“Reading fiction might allow adolescents to reason about the whole lives of characters, giving them specific insight into an entire lifespan without having to have fully lived most of their own lives,” they suggest. By seeing purpose in the lives of other people, teens are more likely to see it in their own lives. So where do you turn if you wanted to send your teen on one of these experiences this summer? How can my teen attend one of these programs if I am from a middle or low-income background?
The length of mothers’ telomeres—the end caps on genes that tend to shorten with age—were measured before and after some of the moms attended a mindful meditation retreat. It’s not enough to just feel like you’re a small part of something big; you also need to feel driven to make a positive impact on the world. This helps young people try something on for size, see if they like it, and then decide if they want to make it part of their life. Unfortunately so many young people today are not actually able to explore—teens are often either disillusioned from the banality of school or over achieving students are on the treadmill and cannot step off for fear of falling behind.
- In a series of articles, podcast episodes, and other resources, we’ll be exploring why and how to deepen your sense of purpose at different stages of life.
- He observes that the elders who held on to a sense of purpose thrived because of their flexibility.
- We can look to philosophers who tried to explain the different approaches to the search for meaning, argues Heine.
- In a survey of empirical studies, Raymond A. Mar and colleagues found a link between reading poetry and fiction and a sense of purpose among adolescents.
However, says Bronk, older folks may want to reflect back rather than look ahead. She suggests we think about what we’ve always wanted to do but maybe couldn’t because of other obligations (like raising kids or pursuing a career). Bronk found that helping people prioritize their values is useful for finding purpose. For example, watching a beautiful sunset or a starlit sky, witnessing people doing supremely moral acts, encountering deep states of meditation, or seeing incredible architecture or art can all inspire awe.
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. More often, childhood and adolescence seem to be the time when the building blocks of purpose are established, but we’re still exploring what we want out of life. A 2012 study by the same researchers had a similar finding, but in the opposite direction—with young people who felt purposeful building a more solid sense of identity over time.
Happiness Break: How to Awaken Your Creative Energy
“Though the goal of our paper was to highlight many sources of purpose, our take-home message is that having any kind of purpose is key to having a good life,” says Heine. A new study suggests that a sense of purpose may be more important to our longevity than life satisfaction. This is a valuable reflective process to all people, but Amber took it one step further, by publishing her autobiography and turning it into a tool for social change. Today, Amber’s purpose is to help people like her feel less alone.
Awe and Gratitude
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. Please answer the questions below as honestly as possible; there are no right or wrong answers. The last seven questions are about you, and will be used to explore how purpose relates to factors like age and gender. Individual responses to this quiz are anonymous and will not be shared.
To find out—and discover steps for strengthening it—take this quiz, which is primarily based on the Claremont Purpose Scale developed by psychologists Kendall Bronk, Brian Riches, and Susan Mangan. Victor Strecher, a behavioral scientist at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, lost his 19-year-old daughter to a sudden heart attack in 2010; she had been living with a rare heart condition for years. Her fragility and eventual death upended his thoughts on what life should be about and how to live it—and it moved him to write a book called Life on Purpose. When Christopher Pepper was a senior in high school, a “trembling, tearful friend” told him that she had been raped by a classmate.
Connecting with What Matters
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 Plus500 Review Strengths Survey can be useful in identifying our personal strengths and embracing them more fully.
Five Childhood Experiences That Lead to a More Purposeful Life
- Yet many of us don’t take the time to think about our place in the universe or what we value most.
- In Freedman’s experience, very few of us will wake up one day with a totally new purpose in life.
- It includes Strecher’s personal revelations as well as those of others who’ve found their purpose and changed the trajectory of their lives.
- Instead, he observes people draw on the skills, knowledge, and values they’ve cultivated over a lifetime to start a new chapter.
All responses are anonymized and only used in aggregate for evaluation purposes. A new book makes the case that hope is the right response when we are facing difficulties in our lives. Studies are investigating the process of leaving religion and what a flourishing life after religion looks like.
Learn how poetry can help your brain handle stress, process feelings, and spark insight. Why do people like Kezia and Christopher seem to find purpose in suffering—while others are crushed by it? Part of the answer, as we’ll see next, might have to do with the emotions and behaviors we cultivate in ourselves.
Three Ways to Encourage Intellectual Humility in Kids
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.
I want the kids out there who grew up like me, to know they have futures ahead of them. I want them to know they are smart, even if they may not meet state academic standards. I want them to know that they are just as good and valuable as any other human who happens to be born into more privileged circumstances. Many people I interviewed for this article mentioned pivotal books or ideas they found in books.
The Science of Trusting Your Intuition
It includes Strecher’s personal revelations as well as those of others who’ve found their purpose and changed the trajectory of their lives. 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.
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. Although there is no research that directly explores how being thanked might fuel a sense of purpose, we do know that gratitude strengthens relationships—and those are often the source of our purpose, as many of these stories suggest. Of course, finding purpose is not just an intellectual pursuit; it’s something we need to feel. That’s why it can grow out of suffering, both our own and others’.
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. People can find a sense of purpose organically—or through deliberate exercises and self-reflection.
