I have come to appreciate that enjoying the craft you do is the most important thing. After family and friends.

Indeed... This reminds me of a dialogue in Iain Banks' Use of Weapons, between a stranger and a woman from the Culture, a society technologically advanced to the point that machines do everything better than the humans:

     “Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman,   
  looking around the starship shell.

      “Why, of course!” she laughed.

      “Then why do you do it?”

      “It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out 
  those doors for the first time, heading for deep space,   three 
  hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite  
  happy, and you think; I helped build that. The fact a machine 
  could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was 
  you who actually did it.”

      “Hmm,” he said.

      (Learn woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a 
  carpenter or a blacksmith any more than mastering writing will 
  make you a clerk.)

      “Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said, 
  approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, 
  where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing 
  inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding, 
  or swum underwater?”

      “Yes,” he agreed.

      The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do, 
  and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because 
  of this?”

      He smiled. “I suppose not.”

      “You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” she 
  looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.”

I think it's a great answer to the question of why do things, but it doesn't address the problem of one's purpose...