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Finding Your Purpose in Life 'The Bear' Way
It can be hard to find your purpose in life, but you don't have to do it alone.
Updated June 24, 2024 Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Key points
- Many of us struggle with feelings of lack of purpose or meaning.
- We can search for years to find it, especially if we don't have high regard for ourselves.
- Other people, such as friends and family, can often see what we're meant to do or be better than we can.
On the FX series "The Bear," Richard Jerimovich, known affectionately (or not) as "Richie," "Cousin," or other, unprintable names, is introduced as a man without purpose. But he seems unaware of this when we meet him in the first episode, seemingly happy working at The Beef, an Italian beef restaurant in Chicago owned by his best friend Michael Berzatto—until Michael took his own life. Before doing so, he left the restaurant to his little brother Carmy, who tries to adapt the techniques of elite, Michelin-star kitchens to the scrappy little neighborhood spot. Richie finds himself out of place in the new "system," realizing he has no skills apart from being everybody's pal, joking with the other employees and customers, but usually making things worse whenever he tries to fix anything in the restaurant.
The second season opens with Carmy and the rest of the crew, including his sister Natalie and fellow chef Sydney, remodeling The Beef into The Bear, the fine-dining establishment that Carmy and Michael had long envisioned. This only makes Richie feel more out of place, and he starts to doubt his purpose in life. He shares these concerns with Carmy, who seems to dismiss them in the hustle and bustle of getting the restaurant ready to open on schedule. We also learn, via a later flashback episode, that Richie had been trying to get out of The Beef for years, realizing much earlier than we previously knew that there has to be more for him in life.
In the heralded seventh episode of season two, "Forks," Richie interns (or "stages") at an elite restaurant in Chicago, starting out his week polishing forks—lots of forks. Soon he is rotated to different tasks in the restaurant, eventually being assigned to shadow the wait staff. It is then that he comes to appreciate the restaurant's extreme approach to customer service, based on the book Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, which requires staff to listen carefully and read body language to know when customers need or want anything before they ask.
To his surprise, Richie excels at this, embracing this new immersive role and winning the affection of the restaurant staff and the admiration of its owner (played by Academy Award winner Olivia Colman), who tells him she wasn’t surprised by his success because Carmy believed in him. Originally thinking (understandably) that Carmy sent him there to get him out of the way, Richie comes to realize that Carmy knew what Richie’s purpose was all along, but also knew he couldn’t just tell him—Richie had to come to that knowledge himself.
Many of us are like Richie, struggling to find our purpose in life. Lucky are the people who feel a calling, who just know what they’re “meant” to do or be from early on. Carmy seems to know this, and so does Sydney, although they are both obsessive about pursuing it (in their own unique ways). Of course, Richie didn’t—and he likely would never have, if he had simply wandered through life himself, regarding himself as someone everyone wants to hang out with but not someone to be trusted with any responsibility or authority, and never believing he had any skill or talent that was truly his own and would be useful to others.
Richie only found his purpose with the help of someone who could see the value in him that he could not. At the same time, it had to be someone who could see Richie for all he was, his good points and bad, so he could really determine what Richie was truly good at. And it was the one thing Richie probably took for granted his entire life: his people skills. He discovered he was uniquely able to give restaurant customers the experience they wanted—or didn’t even realize they wanted! But he would not have realized this if Carmy, the person Richie thought was against him, did not see it in him and send him to learn it for himself.
We each need to find our purpose, but no one says we have to do it alone. Our friends and family often see a much more accurate version of ourselves than we do, for better and for worse, and they can be invaluable to discovering where our talents and skills lie—even if we never polish a fork in our lives.
