Photo by Kindel Media: https://www.pexels.com/photo/child-holding-a-colored-marker-on-paper-7105596/
My daughter’s pre-K graduation was an afternoon filled with smiles, laughter and happy tears. Each student had a moment to shine during their “speech,” which involved answering: What’s your name? How old are you? And lastly — what do you want to be when you grow up?
“Pizza chef!” my daughter said, proud of it.
Then it was everyone else’s turn
Cowboy. Scientist. Pirate. Doctor mom.
We all cheered and clapped enthusiastically because our kids can be anything they want to be.
We encourage limitless exploration in kids. Yet, “what do you want to be?” puts an ever-so-gentle pressure on them to name an identity, a specific role in society. Put another way: a purpose.
“What do you want to be?” gets more frequent in the teenage and young adult years, when the stakes rise. Declare your major, get those good summer internships, land that good first job.
Fortunately, your twenties still make room for exploration, in service of finding your purpose in life.
And we like exploring — to an extent. Research shows that the search correlates with life satisfaction in our twenties. In our thirties? Flatline.1
The reasons probably range.
From apathy — What’s the point?
To acceptance — I’m pretty comfortable so why disrupt things with a search?
To full-on anxiety — I’m working really hard to find it and I still have no clue!
The last phenomenon is so common that psychologist Larissa Rainey coined it “purpose anxiety.”2
Why is purpose so elusive?
I am intimately familiar with purpose anxiety. This entire Substack was spawned from that experience and I have learned to think of purpose as something you get to craft from your own passions and values. More on that in a minute.
I know I’m not alone. My clients come to me actively searching for their purpose. And they start with the same basic premise:
I need to find my why, what fulfills me, my passions, interests and values that drive me.
I need to know my strengths. My qualities, skills, and talents to offer the world.
I need to figure out what the world needs. How can I contribute those passions and strengths to the cause?
I need to nestle these together neatly like Russian dolls. My why activates my strengths to do good in the world.
Different people, yet oddly similar approaches. It’s almost like an optimization exercise. A direct symptom, I believe, of our culture’s obsession with productivity and busyness.
I went the optimization exercise route countless times myself. First with pen and paper. Dead end. Then online quizzes. Didn’t like the answers. I eventually tried ChatGPT. Still dissatisfied.
Here’s how it usually went.
My strengths: Communicating ideas, empowering other people.
My passion: Serving communities.
My purpose (according to the internet and ChatGPT): Teacher, public policy advisor, HR director.
Defensible based on my strengths and passions? Yes.
Did I want to do those things? Nope.
Maybe we’re mixing up meaning and purpose
I always assumed the search for one’s purpose had been around since the beginning of time. But it’s not. Not by a long shot. Google’s NGram viewer shows that “find your purpose” didn’t come onto the scene until the early 1990s. Since then, the phrase’s prevalence in printed sources has increased by nearly 3000%. Three. Thousand. Percent.3
On the other hand, “the meaning of life” has been around since at least the 1840s.
Purpose, as something you're supposed to go find, is a recent invention. Meaning is ancient.
Maybe I was conflating purpose with meaning.
They’re deeply intertwined, but in fact different. Developmental psychologist William Damon defines purpose as a stable, generalized intention to accomplish something that’s meaningful to the self and leads to productive engagement with some aspect of the world beyond the self.4
Translation: Meaning is inward. Purpose is what happens when that meaning touches something outside you.
That’s why the Russian-doll approach kept failing me. I thought “meaningful to me” was supposed to open up to the one doll that fit. One singular expression of purpose, and I’d know it the moment I got there. Angels singing, or close enough. My quizzes could tell me what I loved and what I was good at — the meaningful-to-self part — all day long. What they couldn’t tell me, because no quiz can, is where that meaning was supposed to go. They were all random guesses.
In complete frustration, I abandoned the exercise.
Instead of looking forward, I looked backward.
I scanned my memories. Flashes where I was in my groove, using my strengths and passions to meet the outside world. Each memory held a different expression of purpose. And they all had great meaning to me.
It turns out, I didn’t have to find that one and only Russian doll that would fit. I just had to stop assuming there was only one. I went back to what kids do naturally: exploring, noticing what lit me up, and seeing where those things met the world, depending on the season I was in. As we grow, so can the ways we express purpose.
Let me tell you. It’s way more fun to do it this way.
Make space for purpose
Ironically, the antidote to this hurried optimization of our purpose is to protect space for it. To actually be present for what’s already happening around you instead of rushing to the next meeting, to soccer practice, to the dinner you should have said no to anyway.
In my own exploration of purpose, and in working with clients, I’ve found it helps to stay open to a few things.
Awe, wonder, and curiosity. Dr. Dacher Keltner’s research on awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something so vast it stretches your understanding—shows that it reliably pulls people out of themselves and into a stronger sense of connection with others and the world. Think of it as a bridge between individual meaning and external purpose.5
The beautiful thing is that awe doesn’t require anything extraordinary. Natural beauty, courage, art, even watching a crowd move together can all spark it. The trick is slowing down long enough to notice. And once something captures your attention, resist the urge to immediately explain it away. Stay curious. Ask why it moved you. What value did it touch? What did it remind you of? Those moments become part of the story your brain is constantly building about who you are and what matters to you.6 The richer that story becomes, the more possibilities you have for expressing it in the world.
Community. We often think purpose is something we’re supposed to figure out on our own. But purpose doesn’t exist in isolation. It comes alive in relationship: through conversations, shared experiences, and opportunities to contribute to something beyond ourselves.
That used to happen more naturally. Neighborhood gathering places regularly brought people together without asking them to optimize every minute. As those spaces have faded, and productivity has seeped into nearly every corner of life, meaningful connection increasingly requires intention. If purpose is partly shaped by where your meaning meets the outside world, then it matters who you’re regularly in conversation with. Don’t leave that to chance.
Permission. Finally, give yourself permission to experiment.
Have you been toying with the idea of switching careers for years? Shadow someone for a day. Volunteer. Take a course. Try it on.
Not with the question, “Is this my purpose?” but with a better one: Do I feel connected to something while I’m doing this? Or am I simply hoping fulfillment will arrive someday if I keep going?
A purpose doesn’t have to arrive fully formed before you act. Sometimes it becomes visible only after you’ve made enough space to notice what keeps drawing you in.
Trust the kids
That night, after the celebrations had died down, I asked my daughter why she wanted to be a pizza chef.
She thought about it for exactly zero seconds. “Because I get to mix the dough, squish it, and then everybody’s happy when they eat it.”
Not “I want to run a restaurant.” Not “I want a stable career in food service.” She wasn’t answering with a professional identity. She was answering with what was actually inside it — squishing dough, making people happy.
Another day, apropos of nothing, she told me she also wants to be an astronaut just like Mae Jemison. And also still a pizza chef.
She wasn’t confused. She was trying things on.
Maybe we should, too.
Kendall Cotton Bronk, Patrick L. Hill, Daniel K. Lapsley, Tasneem L. Talib, and Holmes Finch, “Purpose, hope, and life satisfaction in three age groups,” The Journal of Positive Psychology 4, no. 6 (2009): 500–510.
Larissa Rainey, “The Search for Purpose in Life: An Exploration of Purpose, the Search Process, and Purpose Anxiety” (Master of Applied Positive Psychology capstone, University of Pennsylvania, 2014).
Google Ngram Viewer data on the phrase “find your purpose,” 1996–2026.
William Damon, Jenni Menon, and Kendall Cotton Bronk, “The Development of Purpose During Adolescence,” Applied Developmental Science 7, no. 3 (2003): 121.
Dacher Keltner, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).
Nava Yeshurun et al., “The Default Mode Network: Where the Idiosyncratic Self Meets the Shared Social World,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 22 (2021): 181–192; Vinod Menon, “20 Years of the Default Mode Network: A Review and Synthesis,” Neuron 111, no. 16 (2023).