Does having purpose in life help us to age well and live longer?

Purpose is one of those words that is everywhere at the moment. It's on book covers, it's in podcasts, and it's in the advice we give people who have just retired and aren't quite sure what to do with themselves. And yet most of us spend our evenings scrolling through our phones letting an algorithm decide what we look at next, with AI now doing a fair bit of our thinking for us as well. So, I found myself wondering, do we still have purpose in life, and if we do, does it actually change anything?

I went looking for the evidence and I have to admit it was more interesting, and more complicated, than I expected.

First though, what do researchers actually mean by purpose in life? In research terms it is usually described as having a sense of direction and being goal-oriented [1]. Knowing roughly where you are heading and having a few things you are working towards. It doesn't need to be grand.

So, what does the research say?

A paper published in July this year pooled together data from almost half a million people, some of whom had been followed for as long as 32 years [2]. In research terms that is a lot of people over a very long time, which is about as strong as this kind of evidence gets. The headline finding was that people who reported having purpose had around a 30% lower risk of dying early than those who didn't.

Thirty percent is a big number, so the obvious question is why. Smaller studies fill in some of the picture. People living with a purpose tend to be more physically active, they are less likely to smoke cigarettes or use other substances, and they are more likely to turn up for the health screenings we are all told to have [2]. None of those things is surprising on its own but put them together and you start to see a plausible explanation. If you have a reason to still be here in 10 years, you are probably more inclined to look after the body that has to get you there.

My next thought was whether this is really just a story about older people. It isn't. Another group followed adults through midlife for 14 years and found the link between purpose and living longer didn't depend on how old someone was, or on whether they were still working or had already retired [3]. Purpose appeared to buffer mortality risk right across adult life, not only in our latter years. I like that finding because it means it is never too early and never too late. It is also worth saying that you can go to work every day and not live with much purpose at all, inside or outside of work. Turning up isn't the same thing.

Around this point I started thinking about Ikigai, the Japanese idea of having a reason to get up in the morning. There are many books written about it (this one I enjoyed reading [4]), but there is research too. One study followed thousands of Japanese adults for seven years and simply asked whether they had Ikigai or not. Those who said they did not had a much higher rate of dying, from any cause, than those who said they did [5]. What I find rather lovely about this is that a culture on the other side of the world landed on the same idea long before anyone was measuring it on a seven-point scale, and gave it a far better name than we ever did.

The study that really stopped me though was a much smaller one. Researchers followed 246 older adults over a number of years, all of whom had given permission for a brain autopsy after they died [6]. That meant the team could compare what was physically going on inside someone's brain with how well that person had actually been thinking and remembering while they were alive. They found that those with a strong sense of purpose in life held onto their memory, thinking and reasoning better than you would expect given the amount of Alzheimer's damage in their brain. The damage was there. It just didn't seem to cost them as much day to day.

I don't want to oversell that, because it doesn't mean purpose prevents Alzheimer's disease. But it does suggest purpose might buy people a bit of functional room to move, and for anyone who has watched a family member lose that room, it is not a small thing.

So that's it then, we should all go off and find our purpose?

Not quite, and I think the sceptics have a fair point here. A recent paper by Sias and Turtle [7] raises a chicken-and-egg scenario that applies to nearly every study I have just described. All of them asked people how purposeful their life felt at one point in time, then looked at who was still alive years later. But think about someone whose health is already quietly failing. They are more likely to die sooner, and they are also more likely to answer questions about direction and purpose rather bleakly. Poor health could be driving both sides of the equation without purpose doing much of the work at all.

Sias and Turtle went back to nearly 6,000 older Americans tracked over 12 years and tested how much of the purpose-longevity link survived once you properly account for how healthy people were to begin with. Their argument is that a good deal of it may not, and that telling people to go and find a sense of purpose so they will live longer is getting ahead of the evidence. That seems reasonable to me. It doesn't mean we shouldn't live with purpose, only that we can't yet say confidently that purpose causes the extra years, rather than good health producing both a longer life and a happier outlook along the way.

That sent me back to a question I probably should have asked at the beginning. When these researchers say purpose, what did they actually ask people?

It turns out they nearly all used the same short set of questions, a seven-item subscale developed by Carol Ryff [8, 1]. People are asked how strongly they agree with statements such as “some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them”, whether they feel a sense of direction and purpose, and whether they plan for the future or prefer to live one day at a time. The items come from three domains: having a purpose, actively engaging in it, and setting purposeful goals.

Knowing that made me a little more sympathetic to the sceptics, because however you word them, these questions are only ever a snapshot in time. Someone who has just had terrible health news is going to answer very differently to someone who was promoted last week or is off on a bucket-list holiday. I know my own answers would look quite different in January compared to the middle of a busy year, in winter.

So what do we take from all of this? Purpose isn't everything, but it is something. Everything in life does seem to be interlinked. If we have good health then perhaps we find purpose more easily, simply because it is easier to do things. And yet plenty of people in poor health have enormous purpose and live long, fulfilled lives anyway.

Which brings me back to our own successful ageing research, where older adults told us quite clearly that ageing well wasn't about longevity, it was about quality of life [9]. If it turns out we can have both, and purpose plays some part in that, I don't think any of us would complain.

•       Do you have purpose in life? Are there things you want to achieve or look forward to? If so, you do have purpose in life and good luck with achieving those things, I hope you have fun doing it.

•       If you struggle with this, maybe improving your health could be a good starting point. Small steps to improving your physical or mental function, could lead to doing things you love, like hanging out with family or friends or going on holidays where you see some amazing things along the way. When you feel better in yourself it's likely you will have purpose in something.

•       Volunteering and mentoring play a strong role in having purpose in life, you don't necessarily need to do it in a structured way. I need help with my reticulation before summer hits and Dad will be mentoring me through a few new things that I am unsure about. Mentors can be anywhere and it can be really fun hanging out and learning new things.

•       Why not sit down with someone you like to do things with and write a list of things you'd like to do together (it doesn't need to be long, just a start). It could be helping each other or working towards something together, it is often more fun when you are doing it with someone else.

•       If you are still a little unsure, perhaps get Ikigai from your local library and see how the Japanese like to do it. If nothing else, it's an interesting read.

Live the good life!

References

[1] Ryff, C. D., & Keyes, C. L. M. (1995). The structure of psychological well-being revisited. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(4), 719–727. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.69.4.719

[2] Sutin, A. R., Zavala, D., Milad, E., Stephan, Y., Karakose, S., Brown, J., Terracciano, A., & Luchetti, M. (2026). Purpose in life and mortality: A meta-analysis of the published literature and individual-participant data of 488,765 participants followed for up to 32 years. Psychological Medicine, 56, e214. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291726104863

[3] Hill, P. L., & Turiano, N. A. (2014). Purpose in life as a predictor of mortality across adulthood. Psychological Science, 25(7), 1482–1486. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614531799

[4] García, H., & Miralles, F. Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy life. Penguin. https://www.penguin.com.au/books/ikigai-9781786330895

[5] Sone, T., Nakaya, N., Ohmori, K., Shimazu, T., Higashiguchi, M., Kakizaki, M., Kikuchi, N., Kuriyama, S., & Tsuji, I. (2008). Sense of life worth living (ikigai) and mortality in Japan: Ohsaki Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, 70(6), 709–715. https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0b013e31817e7e64

[6] Boyle, P. A., Buchman, A. S., Wilson, R. S., Yu, L., Schneider, J. A., & Bennett, D. A. (2012). Effect of purpose in life on the relation between Alzheimer disease pathologic changes on cognitive function in advanced age. Archives of General Psychiatry, 69(5), 499–505. https://doi.org/10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.1487

[7] Sias, R., & Turtle, H. (2026). The importance of baseline health in linking life purpose to longevity. PLOS ONE, 21(5), e0349401. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0349401

[8] Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57(6), 1069–1081. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.57.6.1069

[9] Burton, E., Teater, B., Chonody, J., & Alford, S. (2024). What does it mean to successfully age? Multinational study of older adults' perceptions. The Gerontologist, 64(10), gnae102. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnae102