Purpose?

How does one find the purpose - or even a purpose - for one's life in the midst of all the other things seeming to offer none?

There seems to be a combination of factors in my life - a renewed realization of the amount of selfishness I possess within myself as well as level of instability - that is causing me to question what my old purpose was - indeed, even if I had a purpose - and what, assuming the old one is defunct, the new one should be.

In my career, I seem to be butting up against the wall of reality; that suddenly the limitless blue sky of possibilities - career advancement, salary - is coming to a halt, that I can perhaps expect the normal advancement of time but the dream of moving to a significantly higher position (with higher pay) has moved on. 

This then combines with factors of self-centeredness within my life - for me, perhaps, the escape valve of my life for doing what I would not really like to be doing - to create a situation where even though I may be at what and where I am for a long time, I cannot just "check out" with my own activities and life.

I'd love to say that I've had some blinding vision from God, some passionate uplifting dream to move me over this hump into the next phase, something so utterly clear that I cannot mistake it for anything else - but alas, I have not. I just have the walls of reality seemingly continue to close in on the circle of my life, leaving me with a smaller radius and and increasingly narrow view of the sky.

How does one find a purpose in the midst of this?  How can one take the ordinary, mundane events of one's life and craft a purpose of it or weave a purpose through it?  How does one find a purpose - not a canned response, but a real motivating one?

I can just make up my own or quote one, but it hardly changes anything - more of a justification of events that are already in place than a guiding statement. And eventually, I will see it as such and it will become irrelevant, one more in a list of things that I thought was real or mattered or I could do.

In the darkness of my soul I ask myself:  What am I doing wrong?