Finding Your Purpose: A Deeper Look

A few weeks ago, I stood at the top of Crystal Mountain with three strangers and gave them my three recommendations for men to have good mental health. The first one, "find your purpose," opened up more questions than answers, so let's take a deeper look through three books I've found genuinely enlightening on the subject. And to be honest, this one is useful for anyone working to find their purpose, or anyone quietly wondering: do I even need one?

What We Mean When We Say "Purpose"

Purpose is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot and explained very little. Self-help books tell you to "live with purpose" and "discover your why" without ever telling you what to do on a Tuesday afternoon when you feel completely adrift.

So let's get specific.

Purpose isn't always a career. It isn't a role. It isn't what you produce or what you earn or how useful you are to other people, though it might involve all of those things. Purpose is the answer to a quieter, more essential question: Why does it matter that I'm here?

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, wrote what is arguably the most popular book ever written on this subject. In Man's Search for Meaning, he described watching men in Nazi concentration camps stripped of everything: family, possessions, dignity, physical safety. He observed something that changed his understanding of human psychology forever. The men who survived were not always the strongest or the youngest. They were the ones who had something to live for. A person to return to. A manuscript they hadn't finished. A meaning they had not yet fulfilled.

"Those who have a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how.'" Read that again and let it really sink in.

So how the heck do we find our “why?“Frankl's answer is logotherapy: the idea that the primary human drive is not pleasure, not power, but meaning. When meaning is present, suffering becomes bearable. When it is absent, even comfort feels hollow.

This matters deeply for men. Because in my clinical work, I see it constantly: men who have everything the script promised them, the career, the house, the family, the achievement, and who still feel inexplicably empty. They don't call it depression, because they don't feel sad. They feel nothing. Or they feel vaguely angry without knowing why. Or they feel like they're going through motions that used to mean something and no longer do. That's not weakness. That's purposelessness. And it is one of the most painful and least-named experiences in men's mental health and what I believe is the biggest contributor in the difficulties men face today.

Why Men Struggle to Find It

Men are handed a script early. Provider. Protector. Achiever. And those identities aren't wrong. For some men, they are genuinely the container through which purpose flows, and there is nothing insufficient about that. But there's a difference between a role you chose because it brings you alive, and a role you accepted because no one ever asked you what you actually wanted.

The question "what matters to you?" is not something most men heard growing up. They heard "what do you want to be?" which is a question about function, not meaning. And so they built lives organized around function. And when the function stopped satisfying, or when it was taken away by injury, job loss, divorce, aging, or illness, there was nothing underneath it to hold them. This is not a character flaw. It is, in many ways, a cultural one.

David Epstein writes in Range about the pressure our culture places on early specialization: the idea that you need to identify your "thing" as quickly as possible and commit to it fully. We tell kids to find their passion at seventeen and build their whole identity around it. But Epstein's research shows this is actually backwards. The people who develop the deepest, most durable sense of purpose and competence are often those who spent years sampling widely, trying things, failing at some of them, and slowly discovering through lived experience rather than planning what actually resonated.

"Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today."

Purpose, Epstein's work suggests, is rarely discovered through introspection alone. It is usually discovered through action. Through doing things and noticing what makes you feel more like yourself, and what makes you feel less. This is good news. It means you don't have to have the answer. You just have to be willing to pay attention.

Purpose After Trauma

Here is where I want to stay for a moment, because this part matters.

For men who have experienced significant trauma, including childhood abuse, relational violence, work trauma, medical crises, and the loss of someone central to their identity, the path to purpose is often not a straight line. Sometimes it's not even a path at first. Sometimes it's rubble.

Trauma does something specific to purpose: it interrupts the narrative. It breaks the story you were telling about your life and leaves you holding pieces that don't seem to fit together anymore. Before, you knew who you were. After, that knowing feels uncertain. Contaminated, sometimes. Like the person you were before and the person you are now are strangers to each other.

Frankl knew this intimately. He lost his wife, his brother, and his parents in the Holocaust. And yet he wrote, from the other side of that devastation:

"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."

This is not toxic positivity (which admittedly, I thought he was preaching at first). Frankl was not suggesting that suffering is good or that trauma has a silver lining. He was saying something more precise: that the last human freedom, the one that cannot be taken by any circumstance, is the freedom to choose how we respond to what has happened to us. Not immediately. Not easily. But eventually.

For trauma survivors, purpose often doesn't look like it does in the self-help books. It doesn't arrive as a lightning bolt of clarity. It tends to emerge slowly, in the aftermath of the work: after the nervous system has begun to settle, after the story has been told and witnessed by someone safe, after the pieces of the self have been carefully gathered back together.

What I see, again and again in my clinical work with trauma survivors, is this: the wound often points toward the purpose. Not because suffering is a gift, but because it teaches you, in the most visceral way possible, what actually matters. Those who have been through significant pain often develop a clarity about what they value that people who haven't been tested rarely possess. They know what love costs. They know what safety means. They know what it feels like to have dignity stripped away, and they understand, in their bones, why it matters to give it back.

The Presence Underneath the Purpose

Eckhart Tolle approaches purpose from a different angle, not psychological, but philosophical. In A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, he draws a distinction that I think is genuinely useful here.

He separates what he calls your outer purpose, your goals, your projects, your roles in the world, from your inner purpose, which he describes as something far more fundamental: the quality of presence and consciousness you bring to whatever you are doing.

"Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey only has one: the step you are taking right now."

What Tolle is pointing toward is this: purpose is not only something you find out there in the world. It is also something you inhabit, a way of showing up that is fully present, fully engaged, not constantly somewhere else. And for many men, especially those carrying the weight of unprocessed trauma or the fog of depression, the biggest obstacle to purpose isn't that they haven't found the right career or the right calling. It's that they are never quite here, never fully in the moment they're actually in, because they're managing the past or anticipating the future.

This isn't a criticism. It's a description of what trauma and chronic stress do to the nervous system. They pull you out of the present. They make it hard to feel fully alive in your own life.

When men begin to heal, when they start to do the work, one of the first things they often describe is a returning quality of aliveness. A noticing. Colors seem a little more vivid. Food tastes better. Conversations feel more real. They're actually there for their kids' laughter instead of physically present but mentally somewhere else. That quality of presence, that capacity to be fully in your own life, is not just a byproduct of finding purpose. It is, in many ways, the foundation for it.

You cannot discover what brings you alive if you are never fully awake.

How to Actually Start

If you're reading this and thinking I still don't know what my purpose is. Good. That honesty is the right place to begin.

Here's what I tell the men I work with, and what I've found to be true:

Pay attention to what makes you feel both useful and alive at the same time. Not just competent. Not just productive. Not just "good at this." Alive. The intersection of those two things, useful and alive simultaneously, is where purpose tends to live. Most men can identify one or the other. The work is finding where they overlap.

Notice what makes you lose track of time. Flow states, those moments when you are so absorbed in something that hours pass without your noticing, are not random. They are the nervous system's way of signaling: this matters. This is where you belong.

Don't wait until you have clarity to take action. Epstein's research confirms what Frankl's experience demonstrated: purpose is discovered in motion, not in contemplation. You will not think your way to meaning. You will find it by doing things, paying attention to how they feel, and being honest with yourself about the difference between what looks good on paper and what actually lights you up inside.

Let the wound inform you without defining you. If you've been through something significant, the question is not only how do I recover from this? but also what has this taught me about what matters? The answer to that second question often holds something important about where you're meant to go.

And if none of this feels accessible yet, if you're in the rubble and purpose feels like a word from another language, that's okay too. Frankl didn't come out of the concentration camps with a five-year plan. He came out and slowly, carefully, rebuilt a life that was pointed toward something. Sometimes the first step toward purpose is simply creating enough inner safety to be able to feel anything at all.

A Final Note

I said in the last post that depression in men often isn't sadness. It's emptiness. Purposelessness wearing a convincing disguise.

I believe that because I see it happen. Men can find their way back to aliveness. Not by discovering some grand destiny, but by doing the quieter work of learning who they actually are underneath everything they've been told to be and building a life that reflects that.

That work is hard. It usually requires help. It often requires looking directly at some things that have been carefully avoided for a long time.

But it is among the most important work a person can do. So let’s get started.

Written by Kayla Bunderson, Psy.D. Dr. Kayla Bunderson is a clinical psychologist specializing in trauma and men's mental health. Paradigm Psychology offers telehealth services in California, Washington, and PSYPACT registered states.