There is "Purpose" and "purpose".

One is some grandiose ill-defined thing. The other is housework.

I am certainly in the housework side right now with two kids under 5.

I am a dad, but I still derive quite a lot of identity from what I do for work. If anything, now that I am meeting more parents from nursery & school etc it feels it is almost more important for me now to be able to implicitly assert status through my work/wealth/house-in-desireable-location/car/etc than it was before kids.

I assumed those sort of feelings would dissolve with kids ("Purpose") but if anything the kids have magnified them. Potentially I am just a shallow prick, but I wonder if it is a "provider instinct" thing or perhaps just mini dopamine hits from feeling like I've got something desirable and meeting these other parents just reasserts that over and over.