The Examined Life

William Damon - Am I serving a bigger purpose than myself?

• Kenneth Primrose • Season 3 • Episode 5

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What does it mean to live a purposeful life? Is the way you're spending your time truly reflective of your deepest values and aspirations? These questions stand at the heart of my enlightening conversation with William Damon, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and a world-renowned expert on purpose and moral development.

Damon brings decades of research to bear on understanding how purpose shapes our lives, offering a compelling definition that transcends simple personal satisfaction. True purpose, he explains, must be both meaningful to ourselves and consequential to the world beyond ourselves. This dual focus distinguishes purpose from mere ambition or self-interest, creating a pathway to both personal fulfillment and meaningful contribution.

Our discussion explores how purpose evolves across the lifespan, with Damon sharing insights about why approximately 20-25% of people find themselves "drifting" without clear direction. Contrary to popular belief, purpose isn't something we discover in a single moment of clarity, but rather develops gradually through experimentation, feedback, and mentorship. Damon vulnerably shares his own journey of finding purpose through early writing experiences and later through reconciling with his absent father's legacy—a powerful illustration of how understanding our past can illuminate our future direction.

Ready to examine whether your daily activities align with your ultimate concerns? This conversation offers practical wisdom for anyone seeking to live with greater intention and meaning. Subscribe to The Examined Life podcast for more thought-provoking discussions about the questions that matter most.

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William Damon:

Don't dismiss the past, Even if you're forward-looking and you believe that purpose is leading you forward in ways that you choose. And you have a lot of agency. Part of that agency is figuring out what to do with your history and how to make the most of it.

Kenneth Primrose:

Hello and welcome to the Examined Life Podcast with me, kenny Primrose. So far in this series, I've had conversations on parenting, childhood education and technology with some fascinating thinkers Last week, catherine Burblesingh, and prior to that, elam Sikassas, peter Greig and Michaeline Ducliffe. I'm delighted to be continuing this series by speaking to Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, william Damon.

Kenneth Primrose:

William Damon, or Bill as he goes by, has studied purpose for most of his life and been writing about it. I came across him first by reading his book a number of years ago, the Path to Purpose. I'm a sucker for books with big titles because I'd like to live a life that feels rich in purpose and meaning, and I think most of us would. But what does that mean? How do we find our purpose and how does it change across a lifespan? Well, today's conversation opens up some of those questions from Bill's insights, from research and also from his own life.

Kenneth Primrose:

I found it a really interesting and helpful conversation, and I hope that you will too. I'm going to leave it there just now, but I will make my usual plea that if you're enjoying this, do please share it with others. I hope you enjoy listening to the show and I'll close with some notes about what's coming up at the end of this conversation. I'm delighted to be connecting with you today, bill. You are a psychologist who studied morality, personal development, how we become the adults we are, and the search for purpose, so I hope we're going to explore some of the themes that have been part of your life and work. But I wonder if we could begin by diving into the question that you think we should be asking ourselves.

William Damon:

Sure. The question goes is this is the way that you are spending your time these days, reflective of your ultimate goals in life? You could say in what ways does how you're spending your time match or relate to where you want to be headed in life? Or do the kinds of day-to-day activities that are absorbing your time and attention and thoughts connect with where you want to go with your life and what kind of person you want to become, what kind of things you want to go with your life and what kind of person you want to become, what kind of things you want to accomplish in life? These are all different ways of asking the same question, which invites people to examine what they're doing with their time, from the moment they wake up till they go to bed at night.

William Damon:

Is that a good use of your time? In other words, is it the right use of your time or are there adjustments you might want to make to advance the things you believe in, the goals you have in life?

Kenneth Primrose:

I wonder if we could begin by thinking slightly upstream of it. Perhaps you could begin by unpacking what you mean by goals. What are the kinds of goals we're talking about here that should seize our attention and we should be working towards?

William Damon:

Yes, because your question implies there are many kinds of goals that we have, and some of them are very short-term goals that may be important from day to day, but they're short-term and they don't endure. For example, when I go to campus today to teach my course later this afternoon I'm going to need to find a parking place on campus, and that's a goal that I have. It's a real goal. It's important. If I don't find one, I'm not going to be able to make it to my office, but it's not what I would call an ultimate concern. It's not a long-term goal that drives me over a long, enduring period of my life and, of course, it's only important if I want to go to campus. It's not important in other things I want to do. So there are special types of goals that you would call ultimate concerns the deep driving goals that reflect your beliefs, where you want your life to be heading and what you want to accomplish over the course of your lifetime. There is a relationship between these short-term goals, like finding a parking place, and the longer-term goals, because the short-term goals help you get to the longer-term goals, like finding a parking place, and the longer-term goals, because the short-term goals help you get to the longer-term goals, and they're necessary.

William Damon:

Finding a parking place would be one trivial example. But even taking a job to earn enough money to keep a roof over your head or keep food on the table, the job itself may or may not be reflective of your ultimate concerns. You may need a job simply to earn income by maintaining you, by keeping you alive, and hopefully someday it may turn into an activity, a vocation that is reflective of something deeper and more driving. But in the meantime, you need a job and, whether or not it's connected to something you deeply believe in, you need to stay alive. You need to earn money to live on. A lot of short-term goals may or may not be something you want to hang on to, but they may be necessary to promote, eventually, your search for the ultimate concerns in your life.

Kenneth Primrose:

Would it be fair to hear, within what you've said there's a distinction between extrinsic goals and intrinsic goals with what you're saying is Maslow's hierarchy, that there are certain needs we need to fulfill, but ultimately, apex of that hierarchy are a sense of purpose and meaning in life. Is that what you're getting at when you talk about these ultimate concern goals?

William Damon:

In a lot of ways. Yes, I don't particularly like the extrinsic-intrinsic distinction, because I think that the ultimate concerns are informed by other people and by wise people that we learn from. It's not that I develop my own vision of life on my own and don't listen to other people and unfold my own personal satisfaction and meaning, because my own sense of meaning in life is informed by people who are a lot wiser than I am throughout history. So I can be reading Aristotle or reading Shakespeare or listening to some friend of mine or some mentor and I can learn a lot and my ultimate concerns are very much influenced by the external world beyond the self. That's why I'm not really in favor of thinking of it being external versus internal. I think I want to keep learning and to learn I have to open my mind, listen and be influenced.

Kenneth Primrose:

I was thinking of the words extrinsic and intrinsic, as in. There is a goal to which I'm aiming and once I've got there, I've got there. James Kars makes this distinction between finite and infinite games. We're infinite games. We play in order to keep playing. If my goal is to become a teacher or a doctor, once I'm there I need something to keep me going, some kind of goal or purpose. I think of that as intrinsically motivating, as opposed to a carrot on a stick motivating for donkey.

William Damon:

Sure, let's talk a little bit about purpose, because I think that's a key concept that I've spent a lot of my life studying, writing about. I do think that the idea of purpose explains a lot of what we're talking about, which is how people can organize their lives around something that they believe in and something that continues to inspire them and give them meaning and satisfaction in life. And let me just give you a quick definition of purpose. I think that'll clarify my view of all the things we're talking about, including intrinsic, extrinsic, maslow to the, something that is meaningful to the self and, of consequence, to the world beyond the self. The high points of the definition are that, first of all, it's a commitment. It's something you stick with. It's not a one-shot deal. It's broader than stick with. It's not a one-shot deal. It's broader than any particular action. So you can do a lot of activity and actions that are valuable, but they're not purposes. For example, if you're riding your bike and you notice that you're passing a river and you notice a child fall on the river and you jump in the river to save the child, that's a wonderful, heroic thing to do, but it's not a purpose in life because you don't organize your life around it, unless you sit by the river all day watching for children falling in. That would be an example of a very good action. That's not a purpose. Purpose is a commitment and it has to be active. You have to be doing something for it.

William Damon:

And then the two important things and this gets to your question about what keeps you going, even after you have a job as a teacher or a doctor or whatever it is the two high points are that, first of all, it's meaningful to you. You own it. Somebody isn't ordering you to do it. It's not a command. Sometimes there's a lot of things you have to do it it's not a command. Sometimes there's a lot of things you have to do in life that you do by command and I'm not dismissing those things, but they're not purposeful. A student who does homework in a subject that the student hates, in order to graduate, has to do that. The student needs a degree, and they hate studying chemistry or Greek or whatever it is, but the student is only being purposeful if that subject matter becomes meaningful to the self. What has to be meaningful? It can't be a response to a command.

William Damon:

And secondly and this is the important thing, or one of the important things, needs to be of consequence to the world beyond the self. It's not simply doing something to promote your own interests, whether they be interests in happiness or self-promotion and again, I'm not putting down any of those things. There's nothing wrong with promoting yourself, with trying to survive. You need to have self-goals too, but purposeful goals go beyond the self, and so that's why if you in your example, if you are aiming to, let's say, become a teacher, that's always a nice example, and teachers is certainly a great. It's a great vocation that the world needs. You can become a teacher and you can do it in a purposeful way, which means you really care about the students, you want to promote learning, you invest yourself in the vocation wholly in terms of what the vocation can add to the world.

William Damon:

But not all teachers are like that. I'm sure all of us in growing up have encountered teachers that were not purposeful. I think some people go into it just because they need a job or they do it for a while. They don't like it very much and stick with it. I'm sure all of us have run into teachers like that from early years to college or university. That teacher is not being purposeful it's not simply getting the job as a teacher and, by the way, I can use any job that way. Doctors are like that too Physicians same thing. So just getting the job is not really a manifestation of purpose. What is a manifestation is dedicating yourself to the public mission of that profession, to the public mission of that profession. If you're in medicine, I really want to promote the health of people. If you're in education, I really want to promote learning and investing yourself in that. That's being purposeful. Being purposeful is a pursuit of the ultimate concerns that I mentioned before, because these are long-term goals that go beyond the self.

Kenneth Primrose:

Just to recap and clarify it's got to be meaningful to you and consequence beyond the self, as in, you've got to be serving something larger than the self. If my purpose is to get rich, that's not something of ultimate concern. That doesn't work as a purpose.

William Damon:

It's a long-term goal and again, I'm not really making judgments about it's fine if people are ambitious and want to become rich, as long as they do it ethically. I would never make a judgment about that. But I will say it's not. We would call it purpose. If you want to become rich in order to promote charitable reasons or to create a company that serves the needs of people or provides goods and services that people can benefit from, that's being purposeful. But if you're simply trying to accumulate money in order to buy yourself fancy automobiles, that is not a purpose. Those are self-goals.

William Damon:

One of the great books about purpose before I started doing psychological research on it was a book called Purpose-Driven Life, which was a theology book by an American pastor named Rick Warren. It's quite a good book. It's all about theology. Our work is about secular things as well and it's psychological work, not theological work. Rick Warren's book had one of the great first lines of any book, which is the first line of the book is it's not about you. And that is truly one of the fundamental aspects of purpose and it's also why and I want to underline this for our discussion it's this dimension of purpose and it's also why and I want to underline this for our discussion it's this dimension of purpose, the beyond the self dimension, that provides the value that purpose has in people's lives.

William Damon:

Because purpose not only promotes a lot of activity and commitment in the world a lot of benefits for the world, because purposeful people accomplish a lot, naturally but it also can provide a lot of benefits for the self. A lot of those benefits derive from the non-self-oriented nature of purpose. It prevents self-absorption. It prevents people from just thinking all the time how am I doing? Am I happy? Am I worried about something? Self-absorption, as any psychiatrist would know, is one of the risks of mental health. When you're always thinking about yourself, you're always worried about yourself. Purpose offers you a pathway beyond that. It offers you an opportunity to get engaged in causes and commitments that get you outside of your own day-to-day anxieties and worries. I think one of the great benefits of purpose is the opportunity to not be thinking about yourself all the time, be thinking about something you believe in, something you're trying to accomplish and something that contributes to the world beyond the self.

Kenneth Primrose:

That's really helpful, bill, thank you. The way you talk about purpose is like a nutrient for the mind, but there are certain things that we pursue that can do the opposite, especially if they focus us inward. I think maybe we can talk about this shortly. It's what smartphones and social media and a lot of technology is doing to us. It's perhaps part of the reason that there's a kind of mental health crisis. There's such an inward focus.

William Damon:

I want to support what you just said with some interesting data that I heard very recently and it confirms what you said, which is somebody in our country in one of the universities did a bunch of observations about how young people are using their smartphones. In other words, what are they actually doing? We know they spend a lot of time on them and, according to this professor's, one of the major activities that young people are using their phones for is to take videos of themselves. They turn the phones around and look at themselves and see how am I dressed, how do I look. It's a perfect example of how social media, in the current uses, are encouraging self-absorption. It confirms what you said, as social media can be aggravating this tendency. People have to think about themselves all the time.

Kenneth Primrose:

It's definitely a strand of the argument from Jonathan Haidt on why we're also the anxious generation his new book, why we're also wound up and unhappy, is partly because it makes us look inward. As you point out, you've got a camera that faces you now, so it's not about taking photos, about the path to purpose. That is Viktor Frankl who, I think, said that when we pursue money, sex and power, we'll never have enough of them. There's always a sense that we need more to satisfy us. But I think he said giving yourself over to moral good, spiritual good, creative good, relational good, those are all ends in themselves. It sounds like there's something in what you say about a purpose of ultimate concern that it's an end in itself. Does that sound?

William Damon:

That's it. I couldn't say it any better than you just said it, so I don't have a lot to add to that. I think that's exactly right.

Kenneth Primrose:

I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head. Moral child and a sense of drift among young people, a sense of purposelessness that you were noticing, brought the path to purpose into being for you. There's a book on finding purpose, I guess. Two questions One is that zeitgeist still with us? Do you think you wrote it slightly more than 10 years ago, right? Do you think this is still as relevant as it was, perhaps even more? And secondly, I would love you to unpack a little bit about what happens to people when they have a lack of purpose or meaning in life. Why is this such a big concern?

William Damon:

You mentioned the word drift. Drifting is one of the problems that, especially among younger people, but even as people go on in life, about 20, 25 percent are only drifting. So it's not talking about 100 percent of people. There are obviously very purposeful people around. There are obviously very purposeful people around. We tend to find something like, as people get into their adulthood, a third or more of adults being fully purposeful and another 40 or 50 percent being at least partially purposeful. So a lot of the population is either purposeful or at least looking for purpose or partially purpose. But the 20 to 25 percent who are quote, drifting that's an important part of the population. Some of them are drifting because they're very hedonistic.

William Damon:

In our country, the college student that drinks his or her way through college and spends all the time just on hedonistic pursuits. Some of them are just anxious, depressed, have given up. But whether it's a happy drift or a miserable drift, it's not leading them anywhere that they're going to want to go. And if you remember, that was my question at the outset when you asked me what question? What I was asking was is the way you're spending your time reflective of an ultimate concern, something you are trying to develop and advance in life, and if it's not, maybe you're at danger of drifting.

William Damon:

And drifting, I think, is a developmental problem. You may get away with it for a while, but eventually you're very likely to look on your life and say am I really wasting my life or am I actually accomplishing something? The problem is that a significant part of our population is drifting without finding something to aim for, without finding an ultimate concern to marshal their energies towards. To some extent, a lot of other people are drifting too much of the time. They may not be drifting all the time, like the quote drifters, but even the rest of us can very often use some structured reflection around where we're heading and maybe think about how we're spending our time and maybe making better uses of our time, guided by our best visions about what's important in life.

Kenneth Primrose:

A couple of different questions come to me in this, bill. One is whether there is a connection between you mentioned Rick Warren, and Pur, a purpose-driven life, which is a theology book, and you use the word vocation, which is quite theological. It means to be called. Whether you think a sense of meaninglessness or purposelessness is attendant with secularism, believing that the universe is ultimately a meaningless place. Are those two correlated? In people who are drifting, do you think?

William Damon:

I agree with you that the roots of the idea of vocation, even the Latin root, is to be called. But I think there isn't a necessity to say there has to be, and I think faith is a very powerful source of purpose. Let me be clear about that. I think Rick Warren was onto something there, but I don't think any particular religious faith is the only source of purpose. A lot of people feel called not by a religious tradition but by their observation about what the world needs.

William Damon:

We have a lot of cases that we've studied of young people a young woman who went into medicine because her grandmother died of cancer and she wanted to respond to her, or to people like her grandmother, I should say.

William Damon:

She said cancer is a terrible thing, maybe I can do something about that. We have examples of that from a wide range of professions people that go into teaching, people that go into business because they feel, oh, I can develop a product that will help people communicate better or help provide food for people. So I think the sense of being called is a result of having some perception of something that the world needs or can benefit other people or can somehow improve life in some way. We haven't even mentioned the arts life in some way. We haven't even mentioned the arts. One of our subjects became a passionate music composer because he felt that the scales being used in contemporary music, including jazz, were boring and they could be enlivened. That was an example that he felt called to improve jazz music. I think there are lots of ways that you can feel this sense of vocation, but it mostly comes from an observation of something you can do to improve the world, add to the world in some way.

Kenneth Primrose:

May I ask you, bill, the study of purpose for you is academic, it's based in psychology. Is it also personal? Have you got a sense of purpose in your studies on purpose? Do you feel called towards doing this, and how would you articulate that as a vocation?

William Damon:

let me expand it because I want to make sure that we all understand that purpose is not only connected to your job, of course, when you feel, like vocation, you are purposeful.

William Damon:

I have a family, children and now grandchildren, and those folks were a large part of my purpose in life to do the best I could to support them, to raise them, to educate them. My wife and I are deeply engaged in that. Even when your children move out, they still are a bit of a purpose to you in the sense that you still want to support them. So there are lots of realms of purpose beyond work. Faith, the sense of serving a higher power is another robust source of purpose. There are lots of ways we engage in the world that we can be purposeful for. Life is long for those of us fortunate to live beyond childhood and purposes come and go very often. Raising children is one example when my children moved out of the home and have their own life. There's some purposes, but in much less direct everyday sense. I don't believe in parenting beyond, in micromanaging my children's life. Once they're adults, that recedes. That source of purpose recedes in my life and maybe my source of purpose then becomes more community oriented.

William Damon:

I have more time to invest in neighborhood cleanups, let's say, or any other ways that you can get involved in the community. Purposes come and go and there are times in our lives and we talked about drifting. There are times in our lives we've studied people when they retire from their job. A lot of people go through a period of drifting. At that point Hopefully they find what we call encore purpose, next purposes to be involved in that are no longer connected with their careers, but there could be a time in their lives when they start drifting again, with all of the disadvantages of drifting the sense of meaninglessness and emptiness.

William Damon:

Life is a moving target. It's a movie, not a snapshot, and we develop and go through different phases. This is just a way of saying that there are lots of ways to be purposeful with their appearance in our lives, when we may be dedicated to a certain purpose and then that may no longer be appropriate, when it's time to retire or when your children move out or whatever it is. And there are other times in life when you search for new engagements. But I always get back to that question I started with, which is the way that you're spending your time these days, reflective of some ultimate concern, and there will be periods of time in your life when it's not, but that might be a good time for you to reflect on gee maybe I should examine this and not just drift, but actually employ my daily activities or re-employ them towards a ultimate concern that I believe in.

Kenneth Primrose:

Do you think we always know what is of ultimate concern to us?

William Damon:

Thank you. That's a great question, and that gets back to something we talked about earlier, which is we are not alone in this world. Sometimes we are at a loss, but that's where we can open our eyes and ears and be inspired by other people who we admire. We may be inspired by somebody who writes about things in a way that moves us. We may be inspired by people we know or people in the public sphere. You can follow your instincts in that and learn from other people and help yourself form an ultimate concern. You don't have to invent this yourself. You can look around the world and say are there things that people are doing that I admire, that I could invest my time in, so you don't have to do it all by yourself.

Kenneth Primrose:

He talks about purposes coming and going through the course of your life and this is something I've found written about by David Brooks in his book the Second Mountain. I think he builds on Jung's idea of life having essentially two acts a second half where you commit to things bigger than yourself, and the first half where you're building a container, building a sense of who you are. It's a little bit more self-focused and ego-driven. Is this a pattern that you've noticed in your own life and in those around you and people you've studied? Does the gravitational pull of purpose shift through the course of a lifetime just because of the age we're at?

William Damon:

It does for some people. I think that's a little simplistic. I think the distinguishing between these two strands is correct. In our research we find that people who are very strong in their capacity to develop self-goals that are sensible are also strong in their capacity to develop purposeful goals. These are more yin and yang, working together rather than in opposition. And as for the sequential part of it, I think David Brooks may be a little bit off base there, because we find that early in life among adolescents is really when young people start thinking about their futures we find that the young people that do best are synchronizing their focus on their own self, which has to do with identity. Who I am that's an Ericksonian notion, one of the main goals of adolescence, and that's very self-focused. Who am I? What kind of a person do I want to become? But they're synchronizing that with what they want to do for the world. The question of what they want to do for the world, which is a purposeful question, helps bolster the search for identity.

William Damon:

Erickson wrote about this too. Right from the start. Both things can and should be happening at the same time, not sequentially, one after another. That said, we do find, over the lifespan, people generally becoming more and more purposeful and we do find over the lifespan people generally becoming more and more purposeful. So in adolescence or early adulthood maybe one in five or 20% are fully purposeful. By midlife or later in life it goes up into the 30s and 40%, with a lot of the rest being at least mostly or partially purposeful. There is some development towards purpose and in that sense you could say David Brooks has a point. But it's not quite as simplistic as one comes first and the other comes second. In the best of cases, and even in most cases, they both are happening at the same time and bolstering one another. As development goes hand in hand, self-goals and other goals can and should develop at the same time.

Kenneth Primrose:

It sounds like as we become more purposeful, life takes on some coherence. It brings to mind Frederick Buechner, often quoted as saying where your great gladness meets the world's great need. I've probably paraphrased that poorly, but it seems that is accessible to you as a young person as much as it is as someone who's middle-aged or older.

William Damon:

Young people. Aristotle wrote that youth is a time of idealism. So young people very much can be in tuned with this and in fact they are. That is one of the things that inspires their search for meaning and self, who they are in life. That quote you offered I quoted in. I wrote a little book. Before I wrote the Path to Purpose, I wrote a little book called Noble Purpose which was filled with quotes from people about purpose, going all the way back to Aristotle and beyond.

Kenneth Primrose:

I wonder, as you talk about purpose changing over the lifespan and in your most recent book with my father, you've written about James Butler's life review method Is that something worth talking about in relation to this question we're exploring today Is the way I'm spending my time in the service of my ultimate goals. Does the life review method help you do that?

William Damon:

Oh, absolutely. Butler himself promoted it that way. I'll just give three or four sentences to explain the background. This was a discovery that was personally very important to me fairly late in my life, and the initial discovery had to do with my discovery of what actually happened to my father. I grew up without a father After World War II. He never returned. I always assumed that he was killed in action, but it turned out he wasn't. I discovered more and more about what happened to his life and what difference it made in my life. So as I explored records about what happened to him, I found out about what my early life was like and what it was really like growing up without a father, and lots of other things. All of that's in the book and I will go into it here.

William Damon:

But the point here is that in my discoveries of where my life really began and what some of the important choice points that helped form me as a child and adolescent in the absence of my father, I began to understand more about choices that I made in adapting to what was a very difficult set of conditions, both economically. My father left my mother and I without financial support, and also I didn't have the benefit of having a father to teach me all kinds of things. So I discovered things about myself that were strengths that I didn't know that I really had. I had a way of working out some of the regrets that I had in terms of understanding what some of those silver linings were, and all of this gave me material to look forward and say in my future choices, how can I build on the strengths that I clearly demonstrated and on the interests that I had, and how can I also liberate myself from the remaining regrets I had of things that never happened, because of things that were missing in my early life? This is exactly what Butler's Life Review is intended to do. It's intended to give you a positive, affirmative rear view on your past in order to prepare you for good choices about your future that build on those strengths, the things that you have found satisfying, the things that you have found redemptive. There's a lot of ideas about redemption and redeeming and it's very liberating, the reason I call the book, just to give you an example, a Round of Golf with my Father.

William Damon:

I never met my father. I never had a round of golf with him. One of the regrets that I'd had when I discovered about him was. It turns out he was a great golfer and I love golf, but I am very far from a great golfer. So I started to resent. I said, why couldn't this guy have come around and taught me how to play golf? I had to liberate myself from that resentment. So what I did and this was a psychological exercise and it was purposeful in its own way, as I discovered my father's family late in life this was a revelation.

William Damon:

One of my new cousins found an old set of my father's golf clubs. In that golf bag was a scorecard from his youth playing at a country club in Massachusetts. I went to the country club. They let me on the course to play around. I pretended in my mind that he was playing with me as I played against his scorecard and I can tell you that it was a very liberating experience. It was redemptive.

William Damon:

I found things about him that I admired. It was a beautiful day and I felt the joy of being out there and reconciling myself to his absence and even forgiving him in some ways for abandoning my mother and me and trying to understand why, as a young man, he felt that he could do that. That was an example of going back in the past, finding out ways that I had not resolved certain things and moving through it, moving on with my life. In my book Round of Golf with my Father, I quote William Faulkner, an American writer who had a wonderful line in one of his plays, which is that the path is not dead, it is not even past. And that really was the point that I got to, which is that I learned from my professional writing don't dismiss the past, even if you're forward-looking and you believe that purpose is leading you forward in ways that you choose, and you have a lot of agency. Part of that agency is figuring out what to do with your history and how to make the most of it.

Kenneth Primrose:

Thank you for sharing that, bill. It sounds very redemptive and it's a beautiful story. It sounds very therapeutic as a way of coming to terms with the way the past is sedimented into the present. It isn't, as Faulkner says, even past interested in the meaning crisis. So this is spoken about broadly whether it really is a kind of crisis of purpose and, related to that, whether purpose has a lot to do with belonging. What I'm thinking of is kind of Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone his point that communities are atomized and falling apart in some ways, and in those cohesive communities there is, it seems to me, far less sense of drift psychologically. So I wonder, could you speak into that? Has belonging got anything to do with purpose?

William Damon:

Actually, you anticipated one of the things that we discovered as we followed young people, who became purposeful because they discovered causes or activities that they believed in. They very often started joining groups or galvanizing people around them. Some of them became leaders. Young people became socially quite popular and have very much a sense that they now were part of some group or even leaders of some group that shared interests. Empirically, in our studies of young people, we found exactly the relationship that you've just suggested, which is a relationship between purpose and a sense of belonging and, of course, in terms of society as a whole.

William Damon:

I think there are periods in every society where there are national purposes that bring people together. Of course, war is one. If your country is attacked, people tend to pull together and even though it's an awful situation to be in and nobody would choose to be at war that is one of the silver linings is that there is a sense. I know from people that have written about the greatest generation. In the United States during World War II there was definitely the sense of national purpose and even during economic hardships social scientists that have looked at the Great Depression back in the 1930s in our country and all over the world. A lot of families shared purpose. Just by struggling to survive economically, natural purposes arise and then there are periods where nothing big is happening that is drawing people together for any national reason, and during those periods people have to create systems of meaning that create those bonds and that sense of belonging. The world isn't doing it for you through some catastrophe, so you need to find other ways of pulling together and sharing our lot as humans in this world.

Kenneth Primrose:

Thank you. That's really helpful and I think, in terms of my own personal experience, it really resonates with those times I felt most purposeful or when I felt like I belong and like I have a place within a community. It feels like you're not asking what am I doing with the day? I suppose communities form around purposes bigger than themselves a lot of the time. How would you articulate your own purpose, Bill? Is there something that comes to mind for you there? Is it the kind of thing that you can speak about?

William Damon:

Fairly early in my life I had some experiences that surprised me in how they made me feel. They made me feel that I was dedicated to something and I wasn't even looking for it. Naturally, and my own personal experience was I started writing for my school newspaper as a ninth grader, which means I was about 14 years old at the time. I was interested in sports and I was a terrible writer at that time. So I got assigned the most unimportant sports games in our school, which tended to be junior varsity soccer, actually, because nobody in America in those days played soccer. I would go to these and cover them for the newspaper and I wrote about some interesting events that went a little beyond the game, about some of the teams we played against and some of the children who came from Europe and were better soccer players and that kind of thing. I noticed that my friends would read these articles and say well, that's a really interesting story. You did so.

William Damon:

I did research as a third-rate sports writer.

William Damon:

I went to the games and wrote about it.

William Damon:

It would add to people's lives, it would give information that people found interesting and that sent me off at an early age on a long course of doing what I have done for my entire life, which is becoming a scientific researcher in psychological science, is becoming a scientific researcher in psychological science, doing studies, making observations and writing about it in a way that I hope is helpful to people's lives, to educators who are using my writings to help educate young people, or even not just young people.

William Damon:

Some of my work is used in lifelong learning and professional education, and all of that really started with my own very incompetent efforts as a sports writer when I was 14 years old. But that is how it happens. It happens gradually, sometimes by accident. Somebody discovering gee. I'm actually adding something to the world by doing this activity and I want to become better at it, and I started at that point paying attention to my classes and trying to learn how to write well and doing all the things you need to do to get the skills that would then advance my career in this direction of becoming a scientific researcher.

Kenneth Primrose:

The two things I'd like to pick up there that I find really helpful is one that it happens gradually, that it's a craft that over time develops, but also that it was through hearing that you added value to other people. It was getting feedback that kind of woke you up to this idea that you had something to contribute. Feedback is a really important part of the process when we're trying to discern what might be a purposeful way to spend our time, like what's working. Where am I adding value?

William Damon:

Yeah, that's right and it can be. I gave an example in a kind of an intellectual professional area, but we've seen this happen all over the place. Just to tell you one of the cases we observed during our studies of youth development a boy went to work at a fast food restaurant to earn some summer spending money. That's the only reason he got the job to get a little money so he could have fun on weekends. But it turned out that he had a very wise manager, a mentor, who at some point said to him you're not doing this job only to flip burgers and go home with some spending cash.

William Damon:

Look around this restaurant, you'll see people come in with their families and these are people who have hard lives. In a lot of cases, this meal that they're having may be the high point of their day. They're coming in and they have their children with them. Maybe there are little toys in the restaurant boxes that we're serving them. Your job is not just to give them a burger, but to put a smile on their face, to bring something to their day that they haven't had a chance to have with their families. And the boy said after that summer of working, his whole attitude towards work changed. He understood how even working at the most basic level job can be a noble calling. It's true that any job you have that sense of service with that you're actually serving and you're accomplishing something and you're doing a good job and putting a smile on people's faces, to say it figuratively, that is joyful, it's a purpose, it gives you fulfillment. So this applies across the range of human occupations.

Kenneth Primrose:

I love that, and I love particularly that you picked up on what changed this young lad's perspective was having a mentor. It makes me think we need to be looking for people we can help mentor and also people who might be mentors to us. That's how a sense of purpose is passed down to some degree.

William Damon:

I completely agree with that Wonderful.

Kenneth Primrose:

I want to be respectful of your time, bill. Do you mind if I just try and summarize a little bit of what we've been speaking about? Your question was how am I spending my time in a way that is reflective of my ultimate goals, my purpose? And we've gone into purpose as this morally motivated ultimate concern something that takes you out of yourself and it leads to flourishing of yourself as well as those you're benefiting through serving this purpose well as those you're benefiting through serving this purpose. And some of the ways we find this is by tuning in, listening keenly to where we're adding value to what people are saying about us and presumably also what we're passionate about. Where we find, perhaps, a flow state, where we find ourselves absorbed by what we're doing. These are all signals that we're serving a purpose that feels rewarding for its own sake.

William Damon:

All of that is exactly right, and the only thing I'd add to that is that and you did mention this briefly, that this happens the development of this capacity to invest yourself and to find out what you want to really dedicate your time and commit to. You mentioned that it happens gradually, and that's something I'd underline Of all the things I've studied in the field of child and adolescent development. Purpose is probably the slowest growing capacity. Most of the skills kids or teenagers pick up by the end of adolescence pretty rapidly, but purpose takes a while. Not only does the development of purpose take a considerable amount of time, but there are a lot of false starts. Very often for a lot of people They'll try something out. Perhaps they find out they're not really good enough at it to make a contribution. They may want to be a singer, but they can't quite hit all the right notes or the timing isn't ideal, and so they're going to try something else.

William Damon:

There are a lot of trial and error. There's a lot of discovery of what you're really capable of, what you enjoy doing. There are people that want to be computer scientists because it looks great, but they find it pretty boring so they're not going to stick with it, so they'll switch. Or people that want to be lawyers and they find out oh my God, learning all these laws and cones more than I really want to invest my time in so they'll switch. There's a lot of false starts, a lot of experimentation, but the important thing is forward movement, that you're learning from those experiments, that you've learned something about yourself, what the world needs, what you're good at what you're interested in and as long as there is that sense that I'm going to stick with it.

William Damon:

I'm going to keep my search going. I'm going to learn something more. That's fine. It doesn't matter how long it takes. I always tell this to parents and teachers who say my 22-year-old seems to be drifting, he doesn't have a sense of purpose. I say there's no time limit on any of this, as long as the person isn't discouraged, hasn't given up, hasn't thrown their hands up and said I'll never find anything meaningful in my life. That's the only danger sign, not how long it takes or how many attempts you've made. It's an ongoing surge. Sometimes you have to switch directions, but as long as there's a sense of forward movement.

Kenneth Primrose:

I'm aware we're almost out of time, but I would love to have asked you about whether, now that we don't have so many cultural rites of passage that move you into adulthood, those moments seem to me helpful at taking on responsibility and then finding purpose.

William Damon:

I'm glad you said that because I'll make one quick comment about that, which is, as you're suggesting, the world is a much more complicated place than it's been in the past. In the past there have been relatively fewer choices. There have been built-in initiation rides, transition points. All of that helps structure a young person's search and a lot of that has been disbanded as the world's developed lots of different kinds of occupations, lots of different pathways. So it's hard for young people and complicated, and that's partly why it takes so long. That's why people shouldn't be so nervous about is my child or my student getting there quickly enough? It's not the speed, it's. Is this young person still trying, still looking and learning something from the search?

Kenneth Primrose:

That's a really helpful framing Bill. Thank you so much for your time today. I found it really interesting and I loved hearing your own story of finding your purpose and your life review. It's inspired me. I'm still looking for a sense of purpose. I think I've found bits of it. I think I've got a kind of a compass, rather than a map.

William Damon:

That's a great place to be. Keep at it.

Kenneth Primrose:

Cool. Thank you very much, bill, and I hope your class today goes really well.

William Damon:

Thank you. This is a joy and a pleasure. Thank you, Kenny. I enjoyed talking to you.

Kenneth Primrose:

I think whatever age and stage you find yourself at in life, what seems key is that a sense of purpose is integral to a life well lived and that those purposes shift over the course of a lifetime. I was particularly heartened that purpose is something that can be discerned kind of gradually over time and other people can help us with that. No doubt we can help other people with that too, with that. No doubt we can help other people with that too. I've always been slightly disturbed to meet people who just intrinsically knew what they wanted to do, what their sense of purpose was, because it's never really been that way for me.

Kenneth Primrose:

Next episode is going to be with Ruth Taylor and we're going to be discussing values. Ruth is fascinating, has done a lot of deep thinking on values, how they shape our lives, how they shape our culture, and it was a real joy to speak to her. I'm going to be dropping that episode in two weeks time. Next week it's half term. I head for the Highlands with my family and a tent and hopefully some other camping equipment, and we'll return to you in a couple of weeks with a new conversation. I'll leave you with a clip from the forthcoming episode with Ruth Taylor, thank you for listening and, as ever do please like, share, comment, get in touch if you like and help other people find the podcast. Thank you.

Ruth Taylor:

We're constantly being told that what we should be valuing is what we call extrinsic values, values that require some sort of external approval or reward, so wealth, status, image, power, etc. And it does not feel good to us. Some people do place lots of importance on extrinsic values, and fair enough, we're all human and the beauty of humanity is its complexity. But I think what I meant about conjecture is I to me personally really feel that at the heart of our global mental health crisis is something to do with a culture that is leading us in a direction that maybe we do not intuitively inherently feel is one that will make us happy and give us good lives and let us live in community with one another and in the incredibly, amazingly beautiful, intricate world in which we are a part, and that, for me, feels just immensely sad. It's tragic. That is the kind of fallout of a capitalist, neoliberal, separatist world that we've made.