In the 1960s, a striking share of undergraduates said the point of college was to develop a philosophy of life—to decide what kind of person to become and what ends were worth the effort.
Few students phrase it that way now. They talk about fit, options, impact, wellness, ROI.
And yet the hunger for meaning and purpose remains unchanged: most are still trying to assemble a life that feels meaningful and worth the sacrifices adulthood demands.
Here, I will make two arguments.
First: every society tells a story about what a good life looks like—and those stories usually match how that society is organized. If we learn all of those stories, we get more options for how to shape our own lives.
Second: today’s default—“just focus on self-actualization” and personal satisfaction—is too narrow. A better way is to treat purpose as a mix of commitments you practice with other people, not a private feeling you chase alone.
What different eras (and cultures) thought life was for
Ask different societies what life is for and you get different answers, each one shaped by the society that asked the question. Ideas about life’s purpose don’t float above history; they grow out of concrete arrangements—who holds power, how people work, which institutions set the rules.
In the aristocratic and warrior world of classical Greece and Rome, meaning and purpose were found public honor. Homer’s heroes chased kleos—the kind of fame that keeps your name alive after death.
Aristotle softened that warlike edge and said the point is eudaimonia, or flourishing: live virtuously, use sound judgment, and serve your city well.
The Stoics turned the spotlight inward. They urged self-mastery, acceptance of what you can’t control, and steady service to the common good, rather than chasing reputation.
Early China offered a different set of answers. Confucian thought defines purpose as becoming genuinely humane (ren) through right relationships (li): reverence for parents, reliable conduct, and just leadership. That ethic fits a stable, hierarchical, agrarian society.
Daoism pushed back, counseling “effortless action” (wu-wei): stop forcing outcomes, find harmony with the way of nature, and step off the status treadmill.
In South Asia, Hindu thought names four legitimate aims—dharma (duty), artha (prosperity), kāma (pleasure), and moksha (liberation from rebirth). Buddhism sets a single target: end suffering through ethical living, disciplined attention, and insight into impermanence and non-attachment.
The Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—anchor purpose in a covenant with God: love God and your neighbors, do justice, and steward creation.
In medieval Christian Europe life’s work was to sanctify your station—whether in household, guild, or monastery—inside a clearly ranked society.
During the Renaissance, as merchant cities grew, people started to see life’s purpose in terms of achievement and recognition. Success meant creating something lasting—building, painting, writing, or governing well. Humanism encouraged this shift, celebrating ambition, human talent, and worldly accomplishment.
The Reformation expanded the idea of a “calling” to include everyday work. Ordinary, honest labor wasn’t just a way to survive—it could be seen as a way to serve God and others.
During the Enlightenment and into the nineteenth century, ideas about life’s purpose shifted in step with the rise of the middle class. Instead of seeking glory or salvation, respectability became the watchword. A good life meant reliable work, a stable family, and responsible citizenship. Even literature reinforced this view: the modern novel elevated the ordinary, showing dignity and purpose in everyday struggles over marriage, money, and moral responsibility.
The Romantics challenged this middle-class script. To them, respectability seemed narrow and stifling, reducing life to routine and calculation. They insisted that true purpose lay in authenticity, deep feeling, and moments of transcendence—whether in passionate love, creative genius, or awe before the sublime power of nature. In doing so, they offered not just a rejection of bourgeois values, but a radically different vision of what a meaningful life could be.
The Modernists, writing in the shadow of world wars and the rise of mass society, confronted a collapse of old certainties. Traditional scripts of faith, honor, and respectability no longer seemed adequate in a world scarred by mechanized slaughter and anonymous bureaucracy. In response, they turned to artistic and intellectual experimentation—restlessly searching for new forms, new languages, and new ways of making sense when inherited frameworks had broken down.
Existentialist thinkers and their forerunners—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus—argued that life has no built-in purpose at all. Meaning is not given; it must be made. To live authentically is to choose one’s commitments freely and to remain faithful to them under pressure.
Dignity lies not in submission to preordained scripts but in resisting purposes that reduce others to tools and asserting responsibility for one’s own.
In recent decades, psychology and ethics have reframed the question of life’s purpose in more everyday terms. Viktor Frankl, drawing on his experiences in concentration camps, argued that meaning arises from work, from love, and from the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. His claim was stark but empowering: even in the harshest conditions, we retain the freedom to choose our stance.
Other psychologists turned to what helps people thrive under ordinary circumstances. Self-Determination Theory holds that human beings flourish when three basic needs are met: autonomy, or real choice in shaping one’s life; competence, the chance to develop skills and see progress; and relatedness, the experience of genuine belonging.
Positive psychologists such as Martin Seligman go further, proposing a broad framework for well-being summarized as PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. These are not lofty ideals but measurable ingredients that can be cultivated in daily life.
Ethics has also shifted toward practical evaluation. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum argue that a life should be judged not simply by income or stated intentions but by its capabilities—what a person is actually able to do and be. The focus here is on real freedom, grounded in material conditions and public institutions.
Seen from a distance, a larger pattern emerges. Aristocratic answers to life’s purpose fit honor economies. Religious answers fit sacramental societies. Bourgeois answers fit wage labor and nuclear families. Existentialist answers fit fractured modernity. Today’s turn to positive psychology and capabilities fits therapeutic, data-driven democracies, where well-being is often tracked, measured, and optimized. None of these answers is neutral. Each reflects—and in turn reinforces—the social order that produced it.
The value of learning this history is not that it dictates one correct conclusion, but that it widens our field of vision. It helps us see how purposes align with the kinds of lives and institutions we actually inhabit—and raises the deeper question of which of those institutions we should accept, and which we might need to change.
“Purpose Talk is Too Abstract”
If your strategy for life is simply to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, you’re not just selling yourself short—you’re weakening the very fabric of life with others.
The problems start with what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill.” The raise, the trip, the new purchase: each thrills for a moment, then quickly fades into the new normal. A life organized around novelty requires endless escalation just to feel alive, leaving people chasing more but enjoying less.
But boredom is not the only problem. There’s also fragmentation. A string of disconnected pleasures doesn’t add up to a life. Human beings need more than highlights; we need a story—an account of what we are for, not just what we did last weekend. Hedonic pragmatism denies that deeper need, leaving people restless and drifting from one dopamine hit to the next.
This approach also corrodes relationships. If the goal is only enjoyment or utility, then people inevitably become tools: friends reduced to followers, partners turned into lifestyle accessories, even children treated as “investments.” Trust and intimacy cannot survive where affection is always one unmet need away from being withdrawn.
Worse still, a pain-avoidance ethic discourages the very risks that make life meaningful. Struggle, sacrifice, and deferred gratification are how people build crafts, communities, and commitments that last. A “no-friction” philosophy treats these as threats rather than opportunities—leaving people brittle, incapable of enduring hardship, and unprepared to pursue anything greater than comfort.
Then comes the trap of status. “Do what feels good” and “do what works” quickly morph into “win where others can see.” Cars, credentials, and follower counts become the measures of worth. What begins as private enjoyment slides into competitive display, breeding envy and insecurity while hollowing out satisfaction.
And the whole system is fragile. If your sense of purpose rests on money, looks, or romance, then a single accident, layoff, or breakup can bring the whole structure crashing down. Hedonic pragmatism offers no shock absorbers.
Finally, this approach free-rides on public goods it does not sustain. Private joys depend on shared infrastructure: safe neighborhoods, clean water, reliable schools, basic trust. “I found my happiness” is never the whole sentence; the unspoken part is “…because someone else maintained the conditions that made it possible.”
Taken together, the result is not just personal emptiness but civic erosion. A society full of hedonic pragmatists is one where relationships are transactional, risks are avoided, status anxiety festers, and the commons decays.
The alternative is not a mystical revelation but a thicker ordinary life—one where pleasures are turned into practices, outcomes into skills, companionship into care, and consumption into contributions. Cooking becomes a craft, friendships become covenants, and service becomes a basic expectation of adulthood.
The shift is simple but profound: from “What can I get?” to “What can I practice, become, and uphold with others?” That move stabilizes life. It weaves pleasures into a story, blunts status anxiety, strengthens resilience in hard times, and helps sustain the public goods that make private joy possible.
In short, hedonic pragmatism doesn’t just fail to provide meaning—it corrodes the very relationships and institutions that could give life meaning in the first place. A life worth living comes not from treating others as tools or avoiding all risks, but from taking responsibility, building crafts, keeping promises, and serving something beyond the self.
One Purpose—or Many?
There is no single, universal purpose in life. Instead, people live out many purposes, often shifting across different stages of life and always in relation to others. What matters is not finding one eternal answer but cultivating commitments that root meaning in practice.
In today’s age of distraction and algorithmic nudges, the purposes that really endure are those we share with others—embedded in institutions and communities that outlast us. Meaning is less about chasing a private ambition and more about helping to build a world that others can count on.
Still, not every purpose is equal. The strongest ones can withstand pressure. They make sense of your story without self-deception, they last through both failure and success, they benefit people beyond yourself, and they widen others’ freedoms instead of narrowing them to your own.
You can think of this as a kind of “stress test” for purpose. It helps us avoid both extremes: the rigid claim that there is only one true purpose and the shallow idea that anything that “feels right” automatically qualifies.
Why Students Should Still Wrestle with Purpose
Many people today are drawn to hyper-individualist self-actualization. It promises freedom but often delivers exhaustion. It asks you to curate the perfect self, optimize every decision, and brand your “impact.” What it hides is how dependent your purposes are on conditions you don’t control: steady time, enough money, safe streets, reliable institutions, trustworthy people.
Most of us will not steer our lives without interruption. Illness, job loss, caregiving, injustice, and even geography shape what is possible. Still, reflecting on life’s ends is worthwhile. It helps us make major choices—what to study, what work to pursue, whom to commit to, and where to live. It reminds us that every commitment requires trade-offs. It inoculates us against shallow scripts—status chasing, algorithmic distraction, thin “happiness hacks.” And it allows us to turn luck, whether good or bad, into a story that points us forward.
Practical Frames for Thinking About Purpose
Two frameworks make this reflection less abstract. The first is the “three C’s”: Competence (get good at something real), Connect (belong to people you’d sacrifice for), and Contribute (do at least one thing that would be missed if you stopped). Even in difficult circumstances, most lives can support these.
The second is to recognize that you don’t need a single, once-and-for-all answer to what life is for. Instead, balance four areas: self-cultivation (learning, art, or faith), care (family, friends, neighbors), common work (civic or professional projects), and the transcendent or aesthetic (the holy, the wild, the beautiful).
As your life changes, you’ll need to rebalance these. But at least one of them should always be anchored in an institution or community where someone is genuinely counting on you.
The Bottom Line
For students especially, the lesson is clear: don’t wait to stumble on a single dramatic “purpose.” Begin by joining something bigger than yourself—a lab, a choir, a service corps, a neighborhood board, an open-source project. Let others depend on you.
What people really need is not a single dramatic revelation about “the meaning of life” but a set of commitments they can actually live out, week after week. These are responsibilities that help you grow, connect you to other people, and hold steady even when your mood shifts. In the end, that’s what a philosophy of life is for: not abstract answers, but practical commitments that give shape and direction to everyday living.
On the Decline of Shared Purpose
The idea that life’s purpose is rooted in shared commitments has weakened in recent decades. Part of the reason is cultural: in an age of consumer choice and personal branding, the dominant message is “you do you.”
Purpose is often imagined as an individual quest for self-expression, not a collective project tied to family, community, or nation.
There are also social and institutional shifts at play. Traditional sources of shared meaning—religious congregations, unions, civic organizations, neighborhood associations—have declined in membership and influence.
Mass media once offered a common culture; today’s fragmented digital platforms tailor experience to the individual, reinforcing the sense that purpose is private.
Economic pressures deepen the problem: precarious work, student debt, and unstable housing make it hard to commit to long-term roles and relationships.
Even higher education, which once encouraged students to wrestle with “big questions,” now tends to emphasize career preparation and technical skills. Purpose is often outsourced to metrics of success—grades, résumés, salaries—that feel safer than open-ended reflection.
The result is a thinner public culture of meaning. Individuals are left to piece together private philosophies from wellness trends, social media cues, or lifestyle choices, while collective narratives of purpose—religious, civic, or even political—lose ground.
The danger is not only personal drift but civic erosion: when purpose is understood only as personal satisfaction, it becomes harder to sustain the shared responsibilities and institutions that make private flourishing possible.
The self is too small for a meaningful, purposeful life.
Nice writing on important topic. New connections helpful to my thinking and understanding. Thank you.