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. And it is considered a key to happiness and well-being.
But does it matter where your sense of purpose comes from? Do different sources of purpose affect our well-being in different ways?
Answers to these questions are hard to come by, because most research on purpose doesn’t look that granularly at the concept. Instead, it’s often measured by asking people how much they agree with general statements, like “I have aims and objectives for living” or “My life is meaningful”—not specifically what those meaningful aims are.
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But, in a new study, researchers Michael Mark and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia and their colleagues aimed to get more detail about people’s purposeful pursuits across cultures and to see their effect on “the good life.” Ultimately, they found that our purposes around the world have a lot in common.
Cultural similarities around purpose
In the first part of their study, Mast and his colleagues asked 200 American participants to write about seven things that gave them a sense of purpose in life. Then, they analyzed over 2,000 responses to come up with 16 general categories of purpose that encompassed everyone’s answers:
- Self-improvement: Becoming the best you can be
- Family: Supporting and providing for your family and caretaking
- Relationships: Searching for, finding, or maintaining close relationships
- Religion/spirituality: Living in accordance with and meeting the standards of your religious or spiritual beliefs
- Recognition: Being respected and having high status
- Happiness: Being happy, enjoying life, and feeling good
- Self-sufficiency: Being able to take care of yourself physically and financially, and having the freedom to do as you wish
- Material wealth: Getting rich, owning nice things, and buying whatever you want
- Internal standards: Knowing who you are and what you stand for and living your life according to these principles
- Positive impact: Making the world a better place
- Mattering: Inspiring others and leaving a legacy; making an impact
- Occupational fulfillment: Finding your calling through work; doing your job well and working hard
- Persevering: Handling what life throws at you—not giving up and dealing with the struggles inherent in life
- Physical health: Taking care of your body and being healthy
- Inner peace: Being grateful for what you have and accepting what you can’t change
- Service: Serving your country or community
After testing out these categories with a different group of 100 American participants, their team surveyed over 1,000 people from Japan, India, Poland, and the United States to find out how much these categories reflected their own purpose in life. Specifically, participants reported how much each source of purpose influenced the decisions they made and guided their behavior, as well as how happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich their lives were—all aspects of “the good life.” (Psychological richness involves experiencing diverse, challenging, and interesting activities that evoke complex emotions and change your perspective.)
Analyzing the results, the researchers found that people in each of these unique cultures had very similar sources of purpose and prioritized each category similarly, too. “Happiness,” “self-sufficiency,” and “family” were in the top five for each country, while “religion” and “recognition” were in the bottom five for each country.
Also, there was a lot of agreement on what sources of purpose went along with more meaning, happiness, or psychological richness in life. This finding surprised Heine, who, as a cultural psychologist, is used to seeing more variability among people of different cultures.
“What stands out from our finding is just how much agreement there was within these four quite different countries about what kinds of purposes are associated with a good life,” he says. “They’re not identical, but there is a striking amount of similarity.”
Different purposes for different ends
So how did different types of purposes relate to different ways of living well? The researchers found that people whose purpose came from “mattering” were the most likely to have a more meaningful life, overall, with “perseverance” and “service” also tied to meaning. This fits in with past research explaining how meaning in life involves a sense of purpose, coherence, and mattering, says Heine.
“It makes sense that ‘mattering’ is especially linked with meaning, as it [suggests people] want to make a difference in the world,” he says. “And ‘service’ means you are guided by contributing to others—another source of meaning.”
People felt happier depending on how much they pursued “inner peace,” with the pursuit of “positive impact,” “physical health,” and “happiness” also tied to happiness more than other sources of purpose.
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.
“What you are doing is making the world a better place, and that should be especially rewarding,” he says.
For the psychologically rich life, pursuing “service” was the top contender for people across cultures. This seems counterintuitive, because service isn’t necessarily associated with novelty, complexity, or challenge.
But it’s possible, says Mast, that serving others opens us to new perspectives and a range of emotions—for example, happiness at connecting with people in less fortunate circumstances, but also sadness about their misfortune—that could be relevant to a psychologically rich life.
“These aspects of service (emotional complexity, perspective-changing experiences) may be what link it to psychological richness,” says Mast.
Interestingly, pursuing material wealth was the lowest predictor of every form of the good life in this study. Heine suggest that the reason may be that pursuing wealth takes you away from more reliable sources of purpose associated with the good life—like relationships, a sense of community, work, or connection to a cause or spiritual practice.
“Chasing material wealth is not associated with the kinds of connections that underlie a good life,” he says.
Variations in purpose and well-being
While the overall results suggest an almost universal experience of purpose, there were some cultural variations in the findings, too.
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.
On the other hand, he and Mast 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.
According to Heine, it’s possible that in countries where people feel strong obligations and expectations around their family (like in Japan and India), other areas of fulfillment may have felt more novel and relevant to them.
Mast 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.
“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.
Aiming for the good life yourself
Knowing that certain elements of a good life may be supported by sources of purpose like mattering, inner peace, or service could be useful to know, especially if we’re aiming for a happier, more meaningful, or psychologically rich life. But Heine is not sure that there can be a “purpose prescription” based on their findings alone.
“Purpose and meaning in life have an important subjective element. It wouldn’t be good for an individual to share the same purpose just because others endorse it,” he says.
On the other hand, he and Mast both hope their research will encourage more people to consider focusing on what brings purpose to their lives, to help achieve greater overall well-being.
“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.
