How to find your purpose – And why now is the right time to do it

Dr. Frank Martella

Psychology & Science

This essay is an adaptation from Dr. Martella’s new book, Stop Chasing Happiness: A Pessimist’s Guide to the Good Life, which you can order here.

Blinded by a bullet, a young soldier needed someone to escort him to the hospital. The trouble was that his troops were surrounded by the Soviet army – so the task would require sneaking through enemy lines hoping that nobody would notice them in the thick forest. Helge, a young lance corporal, was charged with the task, as the wounded was his friend. With a map in one hand and the hand of his blinded friend in the other, he started the journey to guide them through the forest where enemy soldiers could be behind any tree.

My grandfather, Helge, was nineteen when the Soviet Union started its offensive against Finland in 1939. Guiding the blinded through enemy lines was only one of the perilous encounters he had during the war. “It goddamn hurt, when you saw your pal die next to you,” he once told me. While I spent my twenties partying and studying (in that order), he spent them in the trenches, battered by enemy artillery, defending his home country. Finland, with a population of 3.7 million at that point, should not have had a chance against the military superpower of the Soviet Union, with its 170 million people. Nevertheless, the bravery and sacrifice of the Finnish soldiers, along with their superior ability to fight under arctic conditions, meant that at the end of World War II, Finland remained an independent country.

What does spending your formative years in a war, with many first-hand encounters with death, do to the psyche of a young person? After the war, most men went silent, not wanting to discuss what they’d experienced with their wives or children. Some broke down, drinking themselves to death in the subsequent years. But for many – like Helge – the war instilled a strong sense of determination into their future lives. They were on a mission to rebuild the country, to make sure that the deaths and sacrifices were not in vain – that Finland would remain worth defending in the future, too.

When, at forty, Helge was asked to become the CEO of a recently-founded state-owned steel factory, the salary offered was approximately half of what he was currently making as a director of a private company. But he didn’t hesitate a second to take on the new role. For him, it was an honor to have the chance to serve his country. Money did not enter into that calculation. He was a man for whom work was a patriotic duty and diligence a central virtue – all because he felt strongly that he was contributing to the common good. He had found something bigger than himself to serve.

While no one in their right mind would want to swap places with a youngster going to war, my grandfather had one thing going for him. At the dawn of his adulthood, he was given a clear mission: defend his home country. We who have been born into more peaceful and affluent times don’t have that privilege. Young adults (in particular) tend to drift, ruminate about too many options, second-guess their choices, try out different paths without being able to fully commit to anything. Sociologists even have a name for this: emerging adulthood – the period of life in your twenties when a person is no longer an adolescent but not yet fully an adult. It’s a period characterized by a sense of being in-between, switching from one job and one partner to another, moving around, being financially dependent on one’s parents, not really knowing what to do when one ‘grows up’. But this general feeling is not only reserved for twenty-somethings: people in their forties and fifties still regularly wonder what they should be when they grow up.

Compared to my grandfather’s generation, when rebuilding society after a World War provided a clear purpose for people across the Western world, we seem to be currently suffering from a generational purposelessness, contributing to aimlessness and unhappiness.

What should you commit to?

What ought you to do with this unique life you have been thrown into? You have roughly 28,500 total days to live – if you live to 79, the average US life expectancy – and the chances are that you’ve already spent quite a significant amount of them. What should you do with the rest? How should you dedicate your energy during the limited number of days you will spend on earth?

Generally speaking, there’s no one thing you really must do. You are not the protagonist of some great work of fiction. The universe did not assign you with a mission at your birth that is slowly revealed to you – along with, perhaps, some magical powers. In principle, you are free to do whatever you want, even if it is completely superfluous. (Want to dedicate your life to playing video games? Go for it!) 

Yet, despite this freedom, it would be wise to identify your central goals. By this, I don’t mean one rigid Purpose in Life – that is mainly the stuff of fiction. What I mean is several everyday purposes in life, plural. It could be as simple as stepping up to become the secretary of the local soccer club or doing some volunteer work in your neighborhood. It could be taking care of your grandchildren or babysitting your neighbor’s kids to let the exhausted couple go out on a dinner date.

There’s one simple rule for these purposes: instead of focusing on you, focus on something bigger than you. A robust body of research has shown that one of the best ways to make your own life more meaningful is to make a meaningful contribution towards others. It doesn’t have to be something grand. In one of my own studies, just the opportunity to raise a small sum of money for the United Nations World Food Program while playing a simple synonym game significantly enhanced participants’ sense of meaning.

So, pick a few purposes that enable you to help people you care about.

It could be your family, your neighborhood, a local club, association, or congregation, the city you live in, your nation – or even some faraway region or some forgotten group of people. It could be creating art, entertainment, or comedy. Sometimes your personal history will give you a cause – if you were bullied in school, supporting an anti-bullying program could be your purpose. If your loved one suffered from a rare disease, bettering the lives of those suffering from the same disease could be your purpose. Whoever and whatever you see as deserving to be served and helped – therein lies your purpose.

Why should you care? Why should you commit? Because to care is to be human. With the rare exception of some neurological disorders, we humans come with a built-in capacity to care about others. When we see somebody suffering, it brings us down. When we see someone experiencing joy, it lifts us up. No man is an island – it is virtually impossible to be happy if those around you are suffering. On the flipside, being able to do something good for people you care about is one of the most surefire ways to experience a strong sense of meaningfulness. Dozens of experimental studies – including my own – have shown this time and time again: being able to help or delight someone else makes us happier and increases our sense of meaning. While some have said this is only because helping usually involves uplifting interactions with others, several studies have shown that it is the act of helping itself that causes increased well-being and meaning in life. In one bare-bones experiment, I asked participants to just push one key on the keyboard every fourth second, earning one cent for themselves with every click. When they also earned one cent for Red Cross every fourth stroke, they experienced more meaningfulness afterwards, compared to a group only earning money for themselves.

Besides enhancing well-being and sense of meaning, prosocial behavior has been shown to have positive health benefits too. Professor Ashley Whillans gave $40 to older adults with high blood pressure three weeks in a row (for a total of $120), asking half of them to spend the money on others and the other half to spend it on themselves. Those spending the money on others had lower systolic and diastolic blood pressure afterwards (effects usually achieved through new exercise or diet, in fact!). Other research has shown that doing volunteer work, actively helping your ailing spouse, and other forms of helping have been shown to predict longevity. One study comparing helping others and being helped by others as predictors of mortality found that it was the opportunity to help others that had stronger predictive powers for longer lifespans. Indeed, when we compared life satisfaction and sense of purpose in life as predictors of mortality, the latter was the more robust predictor of longevity.

These same results appear across the globe. For example, Professor Lara Aknin and colleagues have conducted experiments in Uganda, India, South Africa, and even a small-scale rural village on the Pacific island of Vanuatu, always finding that benefitting others leads to greater happiness than benefiting oneself. Based on these findings and other cross-cultural research, they feel it is time to declare that the well-being benefit of prosocial behavior is “a psychological universal”, a core mental attribute characterizing humans.

Sometimes in my university courses I ask the students to do three small acts of kindness during a single day. These good deeds have ranged from calling their grandparents and washing their roommate’s dishes, to offering a glass of juice to the mailman and guiding a lost tourist to a nearby church. When reflecting on the deeds afterwards, the students often note that it made them feel surprisingly good. Researchers have shown this general finding repeatedly. For example, when Professor Blake Allan asked office workers to do five small acts of kindness every Tuesday for a few weeks, this enhanced their sense of meaningfulness at work.

The path to personal happiness and a strong sense of meaning comes through finding something bigger than yourself—something that’s worth fighting for.

Start your purpose from where you are

So, where do you find your purposes? Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century Sage of Chelsea, had a simple recipe for a more meaningful existence: “doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by action.”

Carlyle believed that purpose, rather than being preordained, is found in the here and now, in whatever specific situation you find yourself. Here, “in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal.” The situation “that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man.” In other words, the best way to identify a purpose is just to look around: to figure out what needs fixing or what could be better in the world around you. Then figure out what you could do to address it. Therein is your purpose. As Carlyle puts it, just “do the Duty which lies nearest thee.”

You do not live in an ideal world. Suffering, injustice, poverty, and other ailments are inevitable, and there is plenty of work to be done. The first step is to identify what could be better. What causes around you do you personally care about? What kind of joy would you want to see more of? The second step is to assess your own capabilities and resources: what are you good at, what special skills and knowledge do you have? What connections, social influence or monetary resources do you have at your disposal? Then, connect the dots: what is the most significant impact a person with your capabilities could have on whatever needs to be improved? If much has been given to you, then do much. Change the world. If little has been given to you in terms of resources, then do whatever little you are able to do. Carlyle puts this in grander terms:

“To each is given a certain inward Talent, a certain outward Environment of Fortune; to each, by wisest combination of these two, a certain maximum Capability. But the hardest problem were ever this first: To find by study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward and outward Capability specially is.”

Ask yourself: What does the world need that you could deliver?

Identifying an answer to that simple question is where your purpose resides. Carlisle Moore summarizes this message well: “Do the thing you are best fitted for with determination, and your practical and spiritual troubles will end.”

Commit to the process

Have a purpose in mind? Good. Have several purposes in mind? Even better. Next, don’t worry if you never accomplish them. That is not the point.

The Buddhist climate activist and scholar David Loy says in his book Ecodharma that we must learn to act without attachment to the results of action. We should do the best we can but we can never know whether our efforts make any difference whatsoever. It could be that we have already passed ecological tipping points or that our actions fail to materialize in anything concrete. But it could as well be that they cause a bigger impact we ever imagined. We never can be sure about the results. Accordingly, instead of being attached to the results, we should see our activities as a gift – something we give with no strings attached. As Loy notes: While “we hope our efforts will bear fruit … ultimately they are our openhearted gift to the earth.”

Consider this example. When my grandfather served in the Finnish army during WWII, Risto Ryti served as the reluctant president of the country. As the war kicked off in 1939, the then-president Kyösti Kallio felt that the country needed a cold-tempered prime minister. Ryti tried to refuse, but Kallio made him accept his duty. When Kallio himself then suddenly fell ill and died in December 1940, Ryti was inaugurated as the president, with the mission to lead the country through the war. In that position, he faced many tough life-or-death choices, where one needed to act quickly, with the fate of the whole nation depending on his decision. He had to accept that a wrong decision could cost the lives of thousands of men and even the independence of the whole country – and still make that decision without being sure of the outcome. Fortunately, a peace agreement was made in the summer of 1944. The conditions were harshly against Finland, with some territory lost, but importantly, the country remained independent. To enable peace, Ryti had to sacrifice his own political career by making promises to the Soviets that he knew he could not keep. After the war, the Soviet Union pressured Finland to take Ryti and other wartime leaders to court, where he was sentenced to prison. In his defense speech he stated:

"I have a good conscience. I have always aimed, to the best of my ability and understanding, to serve my country selflessly. I hope in some form to be able to continue to do so in the future. In the service of the homeland, it is not the place that counts, but the will. It may as well be in prison as in the President's castle.”

Ryti did not set out to build a political career. He was there to serve a cause he believed in, a cause he aimed to serve to the best of his ability both when fate threw him into the presidential palace and when it threw him into prison. Your position is not up to you, and neither are the resources that are given to you. What is within your control, however, is what you make of what is given to you. Through committing to the process, through showing up, you fulfill your purpose. Purpose is measured in action, not in outcomes.

Purpose – Just do it

Despite my grandfather’s humble origins, where his father’s boss had to pitch in so he could afford to go to middle school, Helge had a highly successful career. For twenty-five years, he presided over Finland’s first and only steel factory, which had a key role in the building of Finnish industry in subsequent decades. But for him, it was not a career but a calling. He worked to serve his home country. And given his talent in mathematics, engineering, and business, the best way to serve the country for a man like him was to lead the effort to build and run a steel factory. That was his way of connecting the dots between what he wanted to serve (his home country) with what capabilities and resources he had (mainly his perseverance and engineering prowess). The steel factory became his life work, and even at the age of ninety he explained proudly the engineering choices that had made the it into one of Europe’s most efficient steel factories. The hard work and long hours he put in was his humble way of serving his country and building a better life for future generations.

You might not have been pushed into a purpose as clearly as somebody having to fight for their life and the lives of their loved ones. Regardless, there are so many causes to commit to, so many potential good deeds to which you have the capacity to contribute. Bigger or smaller, grander or more mundane, there’s always something you can do. So go out and do it. Why? Because having causes worth fighting for enriches your life by offering clear direction and energizing your actions.

One anthem I play when I need a boost is Land of Confusion by Genesis. The refrain of that song sums up the purpose-seeking attitude to life by noting that this is the world you are living in, and these are the hands you were given. Your task is simply to use your hands to try to make this world a place worth living in.

We have been given hands. They are there for action. So go out and find something worth doing with them. Let’s allow Carlyle to bring that point home:

“Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.”

Dr. Frank Martella is an Assistant Professor at Aalto University, Finland.

December 2025