There is a growing consensus among social scientists and philosophers alike that a sense of life’s meaning and purpose is a key aspect of flourishing, and one that is irreducible either to happiness (in the sense of positive emotion) or goodness (in the sense of personal virtue). A group of researchers at the University of Michigan published a paper in 2019 that found considerable longevity benefits to having a sense of purpose in life for adults above age 50. And a survey of 2,285 American professionals found that the average respondent “would be willing to forego 23 percent of their entire future lifetime earnings in order to have a job that was always meaningful.”
In 2020, our team at the Human Flourishing Program examined the role that sense of mission played among 6,000 young adults in the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS). The participants’ sense of mission was assessed in adolescence, and they were followed up with for six years into early adulthood. We explored whether and how having such a sense of mission would affect other aspects of health and well-being. As in previous analyses, our study controlled for a rich set of other potentially confounding factors, including numerous social, demographic, and economic characteristics, parental variables, including maternal attachment, and participation in religious services.
Even after these controls, however, there was evidence that, over time, a sense of mission subsequently improved flourishing in numerous domains, including happiness and psychological well-being (e.g., life satisfaction, positive affect, self-esteem, emotional processing, and emotional expression), promotion of physical health (greater use of preventive health care), possibly mental health (fewer depressive symptoms), and character (more volunteering). Although we did not find associations of purpose with specific physical health outcomes in this study, it must be remembered that this was a relatively young group of participants (essentially in their 20s during the study’s follow-up assessments) and major health problems usually begin later in life.
By contrast, a subsequent study by our team examined the relationship between a sense of purpose in life and a flourishing life among about 13,000 retirees in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and found substantial associations of purpose with physical health. Over the four-year follow-up period, people with the highest sense of purpose had a 13 percent reduced risk of sleep problems, a 43 percent reduced risk of depression, a 35 percent reduced risk of loneliness, and a remarkable 46 percent lower risk of dying for any reason. Purpose in life is clearly not only a key constituent of flourishing, but also a powerful determinant of flourishing in many areas over time.
But this raises a further question: What gives rise to a sense of meaning and purpose?
Remarkably little research has examined the factors in adolescence that give rise to or inhibit a sense of meaning and purpose later in life. Our program is trying to remedy that. In our analyses of GUTS data, we found that religious service attendance, positive attachment to one’s mother, and volunteering during late childhood were among the strongest predictors of a subsequent higher sense of purpose during adolescence, while marijuana use and depression tend to lead subsequently to lower levels of purpose. We have also examined the determinants of purpose among older adults, again using HRS data. We found that volunteering, time with friends, and physical activity were associated with an increased sense of purpose among older adults. However, in this case, the effects were generally quite modest, which suggests the intuitive conclusion that meaning and purpose might be more malleable earlier in life.
Although there is certainly a need for replication in other settings, these initial analyses may help provide guidance for parents trying to shape a sense of mission and purpose for their children. On the one hand, they underscore the importance of inculcating a strong sense of purpose in childhood, before their attitudes and habits solidify. As the Proverb has it, “Train a child up in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (22:6). And these results raise particular questions about the long-term effects of cannabis use on teens; the ongoing debates around marijuana legalization have focused on questions of its health effects, but perhaps issues concerning the formation of purpose in life should come into play as well.
It is clear that more research needs to be done on this important topic. Almost everyone desires to have a sense of meaning and purpose in life. The fact that we know so little, at least empirically, about what gives rise to such meaning and purpose is truly remarkable.
To facilitate a more careful study of the determinants of meaning and purpose, in 2020 we put forward a new Comprehensive Measure of Meaning (CMM), which, ultimately, is intended to incorporate the results of philosophical discussion into an established framework. We recently published a paper describing its reliability and validity as a measurement tool. In developing this measure, our team took an approach that is unusual within psychology: Rather than beginning first with focus group interviews or reviews of existing items, we took as our starting point a series of recent debates in philosophy and psychology about the nature of meaning, which had converged on the view that meaning is experienced in at least three dimensions of life, namely cognitive coherence (having a sense of the “meaning of life” as a whole), affective significance (having a sense of “meaning in life” or the meaningfulness of one’s regular activities), and motivational direction or purpose (having important goals and pursuits).
With these distinctions in hand, our team then undertook a thorough review of existing scales designed to measure meaning and purpose. The CMM makes use of a variety of items from those previous scales, but it categorizes these in ways that are consistent with that threefold philosophical typology and its sub-domains, as we further proposed, drawing again on the philosophical literature on the topic, that the above dimensions might be decomposed into global and individual coherence, subjective and objective significance, and, for direction, into mission, purposes, and goals. Each of these is arguably independently valuable, and each can be possessed apart from the others.
Our evaluation of the resulting scale’s properties are based on data from a longitudinal sample of 4,000 college students and a single survey of about 8,800 employees at a Latin American financial institution.
Happily, the initial data collected using the CMM provides strong initial support for the threefold conceptual grouping of them into measures of coherence, significance, and direction, and even to further subdivision of each of those domains. These results provide some initial empirical confirmation of the proposal we outlined in an earlier article for Common Good, that the humanities can provide conceptual clarity, and further insights, for traits — such as meaning — that the social sciences seek to study. We hope that the CMM will prove a valuable resource in ongoing efforts to understand the distribution and drivers of meaning.
If, as Viktor Frankl proposed, “self-transcendence is the essence of human existence” — if our ultimate happiness consists at least in part in fitting ourselves within a larger story than our own private pleasure, in losing our lives in order to find them (Matt 16:25) — then cultivating and sustaining meaning is at the very heart of the promotion of human flourishing.
