Dr. K

I don't know.

But if someone says, I have no meaning, can you help me with that?

The answer is absolutely yes.

So what I think about is purpose is using something called factor analysis.

So if you ask someone, do you have direction in life?

Do you have purpose in life?

Is there meaning in life?

All three of those things cluster together to some thing.

Even being in control correlates with that.

So if you are in control of your life, your sense of purpose will increase.

So there are a lot of these like words that we use, but all of these words tie back to some internal sense of what is happening in your life.

So that's how I would describe purpose.

In terms of spiritual practices, what my experience is is that if you look at human beings who say they have purpose and human beings who don't have purpose, their lived experiences in life are different.

So when I work with survivors of trauma, they have certain experiences.

Like literally we can scientifically sort of measure this.

You have a particular experience which destroys your sense of meaning in the world.

I had a patient once who was attacked in a bathroom for about five minutes.

And in five minutes, this person had a sense of what they were doing in life, was dating, was doing well in college, had loving parents.

And in five minutes, their compass for navigating the world was shattered.

So if we sort of think about experience can lead to a loss of purpose, experience can also lead to a gain in purpose.