What Is a Life For? Two Generations, One Basic Question
For more than twenty years, I have taught existential psychology to university students in Ecuador. For the past five, I have also taught a course called "Navigating Your Uncertainties." And for many of my seventy-nine years, I have navigated my own uncertainties and searched for meaning in life.
During the last 10 years, I noticed something that surprised me. The young people in my classroom and the older people in my life are asking the same questions. They are simply asking it from opposite ends of life.
A third-year student sits in my office and says, "Everyone keeps asking what I want to do with my life," she says. "What if I choose wrong? What if I end up living a life that isn't really mine?"
A few weeks later, a friend in his eighties, also a composite, tells me over coffee: "I spent forty years building something that no longer exists. Sometimes I wonder what it was all for. And now that I'm not doing much of anything, I'm not sure what my life means."
Two Questions, Mirror Images
Students ask, "What should my life be for?" Elders ask, "What was my life for?" and "What does my life mean now?"
Students look ahead at an uncertain future and fear choosing wrongly. The other looks back at a lifetime of experiences and fears it did not add up. The uncertain anxiety of the young and the regret of the old seem like opposites. I believe they grow from the same root concern.
The Same Concern and Trap
Both generations have absorbed the idea that a life is justified by a single purpose: one you must find, commit to, and fulfill. Bestselling books, commencement speeches, and wellness culture all urge us to "find our why through purpose."
For a twenty-year-old, this sets an impossible challenge: name, before you have lived, the one thing your whole life is for. For a seventy-five-year-old, it sets an impossible life assessment: look back and confirm that you found it and achieved it.
Few lives pass either test. Most lives are not aimed at a single target. They are a mixture of jobs and loves, detours and accidents, losses and second chances. Measured against one purpose, most of us come up short. My students freeze, and my older friends despair.
The cost of believing that our lives must be justified by one great purpose—or by what we accomplish—can be extensive. Making one purpose or accomplishment the measure of a person's worth can be harmful. A culture that measures people by purpose and productivity will eventually decide that some people have outlived their usefulness. Ageism draws its strength from this standard. If your worth is what you produce, then retirement, illness, and frailty become verdicts on your worth. The Gray Panthers seem to have spent more than fifty years refusing that verdict.
From Purpose to Mattering
In my teaching, I have found that a different question opens doors that the purpose question does not. Instead of "What is my life for?" I invite people to ask: Whom have I mattered to? How have I mattered? And how do I matter now?
Philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, in her recent book The Mattering Instinct, has explored mattering as a basic human drive. Goldstein describes ways people seek to matter. It is a wider, and I think, a more helpful way of looking at life.
For the student, mattering addresses the difficulty of choosing the One Right Path. You don't need to know what your whole life is for to matter today: to a roommate, a younger brother, a stranger you help. Mattering is built through many small commitments, not one irreversible choice.
And mattering does not retire or stop with age. Someone who can no longer work can still live in a way that matters to them. Goldstein mentions four ways people of all ages can feel their lives matter, and I added a fifth:
Socializer. Matters to others, through belonging, being valued, and being part of a community that would notice their absence.
Transcender. Matters beyond the human social world, to God or to something larger than the self, such as a cosmic purpose.
Competitor. Matters by comparison, meaning more than others or coming out ahead.
Heroic Striver. Matters by living up to a demanding standard they set for themselves, whether or not anyone else recognizes it.
Legacy-Seeker. Matters by building something that outlasts their own life, such as a body of work, an institution, a tradition, or a community.
What Maggie Kuhn Knew
Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, offers a remarkable example. In 1970, at age sixty-five, she was forced to retire from her position with the United Presbyterian Church. Someone decided she was too old to keep doing work she loved.
But Kuhn was far from finished. Drawing on a lifetime of social activism, she joined with others to establish the movement that became the Gray Panthers. What followed was one of the most influential chapters of her life.
Kuhn challenged the idea that our value diminishes with age. She also understood something important: young and old need each other. Her movement brought generations together to challenge age discrimination and work for a more just society.
I believe Kuhn's life illustrates something fundamental about what it means to matter. Our worth does not depend on our productivity or even our accomplishments. We can continue to do what matters through our relationships, our convictions, and the ways we participate in the world around us.
Kuhn's story reminds us that retirement may end a career, but it need not end a meaningful life and a life that matters. The right to matter should not depend on the ability to contribute. An older person who can no longer work, volunteer, or participate actively in community affairs does not become less worthy of respect.
An Invitation Across Generations
Because these questions are mirror images, the generations can help each other with them. Young people can learn from elders that lives rarely go according to plan, and that meaning often appears in unexpected places. Elders can learn from the young that their experiences are valued and that they still matter.
So, I will close with two questions, one for each generation to ask the other:
To a younger person: "Who has mattered most to you so far, and why?"
To an older person: "Who or what gives you a sense that your life matters today?"
Our lives don't stop mattering when our careers, accomplishments, or earlier purposes end. Perhaps the most important question is not what purpose our lives are for, but what makes us feel we matter.
What would you like to add to this discussion?
Gerald L. Finch, PhD, is a Professor of Existential Psychology and Navigating Your Uncertainties at Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, where he has taught since 2002. A former senior U.S. Navy officer, Mobil Oil manager, international peacekeeper, and diplomat-level United Nations employee, he teaches and writes about meaning, mattering, and uncertainty across the lifespan.
