Do We Really Need a Purpose in Life?

Many clients come into psychotherapy with a question about purpose. This can be about not knowing one’s “grand” purpose or feeling like one’s previous purpose or motivations for living have exhausted themselves. There is a sense among many that having a purpose is a good thing and finding one’s “true” purpose is even better. Having a purpose gives us a reason for living and gives us direction along our path.

But is having purpose really the best way to think about life, therapy, or well-being? Or, may searching for purpose add other kinds of stresses and anxieties that are not really useful to us as humans?

The Problems With “Purposive” Living

There are a number of problems with conceptualizing life in terms of purpose and seeing a lack of purpose as a character flaw or cause of ill mental health.

Having a strong sense of purpose can be highly motivating and give us a strong sense of identity, but it can also narrow our attention and become too rigidly associated with our self-concept. Why is this a problem?

This is not a problem if one experiences life without any change or variation in this sense of purpose and feels continually motivated and enlivened by this pursuit. For instance, you may be highly motivated by accounting and finance as a young person and continue to be excited, driven, and identified by this pursuit later in life. In this example, nothing is wrong. Finance, in this case, gives this person a sense of drive and purpose, and, as long as it continues to do so, they will feel enlivened and stimulated.

However, most of us do not continually experience the same sense of motivation and purpose later in life that we did early in life. For instance, I may have found great purpose in sports, athleticism, and competition as a preteen, but as I develop over time, my interest and attention wane and I may drift to other interests such as math, romance, or sci-fi novels. My purposes may change and shift, for example, as I develop over time.

As a culture, we tend to permit and acknowledge these shifts more easily in early life than we do as we approach adulthood. As we approach adulthood, we are expected to refine and narrow our focus and attention to a pursuit that is useful and gainful, and, ideally, one that is suited to our skills and ambition. If I like math and solving problems, for instance, I may pursue engineering, and this may satisfy my need to make a living and give me a sense of purpose and satisfaction from solving complex problems and providing use to a company, government, or client.

On Unknown Wants and a Sense of Failure

The problem, however, is for those of us who may not have had such strong drives at the outset, or who do not experience a sense of purpose or satisfaction from their line of work. This can lead very frequently to a feeling of "missing out" or of personal failure. One of the great sources of shame in our culture is not knowing what we want—either as a vocation or more generally in terms of pursuing a good life. We typically tend to reward and champion those who from an early age know what they want and then back those wants with effort and achievement.

On the other hand, those who are more reluctant, hesitant, or aimless are seen as underdeveloped, coddled, drive-less, or maybe even depressed. Indeed, lack of motivation is one of the potential indications of depression, so having a strong sense of motivation and purpose is seen as a robust sign of mental health.

Toward an Experimental Life

What would be achieved, however, if we thought about the “good life” not as strictly one with a strong sense of purpose but as an experimental life that may have periods without wanting or purpose? For example, what if we thought of a life as a series of experiments that we try on and that may be exciting or enlivening for a time, but may not be permanent parts of the self?

If someone came into therapy without a strong sense of motivation for purpose, we may look at that not as a problem to be solved but as a way to modify a view of what a good or interesting life may be. Someone, for instance, may not have a unifying grand purpose, but they might have interests in certain things and have activities, daydreams, or relationships that are satisfying or enlivening in some ways. Could this not be an example of a good or “good enough” life? Could a life filled with a variety of minor interests and not one grand purpose not be seen as a life worth living?

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Reframing a good life as one absent a grand purpose also opens us to periods of natural transition or change in our lives, periods that are often marked by tremendous forces of uncertainty or not knowing what we want. Rather than trying to recover a purpose, we might look at these periods in life as valuable places to experiment and improvise, to allow our minds to wander and to review what we are interested in and why we are not interested in the things we used to be interested in.

This is often common at midlife, as we may begin to investigate what our previous wants and motivations were and who they really were for. For example, was my pursuit to become a doctor or lawyer really my own individual drive and purpose or was it the desires or unfulfilled purpose of my mother or father? Or maybe was that drive influenced by the culture at large, coloured by notions of success? At midlife, we often begin to hear inner voices chime in that conflict with some of our inherited motivations.

This is perhaps one of the strongest potential insights from not having wants or purpose—they may be protests from the self against false or inauthentic drives and pursuits. What may in early life appear like an authentic drive or purpose may be reviewed later in life as something carried on behalf of our parents or influential elders. These may even include deep-set cultural norms like having a relationship or wanting kids.

Being married or having kids may make sense biologically or culturally but may be at odds with other parts of ourselves, parts that may want to pursue other less culturally normative paths. Not knowing what we want, in this manner, may open up new possibilities for living not on offer in typical social life.

In normalizing more experimental modes of living, we do not necessarily deny purpose as an important way of living but merely note that it is not the only way to a satisfying and enjoyable life. In other words, we don’t necessarily need a purpose to our life—to tie our actions to one great ambition or raison d’etre. Rather, an enjoyable and meaningful life may be one where we occasionally have strong senses of purpose but occasionally do not. An enjoyable and well-lived life can be of continuously trying out and trying on new roles and modes of living.