Welcome to meaningful work matters. I'm your host, Andrew Soren, and today I'm joined by Patrick Hill from Washington State University. Patrick's research focuses on purpose and identity development, and in this episode, we explore what it means to live a purposeful life, not as a lofty, distant goal, but as something adaptable, accessible, and actionable. In our everyday lives, we dive into how purpose plays a key role in well being,
personal growth, and even physical health. Though not always in ways you might expect, Patrick's research highlights the power of small p purpose, those everyday actions that give us direction and lead to positive outcomes. He also shares strategies for navigating the pressures that we sometimes find to define a big P purpose, which actually just often leaves people feeling anxious and overwhelmed, especially when we ask people to do that at work.
We discuss the psychological and physical impacts of purpose connected to activism and the critical importance of supportive relationships in our lives. Whether you're looking to define your own purpose or help others find theirs, this episode offers practical insights that will help you move forward. Welcome to the meaningful Work Matters podcast. I'm your host,
Andrew Soren, founder of Udaemonic by Design. On this podcast, we'll dive into the world of meaningful work, explore its complexities, and examine its impact on people and the organizations they're a part of. Each episode features incentives, insightful conversations with cutting edge experts who are successfully navigating the challenges of
meaningful work. We hope to offer you ideas, frameworks, and tools to unlock potential and design work that's fulfilling, impactful, and supports everyone's well being. Subscribe or follow us now in let's make meaningful work matter. Patrick Hill, it is a wonderful thing to have you on this meaningful work Matters podcast episode. I'm thrilled that you are here. I'm excited for us to have a conversation about purpose and meaning and work and all sorts of different
complexities that are probably going to fall out of it. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's always great to see you. Great to talk with you. And I'm excited to have this conversation as well. Pat, why don't you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and what you think makes your work meaningful, right? Yeah. So I'm Pat Hill. I'm currently a professor of psychological and brain sciences
at Washington University in St. Louis. I was born and raised just outside of Indianapolis and kind of grew up in the Midwest, went to Indiana University and then off from there, had a graduate career at the University of Notre Dame, and eventually got to be a professor at Carleton University in Ottawa before coming here to St. Louis. So it was great to live up in Ottawa for about four months of the year. That the other eight are always tricky, but it's a beautiful city if
you go during those four months. During those four months. During those four months. But what we do in our lab is explore what it means to live kind of a purposeful life or live purposefully,
however you want to think about it. And what I love about this, what makes to your question my work personally meaningful and important to me is getting to see all the ways that this gets played out by my students and all the ways that new people in the lab come and wrestle with this topic that like I've been wrestling with for the past 1520 years,
since my time at graduate school. And yet, despite all that time thinking about it, it's always fun that every student comes in with a different view of it, a different perspective on it, a different take on what
we could do. So, for instance, like a few years ago, my graduate student Gabrielle Fund, who's now a professor at Auburn, she came in and was really excited about purpose, romantic relationships, which was something I had never thought about before of, like how you and your partner helped to validate or invalidate each other's purpose and direction. So we went
that route for a while. And more recently we've been taking it into a lot of areas around social activism and social justice and thinking about what it means when your purpose or direction in life doesn't really align with what you're parents or your community or even the broader country you're in may want or may expect of you. So we've been trying to tackle these questions along the way of we know social support matters and social relationships matter for your purpose.
But how do you navigate a purpose that doesn't really align with what some of those social supportive social partners might, might want for you. And I think that's really where, when I think about what's most meaningful and important to me, it's those interactions of getting to be a mentor, getting to work with my fantastic students, my postdocs and others of getting to see all the ways that they take a construct that is not a way that I ever thought about doing for the past two decades.
So. That'S great. I'm already excited by the complexities that you're bringing to this conversation and the various ways in which your lab studies purpose and the ways in which you're walking your talk in terms of the connection with other people so thank you. Thank you for bringing all of that. And maybe let's start by just trying to figure out what on earth do we mean by purpose? How do you define purpose? It's obviously something
that if any of us had a great answer to. I'm not sure how many episodes your podcast would have.
It keeps us in business that we still don't exactly know what's going on when it comes to purpose and the way we think about it really focuses on a few key elements that back in my time at Notre Dame and ever since then, I really view myself as someone who builds from a foundation, first and foremost, of identity development and theories of identity psychology, where it's easily the most critical developmental benchmark throughout the lifespan of trying to figure out who we are, what matters to
us, what we stand up for, what we don't care as much about. From an identity lens, purpose is a really critical construct of thinking about where you want to go. So our lab is the purpose aging transitions in health lab because I needed a good acronym for PATH, that we think about purpose as kind of a path and direction in your life. And we always say that it's tricky to really know fully who you are and answer that question of identity without knowing where you want to go and what you want to
do. So that's the primary lens that I think about purpose. From. That, it has to be something that's self defining, first and foremost, something that you feel personally attached to, that it's personally definitive and gives you a lot of information of answering that who am I question. But it also is something that engages you,
energizes you. That when we think of the commonalities across basically every conception or purpose, even if they may differ, everybody tends to agree that it's something that leads to greater life, engagement leads to greater personal agency. And finally, it has to have this element of goals and intentionality and directionality, that kind of the way to distinguish it in our lab from related things like thinking about meaning in general or personal significance, coherence, these other deep
existential things that we're wrestling with. Purpose is one of the ones that is most future and forward oriented, that we're thinking about purpose as something that helps to direct you from one day to the next, one week to the next, towards these big, lifelong, meaningful directions for you and end your life.
So bringing that together, our lab tends to think about purpose as this self defining, self informative life aim that gives you a direction towards engagement in life from one day to the next, one year to the next throughout the lifespan. And it shouldn't be something that is necessarily achievable in that sense that we hope to like thinking about questions of meaningful work. It's not that the job itself is the purpose or direction in your life, but as you and others have so thoughtfully
written about, it's what is it about that job? What is it about the work you do in your community or elsewhere that you find really directing you from one day to the next? I think it's really helpful to even just break it down into those kind of three major buckets that you talked about in terms of self defining, in terms of the engaging and energizing, and in terms of that future and forward focus. I think that it's very helpful to think about purpose in that specific
context. Now, I know that one of the key ideas that you bring to the topic is that the purpose should be, it has to be adaptable, accessible, and actionable and kind of use those three a's. Can you tell us about what that means? Yeah, let's start there. It's something that's really been at the forefront of what we've done for the last five to ten years of all along my career. We get these critiques, we get these questions around, like, okay, this seems
very lofty. This seems like something that only a privileged few can really focus on, even though our research shows that's not the case empirically. I can do all of the studies I want on the modest association between income and purpose. So the modest association of other indicators of privilege and purpose. I very much sympathetic to these points of the way we often portray purpose in the broader literature, leaves it as something that is very difficult or very big, lofty,
instrumentable, insurmountable. Cut that out. Insurmountable. When it comes to how do we possibly think that we could go this far to do these big things? And I get it personally, because for a while, I felt very much the same way. When I was first introduced to this idea of purpose, way back when. It seemed like something that was like, okay, this seems great, but geez, I don't even have a clue how to start personally
down this route. And what we've been moving more towards is this notion that those kinds of purposes are great. Nobody is going against the idea that if you can go impact the world, make these big,
bold changes in the world, that's phenomenal. But for most of us, myself included, those kinds of purposes can in fact be a bit jarring or maybe lead me to be less willing to engage that when we think about some of the exemplars of purposeful activity, like the big popular names of people that you and other like you and everyone else might come to as like, oh, that person's definitely has a purpose.
It may be so impactful of like, major political figures, major social justice figures, that those kinds of things just seem totally out of reach. And I shut down as a result. So, with that in mind, we've been trying to inform the field about what is really needed when it comes to purposeful living. And this comes from years of literature and our own work, which shows it's not necessarily those kinds of aims that you quote, unquote need in order for purpose to have a positive impact on your life.
Instead, if you think about it more in terms of feeling a sense of direction, feeling a sense that you have this thing that gets you from one day to the next, like we were talking about. Feeling a sense that you have some kind of goals and aims that provide definition to you as a person. That's the critical component for predicting positive
well being and positive development. So, to give you some examples of this, we use a variety of different measures in which we ask people to self report on to what extent do you feel that you have a sense of purpose and direction in life? To what extent do you feel like you are not someone who is aimless in your life, but you continue forward? And those responses are what matters
when we're predicting big things down the road. So our work in our lab has shown people with a higher sense of purpose tend to have reduced risk for things like mild cognitive impairment, things like early mortality. They tend to have better well being. They tend to be better at answering these questions of who am I? And these identity development issues and crises that go along with it.
And based on that wealth of literature, what we've been trying to get out there is thinking about purpose as a more accessible thing, that you don't need to have this big, lofty purpose, which is often how it's portrayed, like in movies and films. Instead, if you can think about it more in terms of this sense of purpose, that's the critical element when it comes to adaptive development in your work, in your life, and in health.
And that also is something that is much more actionable in terms of, it's easier for me to get people around, you know, think about what. What activities gave you a sense of direction in the last month, rather than the very daunting efforts of, like, write a purpose statement about what that big thing is. And I know there's a lot of value in these purpose statements. We still do them like, it's not, I'm guilty of this as well when we do these kinds of studies.
But what I want to get out there is in terms of something that can be actionable and accessible to people. It's thinking about that sense of purpose that seems to really be valuable. And to give one quick anecdote on this front, I see this very clearly when talking with different groups. So I've given talks to retirement communities here in St. Louis and recently gave a talk to an alumni association gathering of everybody from however many years back comes back to Washu and gets, for some
reason wants to come here and talk about purpose. I don't know why, but I, when I talk to this group, you start with the scientific definition and everybody just kind of shuts down. And then afterwards it's like, okay, let me tell you what you really need or what's really important. And what was amazing was just like, you can literally see the people start perking up when you show them the items of our scales, when you show them to what, what matters for predicting adaptive development.
And so many people afterwards came up and said, like, that was the key. Like, that was the click, like the light bulb for them of, I think of one alum who was retired and kind of like, I don't know if this is really for me. And then afterwards he was like, oh, actually, I get it now. Like, I don't like, particularly in retirement, it's very daunting to think about what is the big lofty, world changing thing I'm going to do in my remaining time.
But instead, if I focus on this sense of purpose, it's something that is a lot more adaptive for you and also something that you can actually wrestle with in a way that, again, my goal is to be focusing on adaptive development and promoting positive human development. And in that sense, it matters a lot more if you can feel a sense of purpose than answer this big, bold, like, what is the purpose that you're going to do that
changes the world in that sense? So we've got this big p purpose, which is possibly not so helpful, and then we've got this smaller p purpose, which really gives us a sense of purpose, a sense of direction, a sense of forward momentum, a sense of being energized, a sense of being personally attached, something that's meaningful, that is helping guide us, but isn't necessarily this giant, overarching thing that all of us need to be focused on.
Yeah, I think that's a great way of the big P. Purpose is a great aspirational goal, but also can really shut down the conversation a lot of the time, too. I certainly know a lot of people who talk about purpose anxiety when we talk about meaning
and purpose, especially in a work context. I was having a conversation yesterday with somebody who leads a big team and wanted to try to bring more purpose into the work that he was doing because he thought he should, because it feels like having purpose is a really good thing for work. We know that purpose is really important at work. And yet every single time that he asked his team, you know, what. What do you feel is your purpose? What, what? You know, there were, there are either crickets
or, or actually the anxiety. Like, I don't. I have no idea. Or people would make things up just to try to please him. And he got really stuck trying to figure out, how do I do this? What does it mean to actually think about purpose at work? So I'm kind of curious, even when you hear that, what are some of the ways that you help people identify the smaller p sense of purpose as opposed to this big, immobilizing, anxiety inducing, like, what's your giant big
p price? Yeah, that's such a good, good question and a great real life example of what happens here of we get this question a lot and literally gave a talk two weeks ago where the first question was like, well, what do we do about helping people who are stressed out about their big p purpose and so forth? And I think part of it, we try to think of it as coming up with the building blocks to the big p purpose of.
What are the scenes that we could plant around using, for instance, some techniques that are common to clinicians and therapists around. Like, tell us about what you did this week, and tell us about which of those things made you feel this way, which of those things made you feel this way. And using that, like, the feeling as information, giving people the opportunity to, like, speak to, you know, even if they don't say the magic p word.
And in fact, most people may not say purpose when they're talking about these kinds of conversations. Like, what gave you direction? What made you feel energized? Or what. What was the thing that you wanted to schedule your day around and kind of start there? Because it's a lot easier to think about this in terms of momentary states of purpose, which then can be built into habits of purpose. Where to give an example from my life. As I said, it took me a long time to really figure out what
was the guiding element for me. And it was around the time of the pandemic where it became very clear what were the things about work that I missed and didn't miss as a result of being stuck here in my apartment
and not being in the workplace. And for the sake of keeping my job, I won't mention the things that I didn't miss, but for the sake of keeping my job, the things that really matter more are those things that I now focus on when I set up my schedule of like, you know, these activities can wait in order to provide more mentorship, to be there with my students, to have these kinds of conversations I talked about at the opening.
And I think that's maybe the best way of trying to enact some of these things in the workplace of, rather than what is your purpose in life? Let's talk about this big existential thing. It's more around, okay, what are the things that to your work and others matter the most to you? What are the activities that are the most meaningful to you? And yes, we recognize that you're still going to have to do some of the things that you don't care as much about in the workplace. Every job
does. But are there ways that we can maybe schedule it so that you're doing more of those things rather than the things that you don't? You're not as excited by, you're not as interested in. And that's been one of our recent efforts. So we have a few different activities ongoing here at Washington University where we're trying to help out undergraduate and graduate students to figure out what are the things that matter the most to them.
And they do these kinds of activities of, like, tell me over the last week, tell me over the last month, what were the things that kind of sparked for you and I? Another reason I bring this up is to your question. One of the big things that we try to do to help quell anxieties is to have people have these conversations amongst themselves. Because the biggest thing that we find is nobody is willing to have this kind of conversation because
of all the anxiety that you're talking about. Like, how many times do you talk to your family, to your friends? Like, here's my purpose and direction in life. It's like, no one has that conversation usually. But if we start to have these talks where students get to talk with one another about, like, you know, I found this exercise to be hard, but I found this exercise to be a
little easier. They're building those support bases for themselves, and they're building that scaffolding to go do the big explorations, to go do the big things down the road. And it's not something that necessarily needs to be university tied, that when we start to open the door and the very first module that we do of these exercises is literally just like, I promise you, no one has this figured out. I promise you, you're not alone.
And that's another reason why the big P purpose could be so daunting, is like, oh, gosh, everyone else has it figured out in the world today. We're selling books for those few people that don't have it yet. And there's a whole, like, there's a whole pop psych literature around trying to help you develop and find a purpose when it's more important to just start thinking about it and start having these conversations with others. And,
and I think that's something else. Wherever I, if you're an employer coming to your employees and saying, write down what your purpose in life is, that's not going to get the conversation going. What's going to get the conversation going is having some of these more modest activities, these more scheduling your life activities, and then have people talk amongst themselves about this matters more to me as an employee of this company versus
this doesn't. And someone else could be like, oh, yeah, you know, I kind of get that. I kind of understand, because the most important thing for the purpose anxiety is having the scaffolding and the social connections along the way to help you, to help you explore. As you're,
as you're speaking. There's a, there's a few things that, that really speak to me, but, but one of the, one of the things that I'm just hustling through right now, as I hear you, is I think in most organizations that I've been a part of, when people are talking about purpose, they're usually talking about a big central organizational
purpose, right? Like when, when organizations are trying to craft purpose statements or say, this is what our organization stands for, this is what we're doing, and expect that those things are potentially going to be meaningful for people at the individual level. And, and that is often big p purpose of those organizations. Often many organizations
struggle to even identify what that big p purpose is. But there's also a huge disconnect often between those big p purposes and of the organization and the actual individuals who are working there and what that might mean to an individual who is working there. And quite frankly, even a reluctance or fear of asking about an individual's purpose and how it might relate to those big p purposes of the organization.
I'm just curious whether you have any thoughts about the relationship between organizational purpose and individual purpose. Such a good question. And, yeah, we've been wrestling with this about how valuable or beneficial are those kinds of organizational purpose statements? Because I know I do a lot of work, I connect a lot with our business school, and of course, that's a big topic for them, of discussing organizational purpose
and so forth. And on one hand, you know, it's, it's great to see organizations focusing, or at least stating a focus on things that are beyond profitability and the numbers and trying to do more beyond that. But what often comes up is, are these questions around, like, well, where do I fit into that purpose
personally? And I think what's tricky is trying to come up with an organizational purpose, then that is specific enough that it doesn't seem super vague of like, we're creating good for the world or good stuff, but then finding something that's not so specific that it leaves the employees out of the picture. And that's the struggle that I have seen when it comes to organizational
purpose of so many organizations. Like, we've reviewed purpose statements from companies before, and so many of them seem just, like, unnecessarily vague to the point of, like, what does this even mean? Or what are you actually standing for other than you felt you needed to put a purpose statement on your website? So I think this is where the drawback of some of those statements are, of trying to strike that right balance of vagueness and specificity.
But what might be more beneficial than this single statement is walking through how you're going to walk the walk, what kinds of activities that you're doing towards that end, which not only legitimizes the statement in a lot of ways beyond what's just on the website, but when you start breaking it down into some of the activities the group or the company can do towards that end,
that's where people might start to see themselves a bit more. And, you know, we've seen this personally with some of the work that we do in community engagement here at Washington University. We, we come in with like, hey, we're a group that focuses on purpose and community engagement. What can we do to help? And the group that we're talking to is like, I have no idea what you like. It's nice of you to reach out, but I don't know what's
going on here. And then it's like, okay, let me tell you some of the things that we could do of like, do you want us to come talk to your group? Do you want us to come do any kind of outreach? Is it a case that there's some kind of a survey or something that you would like from us? Is it the case that we could provide handouts or kind of scientific writing into
every day speak for you? And. And that's when the conversations actually start, is when we start breaking it down into, you know, we're not here to give everyone a purpose. We're here to do these kinds of things that might, you know, spark something for some people
some of the time. And I think that would be more beneficial for organizations beyond, you know, what is the, like, saying a purpose statement is one thing, but here are the actual activities or the advances that we're doing, and that's where people can start to see, like, oh, my personal purpose is, you know, focusing on helping others in need, and that activity from the company fits with my personal purpose.
And just to give one more point on this, you know, what's, what's been interesting is at times when working with industrial organizational psychologists and people who are more focused on the workplace, companies often want this kind of meaningful work, this kind of purposeful work to be part of their discussion, but only maybe to a point of, we sometimes get this conversation around, like, well, what if the employee just doesn't see any opportunity for
meaningful work in this occupation? And they don't like my answer, which is usually like, maybe that employee doesn't belong in your. Or, like, this might not be the right job for that person if they're not seeing themselves in it, which, of course, the organization doesn't like is. And it's like, oh, it's a bunch of turnover. We don't want to, like, we don't want people leaving us.
But ultimately, to your question, that's kind of the extreme case of if you can't find yourself, if you can't find how your purpose aligns with the job, then it might be time to think about something else or to think about another occupation.
And if organization is really dedicated towards producing meaningful work, if an organization is really dedicated towards having employees that view themselves in the organization, you also have to be okay with the fact that there are going to be people who might leave for that exact reason. It's not a ton, but that kind of turnover is, is only natural as people continue to figure out what their direction, what their purpose really is.
A few things that I just want to, I want to highlight from this conversation because I think that they, they're really useful. They're really useful. And in my experience, working with organizations around purpose and meaning more broadly or well being or all of these kind of interrelated topics, dialogue is probably the number one
answer. The thing that we can try to do is create space and opportunities for people to find different ways of talking to one another, with one another about all of these things that feel really often difficult to talk about. They're not actually as hard to talk about once you start to talk about, but it can feel very difficult to start having these conversations. And so I feel like that dialogue is one important part.
Another important part that I'm hearing you talk about is moving from the dialogue into some sort of a, well, what can this mean for me? What's the relationship between, for example, this big organizational purpose that we may have cultivated and what it is that I'm doing on a daily basis? What are the things that allow me to walk that talk in some way, or how do I
make this particularly meaningful for me? There's a lot of work in the job crafting space that Jason Burke and Jane Dutton and many others have done that are about trying to say, hey, how can I rethink my tasks? How can I do things in a slightly different way that are going to be more aligned to those things that I care about? Like, for example, my purpose, the dialogue, the moving to action, the giving people a sense of, hey, how do I make steps in the right direction? This all feels very
useful. Things to be able to do at work and also things that most managers, most teams, most organizations are never trained to do, are never provided tools to do. Feel scary, potentially to do seem like theyre risk, and there's risk in terms of, you know, people wanting to walk away because they're having these conversations. Yeah,
yeah, I think you're exactly right. And frankly, we see very clear examples of this, like in, in our occupation, where there are so many, like, good things about academia, but there are also so many stressful, problematic issues around academia.
And it's the case that when we see graduate students and whether they're willing to or interested in continuing on in academics, going on to be a professor, it often is helping them to realize the importance of striking that balance where it can't just be, I need to publish everything on the face of the earth and I need to do, like, all I care about is making my cv, my resume look really good because that ultimately is going to lead to burnout and difficulty of not
seeing yourself in academia versus what we try to do now. In my lab is thinking about it more from okay, you're coming to me wanting to do something in your community, wanting to do something in your work that matters to the community. And what we have to do is strike a balance of, yes, youll need some of this publication stuff, youre going to need more work on the presentations, but also being able to do some of
these things in order to do some of these things. So again, as we said all along, not everything in your job is going to be something that feels connected or meaningful to you.
But if you can strike the balance of being able to both build up your career or build up your cv, build up your resume, while also inserting some of those activities along the way that are important to you, of reaching out to the community, working on social justice, whatever it may be, that's where you can see a lot more opportunities to try to find yourself, to try to find a cultivate that purpose and direction in your life. Let's dive into
kind of the opposite extreme of that. I think that something that is certainly, I observe quite a bit that some people find great amounts of purpose in ultimately seeing the incongruences in their work and trying to protest against them in certain ways. So I know that one of the things that you've been thinking about is the idea of different kinds of purposes, one of which is activism, purpose. And so, and so, in many different contexts, in many organizational contexts, people find
meaning in their work. People find a sense of purpose in being an activist within their organization, outside of their organization. Tell us a little bit about what you're discovering about activist purpose. Yeah, it's an interesting avenue, as I mentioned at the start, like, it's something that really came about, that it was student led from my former graduate student doctor Megan Wolk, that she was really dedicated to thinking about how to consider these kinds of issues within
purpose. And surprisingly, a fault of the purpose literature up to the last few years is that social activism doesn't necessarily fit well into our taxonomy of things, that the way we've often categorized or thought about different purposes. You could talk about it as kind of a more pro social helping others thing, but you highlight exactly why it didn't fit well into that area of a lot of people may be working towards initiatives that are directly against some of the policies or against the
structure. So rather than to support the current community or helping to support what's currently out there, it may be in direct conflict with some of the avenues and some of the paths that are out there. And I think another thing that's really valuable about this is, as you've already alluded to, activism occurs in so many different domains of life. Like, we find that individuals who report more of an activist purpose. Excuse me,
we start over. So we find that people who report more of an activist purpose, we find these individuals in different occupations. We find these individuals working in the arts. We find these individuals working in industry. We find these individuals in academia and elsewhere. And importantly, we find some individuals who do this completely outside of their profession, outside of their job.
And it's interesting to hear their stories of how these things weave together in a way that they still feel that they are making a connection. And the way we think about activist purpose is defining it as any kind of life direction, that is, toward making change in society, making a change, making a difference in society, which, again, the definition alone leads you to, well, is that pro social for you? Is that antisocial for others? It becomes kind of tricky.
And what's fascinating about this type of purpose for me is that it's one in which we see the greatest element of struggle and psychological turmoil going on, of, you know, when we ask people and they say, like, oh, my purpose in life is to help others, or my purpose in life is to succeed at work, those things tend to be pretty uniformly linked to positive, like, greater life satisfaction,
less depression, less anxiety. When it comes to activist purpose, we do see some of those benefits that it's still linked to things like greater hope, greater, some cases greater satisfaction with life, but it also can be positively related to things like greater depressive symptoms, greater anxiety. And it's very much because if you have this direction in life to change something in society, you're probably very anxious and very stressed about that thing that you want to change
in society. And maybe an experience like, it may be personal experiences of marginalization, personal experience of discrimination from others. We hear this at times from individuals who have second hand experiences of these marginalizing, marginalizing effects of society. And that stresses individuals out to the point that
they want to do something. So what I find really like getting back to our discussion of scaffolding and support, this is one of those purposes that may be most reliant on having some kind of a support base, because it is so difficult to do this kind of work, to have this kind of direction for your life if you don't have people
in your life who agree with it. And, like, it's almost a, not a catch 22, but it's in that realm of, like, you're doing something that may conflict with others around you, and yet you need those others around you to support you. So what we've been trying to do is see where that support comes from, where it may not be every level of your social hierarchy is supporting you, but you've got someone in your life, or you've got some aspect of society that's supporting your aims and direction in life.
And we're still like, this is very early on, but we're working on this in terms of how this will link to both kind of political and civic engagement. But also to your point, we're currently engaged in a paper where I were asking about this within the workplace and seeing do people who view themselves as making a difference in the workplace also view themselves as like, activists? Because that label
does insinuate something. And we're having to be very careful around the language, just like with purpose, like saying an activist, it elicits something in your representation that, unfortunately, is not always a positive stereotype or positive perception for people of
what is the typical activist. So the language here matters, and we're just starting to scratch the surface around the fact that some people may view themselves as making a difference in their workplace, but not see themselves as activists for that exact reason. But yeah, I mean, it connects back to some of the things that you described at the very beginning of this conversation about identity and the
relationship between identity and purpose. And what do I see myself as, and what's important to me?
Just a note on the relational piece. I think it's a really fascinating topic around the ways in which activism will continue to use that word for the time being, both and just doing things that are deeply meaningful in general, and doing things that you think are really morally important, the ways in which those things both create a sense of belonging and connection to other people, but also the ways that those things potentially tear us
apart and create a great deal of isolation and loneliness from people
who could otherwise provide a great deal of support. And we'll be talking in this podcast later in the season with Kerry Oldberger, who's done a whole bunch of work, looking at some of the boundary inhibition that exists when people are engaged in deeply meaningful work, and the ways in which that work can really erode boundaries in your life, unless the other people who are important in your life also share a sense of committed purpose and values, that when there is that shared commitment,
that activism, that meaningful work, that propensity towards just obsessively, passionately diving into a topic brings you together. But when there's an incongruence between that passion or purpose or values, it actually rips you apart. And, and so that's an interesting thing to think about. Who are you surrounding
yourself with? It's a great point. And I started this conversation by saying it's fun to see all the different directions that people have taken and they somehow all kind of come back to that point of thinking about your romantic partner. Which romantic partner is going to validate your purpose or even know what it is? It's frightening how many couples we're talking to where it's like they have no idea what their partner's direction
or anything is. And now in this case, like thinking about is it your family, is it your workplace? Where is it that gives you that opportunity to connect? And I love the point that you just raised there of like, it's tricky because back to why we can't really define purpose. It often is something, or it should be something that's so deeply personal that no one has, like no two people are going to have the exact same
purpose. So how do you build support around something that is personally you, but kind of connected to some other things that some other people might be doing? So its a lifelong crisis in some ways of trying to find those people around you. Yeah right. I mean, it again connects back to this question of identity. Who am I? Whats important to me, really existential question where
one size fits none, right? Like it really does require each of us to be able to dig deep and understand what might be important and also recognize that digging too deep and asking too many of those questions can also then again lead to the purpose anxiety and the immobilization and like, oh my God, I can't do any of this at all. So finding that balance. But I. How important dialogue is in all of it.
Yeah. And starting that conversation again, whether it's with students, partners, workplace associates, whoever it is, just having the conversation is such an important part of all of this. I feel like I could probably keep asking you questions for another 4 hours. That would make for a very long podcast. So I'm going to wrap us up. But before I do, let me ask, do you think there's any other major topic or question that I should have asked you today about purpose or meaningful work?
No, I think we touched upon so many important part of the plan, meaningful things about what is important to consider when you're thinking about your purpose and your direction in the workplace. And as I always say, like whenever people ask me what to do, it's, you know, start thinking about it, start crap, like figuring out what it is during your day and not like you hit upon. The most difficult part is all this
anxiety which often shuts down the conversation. Which often shuts down the mental conversation inside your head. Like that's too much. I can't deal with that right now. So I love what you're doing. I love what this podcast is doing on that front in general. Thank you Pat. Are there places that you would point people if people want to know more about the work that you're doing or your lab is doing? So we have finally updated our lab website, which only took me like
15 years to actually have a decent website. So please feel free to reach out to to the Path Path Lab website at Washington University. And in addition, hopefully in the future there's going to be some links to some of the podcasts and such that we've been doing along the way, but some of those are still in the processing stage. So go there and hopefully there'll be more opportunities for you in the future. Thank you for joining us for another episode of meaningful work matters.
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