunately, my purposelessness pity party didn’t last long and I was intent on distracting myself. I planned this little trip to Lagos and in two weeks I’ll find myself in Madrid, next week I’ll have to study for a final exam and in the meantime I’ll enjoy the company of the best roommates I could wish for, because I’m sure to miss them when I’m back in Eindhoven. So, for the time being I guess I’ll just exist, like these crabs, unbothered by the human notion that my existence needs to serve a higher purpose than that.