Why Chasing Money and Prestige Could Leave You Searching for Purpose

On this episode of The Long View, Jordan Grumet, author and hospice doctor, breaks down how we can understand our purpose, wealth, success, and happiness from his latest book called The Purpose Code: How to unlock Meaning, Maximize Happiness, and Leave a Lasting Legacy.

Here are a few highlights from Grumet’s conversation with Morningstar’s Christine Benz.

Why We Get ‘Purpose Anxiety’

Christine Benz: So you’ve referenced what you call purpose anxiety a couple of times—that people feel some anxiety, discomfort with this idea that they need to find something to do with their lives that is going to have an impact. Can you talk about that purpose anxiety, what it is and why we see that in people?

Jordan Grumet: Sure. I think we get purpose anxiety for two main reasons. One is we’ve been told by society that purpose is this ultimate important thing. And most of us think we have this one big purpose and we either find it and are elated and life is good, or we don’t find it and everything else is lost. So first and foremost, society tells us that purpose is very high stakes. So that leads to a lot of anxiety, especially in people who haven’t really identified what any of those purpose anchors are. That’s number one. The other thing is we have a lot of forces in society today that are trying to sell us a version of purpose. They are trying to get us to co-opt their version of purpose. So who are these people? Well, there are lots of people trying to sell us things. So if you look at influencers and if you go to TikTok or Instagram, you’re going to see all these visions and images of people with six-pack abs, traveling to every country in the world, running seven-figure businesses, and just totally enjoying life. And the reason why they’re creating these images usually is to sell us something. They want us to buy their product. They want us to follow their channels so they get more advertising revenue. They want to tell us that this is how we’re supposed to live life. But the problem is most of us don’t really have agency to do those things.

A lot of us don’t have the genetics to have six-pack abs, nor the time, nor the patience to figure out your diet and exercise, and so on. Most of us are not going to travel all around the world and most of us are not going to run seven-figure businesses. So not only do we have influencers, but we also have marketers and people who are trying to sell us products who are going to sell us all these images of what living the good life looks like and convincing us that the way we get there is by buying their product. And so what this really does is this gives us this high-stakes version of purpose that’s very, very hard to achieve and makes us feel bad when we don’t. And so purpose anxiety is a very real thing. And there are plenty of studies about purpose anxiety and most of them show that up to 91% of people at some point in their life have purpose anxiety. So purpose can really be a force of good. And we talk about that with the health, longevity, and happiness, but it also can be very destructive and make us feel frustrated and lost. And that’s purpose anxiety. And a big reason I think we get to this place is that we traditionally look at purpose wrong. I don’t think purpose is just one thing. I think it’s more likely two things. And one of those things actually is fairly destructive. And the other is much more nurturing.

How to Recognize Positive and Negative Purpose Anxiety

Benz: Well, let’s talk about that then. Let’s talk about both the positive and the negative, destructive one.

Grumet: So I’ve pretty much broken down purpose into two different concepts. One I call big P purpose and the other little P purpose. Now, big P purpose is the more destructive kind. And it’s big audacious purpose really based on goals. And a lot of these goals are very, very difficult goals, like becoming a billionaire, or being president, or if you’re looking at social media, getting those six-pack abs or running that seven-figure business. And part of the problem is we just generally don’t have the agency to do that. So to do these things, you usually have to be the right person at the right time, saying the right things, have the right genetics, and then have a bunch of luck. And so for some of us, it just isn’t meant to be. I loved baseball when I was a little kid, but the likelihood that I was going to become Mickey Mantle and lead the Major League Baseball batting average, just it wasn’t likely. I didn’t have the genetics. I didn’t have the interest. I didn’t have the infrastructure where I lived to develop the skills. So if that was my version of purpose, I most likely was going to at some point be disappointed. So big P purpose is goal-oriented. It’s usually audacious. A lot of times we don’t actually have the agency to achieve it. A lot of times it’s all or nothing. I either make the major leagues or I don’t. There’s very little in between and it’s usually winner take all. So if you want to be president, you know only one person is going to be a president and everyone else loses. And so that’s a very negative way to think about purpose. And if you are basing your happiness on that kind of purpose, most likely you’re going to be disappointed.

Let’s contrast that to what I call little P purpose. Now little P purpose is all process-oriented—process, not the goal. So it’s doing things we love and enjoying the process of doing them regardless of the outcome. This isn’t a very much an abundance mindset. So I think of big P purpose as actually very scarcity-mindset-oriented. Little P purpose is very abundant because there are a million different things we could love doing. It’s not winner takes all. It’s not all or nothing. We don’t have to worry about competing with anyone for scarce resources. And so it’s very difficult to fail little P purpose. So I like to use podcasting as an example because it really makes it clear. I love podcasting and podcasting is my little P purpose. It means the minute I sit in front of the mic to go interview someone, I enjoy that hour no matter what happens. It’s some of the best hours of my day. It has nothing to do with the goal. Like I might have goals of getting that podcast out and having hundreds of thousands of people hear it. But regardless if they hear it or not, I enjoy the process of spending that hour doing that thing. So for me, there’s no way to fail. All I have to do is sit in front of the mic and do it. And that fulfills me.

But let’s switch that around and say I decided to have a big audacious purpose. I wanted to have millions of people download my episodes every month. If that became my version of purpose, I’m not sure I have the agency to do that. I don’t have a group of six people to run my podcast. I don’t have six figures to spend on the podcast. I might not have the inclination or the time or even the skill to get my podcast to that level. So if that’s my goal, most likely I’m going to feel upset and disappointed. And I’m going to spend a lot of time doing things I don’t love doing to serve that goal. I might have to be on social media much more. I might have to interact with a team that I don’t want to lead. These are all the kind of things I don’t love doing. And if I’m lucky enough to hit that goalpost, first and foremost, I spent a lot of my time doing things I didn’t like to do to get there. So 90% of my time was getting to the top of the mountain. If I didn’t enjoy it, that’s 90% of my time I don’t enjoy.

And once you’re there, a lot of times the joy only lasts so long. We know there’s this thing called the hedonic adaption. Basically, after you hit this goal and you’re really happy, within weeks, you kind of fall to your baseline level of happiness. And then you’re looking for the next big goal, or you’re afraid that you’re going to lose what you gained. But either way, the joy doesn’t stick around very long and you’re back to doing things you don’t like doing to get to the next mountain top. And so for me, podcasting very much is little P purpose, because I’m also somewhat goal-agnostic. If I happen to hit those millions of downloads a month, that’s great. But if I don’t, I still really enjoy the process of doing what I’m doing. And I think most of purpose should really be that way.

Are You Stuck on the Treadmill of Success?

Benz: Going back to the treadmill in the book, you had an example of another of your hospice patients, a very successful attorney who was, it sounded like, very much on a treadmill—that one giant achievement led to some other quest. Can you talk about that? Because I do think successful people sometimes fall into that a little bit where they have succeeded a lot, but just kind of continue being success junkies.

Grumet: So Ricky was a very, very successful lawyer. And he started out at the bottom of his law school class, just barely made it out, couldn’t get a job in big law, so had to start his own firm, built it up, became one of the biggest law firms around. And even to his dying day, when he got a terminal illness, it wasn’t good enough, he still had to sell it for the most amount of money. He was an achievement junkie. And this really gets back to that discussion of meaning and purpose. A lot of times, if we don’t do the meaning step and we don’t fulfill ourselves with the sense of enough, we don’t tell ourselves a heroic story in which we are always enough, even when we were young and went through these traumas and we got through them, so we were enough. People like Ricky never came to terms with their sense of meaning.

They never felt enough. So then they move into purpose in such a way that they’re trying to use purpose to prove that they’re enough. And so these achievements become goalposts because they’re desperately trying to prove that they’re good enough, that they’re a wonderful enough person. But every time they reach this achievement, it doesn’t last long because you can’t purpose your way to enough. That’s really a meaning problem. And again, that gets back to people like Elon Musk, who’s achieved maybe more than anyone else in the world, but he doesn’t seem like a particularly happy person. Those people are trying to achieve their way to enough, achieve their way to happiness, and it just doesn’t work. That’s a meaning problem. It has to do with your thoughts and your interpretation of your past.

How to Disentangle Money and Prestige

Benz: Yeah, it seems hard to untangle. I think for a lot of people, a lot of us, you do things that confer prestige and untangling, whether they really matter to you can be difficult. It can be difficult to disentangle prestige and money from things that really have meaning and give you purpose. Can you talk about that? Because it seems like kind of an issue for a lot of us.

Grumet: I think it’s actually a really simple question. We have a limited amount of time on this earth, and winning the game is spending as much time as you can doing things that are purposeful and that fill you up and doing as little time as you can doing things you loathe. So here’s the question: When you’re going after prestige and you’re going after money, do you enjoy the day-to-day activities you’re doing while you’re making it toward that goal? If you enjoy the activities, then you’re really in the midst of little P purpose and you’re doing it exactly right. But if you’re not enjoying your time, if you’re loathing the work or at least finding it not particularly fulfilling, then you’re probably on the wrong path. Now, I’m not Pollyanna about this. Sometimes we do have to get a job we don’t love to make money to support our life. But as we get older and we get more financially stable, we should be minimizing those activities that we loathe and maximizing those activities that we love.

So the calculus is how can you continuously improve over a lifetime until you get to that point where most of your calendar is filled up with these little P purpose joyful things that fulfill you and as little time as possible spent doing these things you don’t like doing in service of something else like money? And so I think we have to ask ourselves that basic question, am I enjoying myself on the way to this achievement? If I’m not, then something’s probably wrong. We should be more goal-agnostic. We don’t have to be goal-phobic. We can still have these great goals. But our joy, our happiness, our sense of purpose can’t depend on whether we reach that goal or not.

Can Money Buy You Happiness?

Benz: You had a super-interesting section in the book about the connection between money and happiness. There had been this often-referenced piece of research that pointed to happiness tapping out at a fairly low level of income. I think it was like $75,000, probably higher if we adjusted for inflation today. But can you talk about what the data say when we look at it in totality? It’s not quite that simple, right?

Grumet: Well, it’s interesting because there have been a number of studies about money and happiness. So one of the first that people always talk about was Kahneman and Deaton. And I think this was like 2012, 2013—but they took a bunch of data that was gathered for something else and retrospectively went through that data and tried to answer the question, does money bring happiness? And they found that indeed, up to a certain point of salary, increasing money, increased happiness. But when you got past, in their case at that time, it was $70,000, the returns were much more minimal after that. Now that was followed up by Matthew Killingsworth, who did another kind of study, which was a little bit better. It was prospective. But what they did is they took a bunch of respondents, and they sent them texts and emails multiple times a day and had them answer these questionnaires, and they did it for weeks or months. And then they took the data and did all their calculations and said, well, it’s not exactly right. People’s sense of happiness can increase with more money if they were the right kind of person who really valued money. And the incremental improvement wasn’t as great the higher you got.

So finally, believe it or not, Kahneman and Killingsworth came together, and they looked at all the data together and came up with similar conclusions to what Killingsworth came up with in 2016. Here’s my problem with this data. This data is very short term. Some of it’s what I call retrospective. Looking at the past as opposed to studying it into the future. A lot of times their assessment of someone’s income and their assessments of someone’s wealth were very short term. It might have been just one assessment or just a few. There is some amazing data about happiness, which is just much deeper and long term. So there’s something called the Harvard Adult Developmental Health Study. This started in the 1900s. It started with like, I don’t know, 500 Harvard students. Eventually they included a bunch of few thousand of their family members. And after that, eventually they included some people in Boston as controls who were not part of Harvard. They started with just questionnaires every other year, but over 80 years, they not only did questionnaires, they did MRIs, they did EEGs, they did blood tests, they did questionnaires of their family members. And they took all of this data. They took data about wealth and income.

And after 80 years, they came to a really bold conclusion about happiness. They found that the biggest thing associated with happiness was not wealth, it was not money, it was not position, it was not achievements. And believe it or not, I’m going to almost contradict myself here. It wasn’t even purpose. What they found was most connected to happiness was interpersonal connection. Interpersonal connections. Now, my argument in The Purpose Code is that little P purpose is one of the greatest ways to develop community and interpersonal connections. And that’s why I also think a lot of the purpose data shows that purpose is also associated with happiness. But ultimately, I think it’s the people we connect with. And the thing is, when you’re involved in little p purpose, it lights you up. And when you become lit up doing something you totally love and enjoy, like a moth to the flame, you attract other people, and they want to collaborate with you. And if they have something to teach you, they want you to be their student. And if they have something to learn from you, they want you to be their teacher.

And you become mentor and mentee. And this is how we build community and connections, which ultimately brings us interpersonal relationships, which I think is what causes happiness. So, honestly, we know this intuitively that money and happiness aren’t connected because we know that some of the happiest countries in the world are actually countries in which people don’t have a lot of money. And there actually have been other studies that show if you take underserved communities and you give everyone the same amount of money, it increases their happiness for a short period of time, but then they fall back to their baseline. Interestingly enough, what probably causes money when it comes to happiness is having more money than those around you. So it’s much more comparative as opposed to money itself increasing happiness.