On the other hand, he and Mask couldn’t explain why seeking purpose through family did not predict meaning in life much, except in Poland, where it ranked second. Given research on how close relationships bring us a sense of meaning, they’d expected it to pop up at the top of the list for all countries. Of course, giving lip service to having a purpose in life is not going to cut it. Also, there is a difference between finding your purpose and acting upon it, says Strecher.

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• If the answers to those questions don’t inspire you, then you might need to find a new community—and with that, a new purpose may come.
• And directs us to make efforts to correct matters whenever it senses anything that no longer makes sense,” he writes.
• In Freedman’s experience, very few of us will wake up one day with a totally new purpose in life.
• As he describes it, purpose is something of a chemical reaction that takes place when our skills meet the needs of the world.
• The path will be laid out before us, and our job will be to keep following that vision with unwavering commitment.

Instead, he observes people draw on the skills, knowledge, and values they’ve cultivated over a lifetime to start a new chapter. Knowing your skills and your interests—and in a larger sense, your identity—seems to be key to pursuing purpose. Researchers found that the more solid their sense of identity, the more purposeful they were. For that reason, it’s good to spend time with those we love—whether that means our families, friends, or romantic partners. Nurturing these relationships brings a sense of meaning in life; even when they are challenging, our sense of meaning can help us maintain them in the long run.

In a survey of empirical studies, Raymond A. Mar and colleagues found a link between reading poetry and Forex Trading for beginners fiction and a sense of purpose among adolescents. While finding purpose can feel like an exciting adventure for young people, who might take gap years or try interesting electives in college, purpose becomes more urgent for adults. Mariah Jordan from Cleveland, one of the winners of the GGSC Purpose Challenge Scholarship Contest, often accompanied her grandmother to doctor’s appointments as a child. Over time, witnessing her grandmother’s experiences, she began to see the racial inequalities that existed in health care. She went on to volunteer in a medical setting and conduct research on cancer in African Americans, working to eliminate health disparities and bring more cultural sensitivity to the field of medicine. This article is part of a GGSC initiative on “Finding Purpose Across the Lifespan,” supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

On the other hand, there is no need to overly rely on that feedback if it doesn’t resonate. Getting input is useful if it clarifies your strengths—not if it’s way off base. If we need help, a survey like the VIA Character Strengths Survey can be useful in identifying our personal strengths and embracing them more fully. Then, you can take the results and think about how you can apply them toward something you really care about. Purpose is all about applying your skills toward contributing to the greater good in a way that matters to you. Of course, writing about the heroic thread in your life story may not grab you.

Nor might some of the other ways to find meaning that Heine suggests. But it doesn’t hurt to assess where you’re at in each of these areas of life and see what you may be missing, he says. “It could be the case that how people conceive of family in these different societies might look very different,” he says. But, he adds, they can’t say more without getting more granular detail in future studies. Mask wonders if it could be due to how different cultures think about family as a source of purpose, which their general survey couldn’t detect. While the overall results suggest an almost universal experience of purpose, there were some cultural variations in the findings, too.

One 2008 study found that those who see meaning and purpose in their lives are able to tell a story of change and growth, where they managed to overcome the obstacles they encountered. In other words, creating a narrative like Amber’s can help us to see our own strengths and how applying those strengths can make a difference in the world, which increases our sense of self-efficacy. Interestingly, gratitude and altruism seem to work together to generate meaning and purpose. In a second experiment, the researchers randomly assigned some participants to write letters of gratitude—and those people later reported a stronger sense of purpose. More recent work by Christina Karns and colleagues found that altruism and gratitude are neurologically linked, activating the same reward circuits in the brain.

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• We might find purpose in fighting poverty, creating art, or making people’s lives better through technology.
• Sometimes, just having someone talk to you about what matters to you makes you think more intentionally about your life and your purpose, says Bronk.
• All of these trips give young people a chance to take a break from their constant use of technology; this alone is a powerful force for young people to re-connect with themselves and seek connection with their peers.
• For example, he suggests things like trying out a new ethnic cuisine, visiting an art gallery, or trying out an escape room with friends.
• “Identity and purpose development are intertwined processes,” write Patrick Hill of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Anthony Burrow of Cornell University.

We might find purpose in fighting poverty, creating art, or making people’s lives better through technology. In her work with adolescents, she’s found that some teens find purpose after experiencing hardship. Maybe a kid who has experienced racism decides to become a civil rights advocate. Of course, experiences like poverty and illness are extremely hard to overcome without help from others. But Bronk’s research suggests that having a supportive social network—caring family members, like-minded friends, or mentors, for example—helps youth to reframe hardship as a challenge they can play a role in changing for the better.

Purpose may be more elusive than we realize—perhaps the culmination of a lifetime of personal interactions and individual experiences—and may be next to impossible to foster in the general public. Compared to a control group, women who’d received the meditation training did indeed have longer telomeres at the end of the retreat, suggesting better health. But the researchers found that this effect was accounted for not by increases in mindfulness, as expected, but by increases in a sense of life purpose, which the meditation inspired.

In fact, the more they were still actively seeking purpose, the less satisfied they were. The researchers surmise that this comes down to cultural norms and the expectations adults have for themselves. At this age, though, only about 20 percent of teens have a strong sense of purpose in life, at least according to Damon’s work. Others have pie-in-the-sky dreams, or fun hobbies, or they’re just trying to get through high school.

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“It may seem counterintuitive to foster purpose by cultivating a grateful mindset, but it works,” writes psychologist Kendall Bronk, a leading expert on purpose. The writing of historian W.E.B. Du Bois pushed social-justice activist Art McGee to embrace a specific vision of African-American identity and liberation. Journalist Michael Stoll found inspiration in the “social responsibility theory of journalism,” which he read about at Stanford University. “Basically, reporters and editors have not just the ability but also the duty to improve their community by being independent arbiters of problems that need solving,” he says.

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For older adults, a one-point difference in purpose can mean a 22 percent decreased risk of having a stroke. The purpose that came from Amber’s parents was based on exclusion, as she discovered. There was no place—and no purpose—for her in that community once she embraced an identity they couldn’t accept. A new sense of purpose came with the new community and identity she helped to build, of gay and lesbian Christians. In a 2010 paper, for example, Leslie Francis studied a group of nearly 26,000 teenagers throughout England and Wales—and found that those who read the Bible more tended to have a stronger sense of purpose.

When she came out as a lesbian at age 27, Amber’s family and community swiftly and suddenly cast her out. This triggered a deep crisis of purpose—one that she resolved by finding a new faith community “that helped shape me and gave me a sense of belonging,” she says. The Greater Good Science Center studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and teaches skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society. Our sense of purpose will change over the course of our lifetime. As we grapple with our identity as teens, settle into the responsibilities of adulthood, and make the shift to retirement, the research finds that our sense of purpose will naturally wax and wane.

When education professional Paul LeBuffe found out that he was raising a special-needs child, it was a turning point for his family and his career—and his sense of purpose. Since then, he has been working to promote resilience in children and adults, and within his own family. Working in that field means he’s always learning things he can apply to his own life, which helps give him a sense of balance. According to Damon, most people who find purpose do so in their 20s and 30s.

For example, for Japanese people, finding purpose through their occupation mattered a lot more to their quality of life (in every sense) than it did in the other cultures studied. Heine, who’s familiar with Japanese culture through his research, says that finding rings true, as he has witnessed how central work life is to people’s well-being and personal identity in Japan. While it may seem obvious that aligning your decisions with inner peace, happiness, and good health would make you personally happier, it’s less obvious that making a positive impact would lead to happiness. However, Heine points to research that suggests that those who benefit others are happier—for example, his colleague Elizabeth Dunn’s work finding that spending money on others makes you happier than spending it on yourself. Having a purpose in life has been found to have many benefits for people, including better health and emotion management, less stress during stressful times, and even economic success. It includes Strecher’s personal revelations as well as those of others who’ve found their purpose and changed the trajectory of their lives.

“Sometimes volunteering can be deadening,” Stanford University researcher Anne Colby. You have to feel you’re accomplishing something.” When you find a good match for you, volunteering will likely “feel right” in some way—not draining, but invigorating. Working with an organization serving others can put you in touch with people who share your passions and inspire you. In fact, it’s easier to find and sustain purpose with others’ support—and a do-gooder network can introduce you to opportunities and a community that shares your concern. Volunteering has the added benefit of improving our health and longevity, at least for some people. Likely both, says Kendall Bronk, a researcher who directs the Adolescent Moral Development Lab at Claremont Graduate University.

All of these trips give young people a chance to take a break from their constant use of technology; this alone is a powerful force for young people to re-connect with themselves and seek connection with their peers. When I was 14 years old, I boarded a plane for a weeklong backpacking trip in the Rocky Mountains. I had already been to the Rockies a few times with my parents, but this time I was headed out to a “primitive skills week,” run by the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies.