Preface: I feel at peace, and guided by inner purpose now. Experience has taught me that all is fleeting, so I am quite confident there will a time where I don't feel this way. Therefore, take all I am about to write with a grain of salt, even as it applies to my experience. These thoughts all reset on certain "spiritual" assumptions that are true in my experience. I ask that you use discipline in your thinking and clarify what is true to you and your experience and not assume that anything I say is supposed to be taken as true, for you, or in any absolute sense.
Everything seems a bit paradoxical to me these days.
Purpose appears to be something that just is, like a knife's (primary) purpose is to cut, an apple tree's purpose is to bear apples, and somewhere far removed in complexity, each human has a purpose that is as clear as those two examples. Simultaneously, we/consciousness possess or appears to possess some kind of free will, or ability to chose that allows us some latitude in defining our purpose.
The proverbial fruit in the Biblical garden of eden story is from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I have come to interpret that as marking a turning point where animals became "man" and "woman", because our purpose was no longer sole encoded in our biology, but something changed where we could chose to work in alignment, or against our biology.
As beings with free will, but also living in or as biological machines, we have this dual existence where some of our purpose is given to us, as certain genetic differences manifest as "advantages" in certain areas of life, and we are also free to steer our lives. Expand genetics to include our environment, "nurture", and even "karma" (why are two identical twins often so different?, and we are always existing in a certain state, with some hardware (our bodies including brains), and software (our minds, emotions, any woo stuff you're into). This is where we "find" our purpose, as it is something inherent to the nature of the state of our system. However, I'd argue that as beings with free will, we can introspect and sculpt this state and also create our purpose, by changing the hardware and software that we experience "the world" through.
To summarize that, we are both spirit (consciousness with free will), and also biology, so "finding" a purpose to me has been balancing and harmonizing what is currently true with my desires and intentions, knowing that even my desires and intentions come through the user interface that is our biology.
The following statements might sound like platitudes, and yet for me they have been immensely transformative.
No amount of pure thinking ever got me anywhere. At some point, lived experience was (and continues to be) the only way "forward". Our minds are only maps to some extent, and until we've walked the territory, it's all just conjecture. I can't overstate how important good food, sleep, exercise, meditation, and "inner work" have been. It's been so important to just be present in the moment, in my body, with my feelings and emotions. The present is all there ever is, so being there seems rather important.