rss-bridge 2021-08-02T20:00:00+00:00

You 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpose

Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the challenges we all face at various stages of life. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. In the kick-off to our annual You 2.0 series, Cornell University psychologist Anthony Burrow explains why purpose isn't something to be found — it's something we can develop from within.

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Happiness 2.0: Cultivating Your Purpose

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ February 20, 2023

Having a sense of purpose can be a buffer against the challenges we all face at various stages of life. Purpose can also boost our health and longevity. In the kick-off to our annual You 2.0 series, Cornell University psychologist Anthony Burrow explains why purpose isn’t something to be found — it’s something we can develop from within.

Check out our previous episodes on happiness, including one on chasing contentment, and one on dealing with difficult emotions.

Additional Resources

Book:

The Ecology of Purposeful Living Across the Lifespan: Developmental, Educational, and Social Perspectives, edited by Anthony Burrow and Patrick Hill, Springer, 2020.

Research studies:

Great, purposeful expectations: predicting daily purposefulness during COVID-19 response, Patrick Hill et al., The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2020.

The Value of a Purposeful Life: Sense of Purpose Predicts Greater Income and Net Worth, Patrick Hill et al., Journal of Research in Personality, 2016.

How many likes did I get?: Purpose moderates links between positive social media feedback and self-esteem, Anthony L. Burrow, Nicolette Rainone, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2016.

Purpose in Life as a Resource for Increasing Comfort with Economic Diversity, Anthony L. Burrow et al., Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2014.

Meaning as a Magnetic Force: Evidence that Meaning in Life Promotes Interpersonal Appeal, Tyler F. Stillman et al., Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2010.

Origins of Purpose in Life: Refining our Understanding of a Life Well Lived, Todd B. Kashdan, Patrick McKnight, Psihologijske Teme, 2009.

Grab Bag:

Dustin Hoffman floating in a pool in The Graduate.

Andre Agassi’s speech at his induction to the Tennis Hall of Fame.

TV interview with Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor and author of “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

TV interview with Dr. Viktor Frankl about finding meaning in difficult times.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. In all our lives, there are moments when the ground starts to shake beneath us, when our world becomes destabilized and everything changes. These moments can feel disorienting, upsetting, but they can also allow us to see things in new ways. Over the past year, all of us have had our own ground shaking moments. What can we do, all these months into the COVID-19 pandemic, to reframe our challenges, to use disruption as a source of re-invention? Every August, we bring you a series called You 2.0. It's about approaching the chaos of our lives with wisdom. Over the next month, we look at how to cultivate more empathy in our intimate relationships.Eli Finkel: So, your spouse is late, your spouse does something inconsiderate. You have a lot of control over how that behavior affects you.Shankar Vedantam: How to reinterpret the past by understanding the nature of memory.Ayanna Thomas : The question is, which reconstructed memories are more accurate, and can you learn to monitor that process? And I think people can.Shankar Vedantam: And how to grow from our mistakes.Amy Summerville: Regret is actually a very hopeful emotion. It's something that is helping us learn from our mistakes and do better in the future.Shankar Vedantam: Today, we begin our series with a simple but essential ingredient in life that we all crave.Anthony Burrow: Purpose is an ancient concept. We, as a species, have been grappling with this concept forever.Shankar Vedantam: How cultivating a sense of purpose can help us weather life's biggest storms, this week on Hidden Brain.Shankar Vedantam: Cornell University psychologist, Anthony Burrow, has spent much of his career studying what it means to have a sense of purpose. He has examined how we can cultivate purpose and how having a sense of purpose can transform our lives. Tony Burrow, welcome to Hidden Brain.Anthony Burrow: Thank you for having me,Shankar Vedantam: Tony. I want to play you a short clip from the 1967 movie, The Graduate, in this scene, a young Dustin Hoffman plays Benjamin Braddock. He's fresh out of college lounging in his parents' pool when his dad confronts him.William Daniels as Mr. Braddock: Ben, what are you doing?Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock: Well, I would say that I'm just drifting here in the pool.William Daniels as Mr. Braddock: Why?Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock: Well, it's very comfortable just to drift here.William Daniels as Mr. Braddock: Have you thought about graduate school?Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock: No.William Daniels as Mr. Braddock: Would you mind telling me then what those four years of college were for? What was the point of all that hard work?Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock: You got me.William Daniels as Mr. Braddock: Now, listen, Ben ...Shankar Vedantam: Tony, do you ever come by people who sound like Ben, people who are just drifting through life?Anthony Burrow: Frequently, I do. Certainly at some point in our lives, we all feel that way, that what we're ultimately doing is sort of drifting through life, although not everybody's in a pool when doing so.Shankar Vedantam: I'm thinking that some of these moments must come, especially during transitions in life, when young people are leaving college and going into the workplace or people are in the middle part of their careers, they're deciding whether they want a second career or whether they want to retire, or they're moving into retirement. I'm assuming that these moments might be more likely than others to bring out the sense of self doubt.Anthony Burrow: Yeah, that's an interesting observation, in that, maybe feelings of languishing are actually not as random as they might seem. Particularly the examples you've given at transition points of having just graduated or having just retired, a lot of the identity contingencies, the ways in which we think ourselves, are interwoven into the everyday life experiences. So, the school relationships I have or the work relationships I have, when those things end, or come to an end, it might be that I started to wonder, well, who am I? What am I going to do today? And languishing isn't just a description of, sort of wallowing in a pool, a float in a pool,

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