It is possible to have a reasonably successful life and still feel strangely dissatisfied with it. The relationship between purpose and happiness becomes especially clear when life looks good from the outside, but we still have the nagging sense that something is missing.
You can have a career, a home, relationships, money in the bank, vacations on the calendar, and no obvious crisis, yet still have the nagging sense that something is missing. I see this often enough that I do not think the problem can simply be explained by anxiety, depression, or a lack of gratitude. Sometimes people are not unhappy because life is going badly. They are unhappy because they do not know where their lives are headed.
Human beings need more than comfort. We need direction. A person who has something meaningful to pursue can tolerate an extraordinary amount of frustration, work, delay, and uncertainty. Without a meaningful direction, even a relatively comfortable life can begin to feel empty. We wake up, work, pay bills, entertain ourselves, sleep, and repeat the process without being able to answer the larger question: What exactly am I doing all of this for?
This is one reason I think purpose is essential to happiness. By happiness, however, I do not mean feeling cheerful all the time. A meaningful life can include grief, frustration, sacrifice, boredom, disappointment, and suffering. Happiness in the deeper sense is closer to flourishing: living in a way that develops what is best in us and orders our choices toward something worth pursuing.
Pleasure Is Not the Same Thing as Happiness
Modern life makes pleasure remarkably easy to obtain. We can order food without leaving the couch, watch virtually unlimited entertainment, buy almost anything with a few taps on a phone, distract ourselves whenever we become bored, and find endless ways to avoid discomfort. Yet greater access to pleasure has not eliminated restlessness.
Pleasure is good, but pleasure cannot carry the weight we often put on it. A good meal is enjoyable, a vacation can be restorative, a new car can be exciting, and financial success can make life easier. None of those things tells us what our life is for. They are experiences and possessions within a life; they cannot provide the organizing principle for the life itself.
This becomes especially apparent when people finally obtain what they thought would make them happy. They receive the promotion, build the business, buy the house, get married, reach the financial goal, or achieve the recognition they wanted. There may be genuine satisfaction, but eventually another question appears: Now what?
The problem is not that achievement is meaningless. The problem is expecting a limited goal to answer an unlimited question.
We Need Something to Aim At
You would probably not own a gadget for ten minutes without eventually asking, “What is this thing for?” Yet people can spend decades living without seriously asking the same question about themselves.
Purpose gives direction to our choices because it tells us what our actions are supposed to accomplish. Imagine getting into your car without knowing where you intend to go. There would be no meaningful way to decide whether you should turn left or right, take the freeway or surface streets, speed up or slow down. A road is only the wrong road in relation to a destination.
Life works much the same way. Decisions about careers, money, relationships, marriage, children, health, habits, faith, and even how we spend an ordinary Tuesday evening make more sense when they are connected to a larger understanding of the kind of person we are trying to become and the kind of life we are trying to build. Without a destination, it becomes remarkably easy to confuse activity with progress.
Purpose Makes Sacrifice Meaningful
Almost anything worth doing requires giving something up. Building a business requires time and risk. Raising children limits freedom. Marriage requires sacrificing some individual preferences for the good of the relationship. Becoming physically healthy means saying no to things that would feel good right now. Developing expertise requires years of doing work that can be repetitive, frustrating, and difficult.
The sacrifice becomes tolerable because it is connected to something larger. If I am walking ten miles for no reason, every mile feels pointless. If I am walking ten miles to reach my child who needs me, the same physical effort means something entirely different. The pain has not disappeared; its relationship to a purpose has changed.
This is also why a life organized primarily around avoiding discomfort eventually becomes smaller. If every difficult experience is interpreted as evidence that something has gone wrong, we begin abandoning worthwhile things precisely when they become demanding. Sometimes difficulty is a warning that we are on the wrong road. At other times difficulty is simply the price of traveling toward something valuable.
I explore this much more fully in my forthcoming book, The Science of the Cross: Stress, Suffering, and the Psychology of Transformation, which examines how adversity can contribute to strength, meaning, resilience, and transformation when we learn to engage with it rather than organize our lives around escaping it.
Wisdom involves learning the difference between suffering that is needlessly destructive and difficulty that is actually helping us grow.
Goals Are Important, but They Are Not the Same as Purpose
Goals help organize life. We may want to finish school, earn more money, start a business, lose weight, repair a marriage, buy a home, retire comfortably, or raise healthy children. These are legitimate goals, and life would be difficult without them.
But every goal eventually creates another question. Why do you want the degree? Perhaps to build a career. Why do you want the career? Maybe to provide financial security, accomplish something worthwhile, use your abilities, or provide for your family. Why does that matter?
If we continue asking the question, eventually we arrive at something that is no longer merely a means to something else. Philosophers have wrestled with this problem for thousands of years. Aristotle argued that although we pursue many things for the sake of something else, ultimately human beings seek eudaimonia, commonly translated as happiness or flourishing, for its own sake.
That is a much richer understanding of happiness than simply feeling good. It asks what it means for a human being to live well.
What Does “Better” Mean?
This same problem appears whenever someone says, “I want my life to get better.” But what does getting better actually mean? I explore that question more fully in Get Better in Therapy: What Does “Better” Mean?, because change by itself is not necessarily progress. We still have to ask what the change is moving us toward.
More money may be better if financial instability is destroying your family, but more money obtained by never seeing your family may make life worse. Greater independence may be healthy for one person and simply another excuse to avoid intimacy for another. Working harder may help someone fulfill his potential while another person desperately needs to learn that his worth is not measured by productivity.
We cannot determine whether something is better until we have some conception of what a human being is and what human beings are for. Psychology can tell us a tremendous amount about how people think, feel, learn, form habits, regulate emotion, respond to stress, and change behavior. What psychology alone cannot finally determine is what all of that change should be toward. Science can describe mechanisms, but it cannot, by measurement alone, tell us what constitutes a good human life.
At some point, the question becomes philosophical.
Human Beings Appear to Be Oriented Toward Something
Aristotle used the idea of telos, meaning an end, purpose, or that toward which something is directed. An acorn has within its nature the potential to become an oak tree rather than a rose bush. Eyes are structured for seeing, lungs for breathing, and the capacities of living things tell us something about the kinds of beings they are.
Human beings are obviously more complicated because we possess reason and freedom. We can act contrary to our own good. We can choose immediate pleasure over something we know matters more. We can develop our capacities or neglect them. We can become more courageous, honest, disciplined, loving, and wise, or we can become increasingly governed by appetite, fear, resentment, and impulse.
This is what makes the question of purpose unavoidable. If there is such a thing as becoming a better human being, then “better” cannot simply mean doing whatever happens to make us feel good at the moment. There must be something toward which human life is properly ordered.
LIFE, TRUTH, and LOVE
Our deepest human desires can be thought about in terms of LIFE, TRUTH, and LOVE.
We desire life, but not merely five additional minutes of biological existence. We want life in its fullness. We want our lives to matter, to continue, and not simply disappear into nothingness.
We desire truth, but not merely isolated facts. Human beings have an extraordinary hunger to understand reality. We want to know what exists, why it exists, who we are, where we came from, and whether anything ultimately means anything.
We also desire love, not merely a temporary emotional sensation. We want to know and to be known, to love and to be loved in a way that is faithful and enduring. The difficulty is that everything we encounter in ordinary life gives us these things only partially. Human life ends. Our knowledge remains incomplete. Even our deepest human relationships are imperfect and eventually confronted by death. Yet the appetite remains.
Christianity makes a remarkable claim about this hunger: it is not an accident.
The Christian Answer to Purpose
From the Christian perspective, our desire for complete LIFE, TRUTH, and LOVE ultimately points beyond the finite things through which we encounter them. Perfect life, perfect truth, and perfect love are not abstractions. They find their source and fulfillment in God.
This is why Saint Augustine's famous observation continues to resonate sixteen centuries later:
“You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”
Augustine was not claiming that Christians never experience restlessness, depression, uncertainty, or dissatisfaction. His point was deeper. We repeatedly ask finite things to satisfy a desire that ultimately extends beyond them.
We ask careers to tell us who we are. We ask money to make us secure. We ask another person to complete us. We ask pleasure to make life meaningful. We ask achievement to prove our worth. These things can all be good, but the problem begins when a good thing is asked to become the ultimate thing.
It cannot carry that weight.
For people who want these questions included in therapy rather than treated as irrelevant to mental and emotional life, I discuss that integration more specifically on my Catholic Therapy and Counseling page. Faith does not replace psychology, but if faith is central to someone's understanding of reality, pretending it has nothing to do with purpose makes little sense.
First in Intention, Last in Execution
There is an old philosophical principle: the first in intention is the last in execution.
Suppose you are driving from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the first thing in your intention—you decide where you are going before you begin driving—but it is the last place you actually arrive. Along the way you pass through Primm, Baker, Barstow, and everything else between your starting point and your destination.
The destination gives meaning to the intermediate steps. Life is similar. If I know the kind of man I am trying to become, then my work, relationships, money, habits, sacrifices, successes, and failures can be evaluated in relation to that destination. The immediate goals matter, but they are not isolated from one another. They become stages within a larger journey.
For the Christian, the ultimate destination is union with God. That does not make careers, marriages, friendships, businesses, recreation, achievement, creativity, or adventure unimportant. It gives them an order. They become parts of a life rather than competitors for the position of life's ultimate purpose.
Success Cannot Answer the Final Question
This may be especially difficult to recognize in a culture built around achievement. We are encouraged to improve ourselves, earn more, accumulate credentials, build businesses, optimize our health, increase productivity, travel, acquire experiences, and continue moving toward the next accomplishment.
Much of that can be excellent. I have spent a substantial part of my own life building businesses, pursuing ideas, and setting goals, so I certainly do not believe ambition is a defect. But achievement has limits.
There is always another mountain. The person who earns $100,000 may begin imagining what life would be like at $250,000. The executive wants the next title. The entrepreneur wants another company. The person who finally buys the dream house eventually notices a larger one.
Sometimes people seek life coaching at precisely this point, not because something has gone wrong but because things have gone well enough that a different question has emerged: What do I want to build next, and why?
There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting more. The danger is spending an entire life climbing ladders without ever asking whether they are leaning against the right wall. Sometimes the most important question we can ask after succeeding is not “What can I accomplish next?” but “What was I hoping accomplishment would give me?”
Purpose Does Not Mean Having Your Entire Life Figured Out
Having a purpose does not mean knowing exactly what will happen over the next twenty years. Some of the most meaningful opportunities in life arrive unexpectedly. Careers change, relationships develop, children are born, businesses succeed and fail, interests evolve, and circumstances force us onto roads we never intended to travel.
Purpose is not the same thing as having a rigid plan. A compass is different from a map. You may not know exactly where the road leads, yet you know the direction in which you want to travel.
A person can ask whether a decision moves him toward greater truth, responsibility, love, courage, service, integrity, and ultimately toward God without knowing every turn that lies ahead. In fact, purpose can make us more adaptable rather than less because when a particular plan collapses, the entire meaning of life does not have to collapse with it. The goal was larger than the plan.
For some people, these questions belong naturally in individual therapy; for others they are better suited to coaching. I discuss that distinction more directly in Therapy vs. Life Coaching. Not every period of uncertainty is a psychological disorder, but questions about identity, meaning, direction, and repeated patterns can still deserve serious attention.
Purpose, Fathers, and the Development of Men
Questions of purpose arise frequently in my work with men. A young man may be trying to establish himself in work and relationships, while a man in middle age may have accomplished much of what he once set out to do and suddenly find himself wondering what the next twenty years are supposed to be about.
Sometimes the difficulty goes even further back. A man's ideas about responsibility, success, authority, confidence, masculinity, and what kind of man he is supposed to become can be strongly influenced by his relationship with his father. I explore some of those patterns in Fatherless: The Fifty-Year Pandemic, including the effects of father absence and the ways men sometimes continue reacting to their fathers long after childhood has ended.
There is also a broader question of what a man is aiming toward. Jordan Peterson's discussion of the father motif in Pinocchio provides an interesting entry point to the subject, which I examine in “Rescue Your Dead Father” — Pinocchio Explained. The psychological point is not simply about one's biological father, but about recovering the wisdom, responsibility, structure, and values necessary to become an adult rather than remaining psychologically dependent on childhood.
These are also themes I work with directly in Therapy for Men in Calabasas: Identity, Purpose & Personal Growth. The objective is not merely to help men feel better in the moment but to help them think more deliberately about the kind of men they are becoming.
What Are You Aiming At?
If you feel restless or directionless, it is worth resisting the temptation to immediately assume that the answer is simply more pleasure, another achievement, a different job, or a new distraction. Those things may change circumstances without answering the deeper question.
Instead, consider what your life is aimed toward. What kind of person are you becoming? What are the things you consider important enough to suffer for? What are you pursuing that would still matter if nobody applauded you for accomplishing it? Are the things occupying most of your time connected to the things you claim matter most?
For a Christian, there is an even more fundamental question: Is the direction of my life bringing me closer to God or gradually taking me farther away?
Finding purpose requires effort, and the answer will not always appear in a moment of inspiration. Much of purpose is discovered through living: accepting responsibility, developing our abilities, loving other people, making mistakes, correcting course, enduring difficulty, and gradually learning what is actually worth pursuing.
The destination matters because it changes how we understand the journey. When we know what we are ultimately moving toward, even the difficult parts of the road can begin to make sense.
If questions of purpose, direction, identity, or personal growth are becoming important in your own life and you would like to discuss them, you can schedule a conversation.
