How to Find Your Purpose

The Paradox of Purpose

The idea that purpose must be grand leads to stress and feelings of inadequacy. The key is to focus on “little” purpose: those tiny moments in which you are most alive.

By Jordan Grumet, M.D.

Hospice patients can teach us a lot about profound wisdom and purpose. The actively dying have taught me some of the most valuable lessons about life. One takeaway: We should put purpose first and build from there.

Putting purpose at the center of our lives is not easy. People say, “I’ve been searching for my purpose forever, and I don’t know what it is. I don’t think I even have one.”

This leaves me scratching my head. Why would something so universally celebrated—the idea of having purpose—cause such frustration? Isn’t purpose supposed to be a good thing?

A 2019 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that having a stronger sense of purpose is associated with decreased overall mortality and a lower risk of dying from heart, circulatory, and blood disorders.

Similarly, a 2021 study using data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study found that people with a strong sense of purpose had a 24 percent lower likelihood of becoming physically inactive and cut their likelihood of sleep difficulty by a full one-third, relative to people who did not articulate a sense of purpose.

And a study involving college students found a strong positive relationship between purpose in life and happiness. Students with a greater sense of purpose reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of depression.

The message is clear: Having a sense of purpose contributes to health, happiness, and longevity.

Alongside these studies, I came across other research, like one that found up to 91 percent of people experience what’s called “purpose anxiety” at some point in their lives. This term describes the anxiety, frustration, and even depression that people feel when they can’t figure out what their purpose is.

Having purpose is linked to a longer, healthier, and happier life. However, the search for purpose can lead to stress, sadness, and a sense of inadequacy. How can purpose be both a solution and a problem?

I think the reason is, in part, that as a society we often get purpose wrong. We tend to think of it as one monolithic concept, but in reality, it’s not. Purpose can be broken down, and this distinction explains why some people feel anxious about purpose:

One kind of purpose is the kind we are taught to pursue. It’s big, audacious, and goal-oriented. It’s about achieving monumental things: starting a billion-dollar company, becoming a world leader, or changing the course of history. While these goals are inspiring, they’re also difficult to achieve. They often depend on factors outside of our control, like timing, resources, and sheer luck. Focusing solely on big and audacious purpose can lead to burnout, anxiety, and a sense of failure when the goal proves elusive.

Another kind of purpose is process-oriented: We don’t need to go big—we can go little. Finding joy and meaning in the day-to-day activities that light us up is what matters. Purpose need not be tied to grand outcomes or external validation. Instead, it’s about doing work or engaging in activities that resonate with us personally—things that make us feel alive in the moment. This kind of purpose is abundant, accessible, and difficult to fail at.

Most of us focus exclusively on the big and audacious and completely overlook the abundant, accessible purpose.

Fixating on big purpose sets us up for frustration. Lofty goals can feel unattainable, and the pressure to achieve them can rob us of the joy in the journey. Little purpose allows us to find meaning in the process. It’s about showing up every day and doing things that excite us, whether or not they lead to a major accomplishment. This type of purpose is sustainable, fulfilling, and less likely to cause anxiety.

The paradox of purpose is that it can be both a source of immense joy and a cause of deep frustration. The key to resolving this inconsistency lies in understanding the difference between big and little purpose—and learning to prioritize the latter. Purpose isn’t just about achieving something monumental; it’s about finding meaning in the small, everyday moments that light you up.

Jordan Grumet, M.D., is a palliative care physician and the author of The Purpose Code.

A Brief History of Purpose-Seeking

And what happens when people—and society—don’t find it.

By Joseph E. Davis, Ph.D.

In an arresting tweet several years ago, the finance executive and entrepreneur Robert Sterling mused, “There is something deeply unwell in our society right now….I’m sure social media, economic malaise, COVID lockdowns, fentanyl, and every other reason we hear about factor into it.” Yet, these reasons, “in aggregate, still feel insufficient.”

Something metaphysical, in the psychic climate, seems to have shifted.

Sterling’s tweet went viral, and for good reason. He pinpointed the problem. There is a sense of apathy that we feel from far too many people—especially from younger people. It is a lack of purpose. A mysterious and debilitating change has occurred, and many people, especially the young, are experiencing an alarming estrangement from the world around them.

Our teens report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, along with suicidal thoughts and self-harm—this trend has been spiking upward in recent years, and the numbers for adults are not much better.

Are We Adrift?

Something is deeply wrong, but shifts don’t happen overnight. While feelings of emptiness and alienation are spreading to more, and younger, people, this mode of despair has been growing steadily for some time. We may have passed a tipping point.

In recent decades of parenting literature, case reports of young people who feel chronically empty, paralyzed by a sense of inadequacy and lack of purpose, are common. In their 1981 study “The Adolescent,” for instance, Daniel Offer and colleagues observed that “with respect to almost every self-image dimension, teenagers in the [late] 1970s feel worse about themselves than did teenagers in the [early] 1960s.” Over this roughly 18-year period, a sharply higher percentage of teens reported worries about their health and feeling “empty emotionally most of the time.”

Or consider these remarks by the Italian writer Pietro Citati in the publication La Repubblica in 1999. Young people, he noted, “are always wondering who they are. They have no will, no desire to act. They prefer to remain passive. They live wrapped in a mysterious inertia. Their time is a series of moments that are not linked together in a chain or organized into a story.”

A psychotherapist described a type of recurrent patient in The Atlantic: “Imagine a bright, attractive 20-something woman with strong friendships, a close family, and a deep sense of emptiness.” This woman does not report any conflicts, deprivation, specific stresses, or family history of mental illness. Her parents are awesome. Yet, she is indecisive and “unable to trust her instincts and stick to her choices.” She feels as if there’s a hole inside her and describes herself as feeling adrift.

In her book, Never Enough, Jennifer Breheny Wallace presents a body of evidence showing that many young people, even when they excel by all the meritocratic measures and seem to have it all, still feel utterly vacant inside.

A dismal picture, now widespread. Looking back further, we can see its features in patient complaints that psychoanalysts began to encounter as early as the 1950s.

Disorders of the Self

Initially, the new and ill-defined complaints of their patients left those practitioners perplexed. Their healing art was premised on the idea that patient struggles are based on internal conflicts. Mental tension and painful emotions were believed to arise from the strain of controlling impermissible desires and wishes. Gaining insight into and easing this conflict was a key goal of treatment. Then along came a new type of patient for whom such inner conflict was absent.

These patients, according to analysts’ accounts, did not know who they were and struggled to maintain a consistent picture of themselves. They were besieged by a sense of their own worthlessness and frustrated unfulfillment, and subject to chronic feelings of emptiness and anxiety. They suffered from what the analysts began calling “disorders of the self.” Their amorphous symptoms were disorienting to the analysts, and their urban, affluent patients even had a hard time expressing them because they reflected an absence of something vital, not a discontent with social constraints.

Something was missing that had been there before. The psychoanalysts thought they knew what it was.

No Firm Footing

For analysts and other observers, the disorders of the self were the result of complex changes—social, economic, and technological—that were working their way through society in the postwar period. Old-style psychoanalysis dealt with what Freud called potent individuals, people with strong desires and well-developed superegos—demanding, internalized convictions formed by tradition and social mores. But as the societal transformations weakened the strong ideals, bonds of obligation, and social norms that structured this inner core, many people, wrote psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis, could “find no firm footing.” Without some solid ground, some stable reference point, their developing sense of self remained diffuse and elusive.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a sea change as new self-psychologies arose in response to the decline of the superego and the struggles of the enfeebled patient. No longer focused on conflict, each therapy aimed to strengthen the vitality and coherence of the self and the powers of conscious self-control.

But psychoanalysts recognized that a robust self required an enabling social foundation. Deplete the foundation, and people were often left with a depleted sense of self.

In the intervening years, the world has become progressively more precarious, open-ended, and risky. The public frameworks that gave life direction and meaning—prescribed roles, rites of passage, compelling life scripts, stable occupational trajectories—continue to fade away. The defining web of institutions, norms, and social mores further erodes.

This is the change in a nutshell. We feel empty, inadequate, and adrift because we have been thrown back on ourselves, forced to face the challenge—felt at younger and younger ages—of trying to establish an identity, make commitments, live with conviction, desire life, and find meaning without the very sources that make these things possible in the first place.

The symptoms of the problem—social media, economic malaise, and the consequences of COVID lockdowns—are important to be sure. But until we also recognize what has washed away, we can make no progress in understanding or addressing this epidemic.

Joseph E. Davis, Ph.D., is a research professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and the author of Chemically Imbalanced.

The How of Human Connection

Why do other people matter so much when it comes to finding joy and purpose in life?

By Marianna Pogosyan, Ph.D.

Two decades ago, psychologist Christopher Peterson claimed that the emerging field of positive psychology could be summarized in three words: Other people matter. Our well-being, success, and survival depend on others. Even our own self-esteem can serve as an interpersonal monitor, shaped by how connected we feel to others.

While research continues to highlight social connection as a key contributor to health and happiness, questions remain about the how of connection. University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley has investigated these and other mysteries of social connection. Everyone experiences social pain, and yes, connection always carries some risk. However, we consistently overestimate how big that risk is. When we do reach out, people respond much more positively to us than we imagine. And what lies beneath that warm feeling of connection? Trust. Here are a few things from Epley to consider.

1. People are more interested in you than you think.

We are overly pessimistic about how positively others will respond when we reach out to them. Whenever a belief keeps us from acting, we miss out on the experience that could confirm or disprove it. It may be true that others aren’t paying nearly as much attention to us as we imagine, but it’s often because they are focused on other things, mostly themselves. When others are paying attention to us, they usually don’t judge us as negatively as we fear.

2. Connection is built on reciprocity.

Don’t underestimate the power of reciprocity. A social interaction is an exchange with dynamic features. It goes back and forth. What makes social interaction a positive experience is the interaction itself. People may like you not just for what you say, but for what you do—for example, facial expressions like nodding or smiling, and showing that you understand. This can create affirmation, responsiveness, and connection.

3. Frequency rather than intensity of positive interactions matters.

Little social interactions help—a smile, a compliment, a kind act. A good marriage, for example, fosters sustainable well-being because it provides many small positive moments every day. Happiness is often compared to a leaky tire: Something good happens and the tire fills up, then it slowly drains. That doesn’t mean you live life on a flat tire; you just need to keep pumping it up.

4. Imagine connection as the physical distance between you and others.

When considering how connected you feel to someone, ask yourself: How close do they feel to me in physical space? Researchers sometimes represent the concept of connection as the inclusion of another in the self. To illustrate this, they use two circles that can be far apart, close together, or overlapping, depending on the level of connection. Spouses, for example, may feel so integrated that they forget where one ends and the other begins; they also use the word we more than me.

There are no magic opening lines for starting conversations. The secret lies in mindset: Take a genuine interest in others and pay attention.

Marianna Pogosyan, Ph.D., lectures at the University of Amsterdam and other institutions in the Netherlands.

What Do You Regret?

If you found out you were going to die tomorrow, what would you regret never having had the time, energy, or courage to do? This question leverages the power of the Latin phrase memento mori (“remember you must die”). It illuminates what we value most. Here’s what I’ve learned from listening to the regrets of others.

1. Regret is deeply personal. There’s no universal answer. What one person would give anything to accomplish might hold no meaning for another. That’s why your answer matters. No one else’s definition of purpose applies to you.

2. Regret is about who we hoped to become. Did you become the kind of person who tried to make the climb to the top of the mountain, even if you did not succeed? It’s about the journey and intention.

3. Inaction is what haunts us. I’ve never heard a dying patient say, “I regret trying and failing.” More often, they say, “I regret not trying at all.” Fear kept them from pursuing what mattered. And now, it’s too late.

Once you’ve named the regret you’d carry with you to the grave, you have a purpose anchor. These insights are signposts pointing toward what still matters. You now have a blueprint for what to prioritize while you’re alive, healthy, and capable of change. Memento mori is meant to awaken us. —Jordan Grumet

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