A growing body of research suggests our social-psychological health matters when it comes to health and longevity. For example, studies have found that people who are more satisfied with life or have a stronger sense of purpose live longer than those who don’t.

But do those two factors matter so much for longevity when you consider other ones, like your age or gender, or whether you’re a smoker or drinker or have a chronic health condition? How much does life satisfaction and purpose protect your health? A new study aimed to find out—and their answer reveals the power of purpose in shaping human life.

“Purpose in life remained significant in all of our analyses, while life satisfaction didn’t,” says lead study author Frank Martela of Aalto University, Finland. “That suggests that purpose is the more reliable predictor of longevity.”

Purpose vs. satisfaction

In this study, researchers drew on data from almost 6,000 adults who’d participated in the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study between 1994 and 1996. These middle-aged participants had reported on their physical health, overall life satisfaction, relationships, and work status. They’d also provided information about their weight, chronic diseases, alcohol use, and smoking habits.

Finally, they reported on their sense of purpose by saying how much they agreed with statements like “I live life one day at a time and do not really think about the future”; “I sometimes feel as if I have done all there is to do in life”; or “Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them.”

By using national databases, the researchers knew that 1,857 participants had died before 2022. So, by looking at all participants’ life-satisfaction and purpose-in-life ratings, the researchers could run some analyses to see if higher purpose and satisfaction were tied to living longer.

What they found was illuminating. Without considering any other factors, a person’s life satisfaction was not related directly to how long they lived. On the other hand, people who reported having a stronger purpose in life were more likely to be alive in 2023 than people who didn’t.

For Martela, this meant having purpose in life could be more relevant for your longevity than life satisfaction—which may be dependent on other things.

“You might think that there is a confounding variable to explain this, but life satisfaction wasn’t significant for longevity, while purpose in life was,” he says.

How purpose might extend life

To get at when purpose and life satisfaction may be relevant for influencing one’s longevity, Martela and his colleagues ran several additional analyses.

First, they considered a participant’s demographics—a combination of their age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, marital status, and more, all of which may affect mortality. For example, women and married people tend to live longer, while African Americans and less educated people tend to live shorter lives, in general.

They found that, no matter one’s overall demographics, purpose in life still mattered for longevity. They also found that people benefitted at all ages from both greater purpose and life satisfaction, though the oldest participants tended to benefit slightly more than younger participants from having purpose.

Next, his team considered a person’s health risks. Here, they found that, even if a person was at risk for an early death (from being a smoker or suffering from a chronic illness, for example), they lived longer if they had greater life satisfaction or purpose in life. The association was weaker, but still significant.

When they considered people’s own self-reported health, though, the relationship between having a purpose in life and longevity held, while the relationship between life satisfaction and longevity did not. This suggests your life satisfaction may be closely tied to how healthy you feel, says Martela.


“It’s hard to be satisfied with your life if you struggle with your health. So, whether your health is good or bad can have a significant impact on how satisfied you are with your life,” he says. “However, you can have a strong purpose, no matter your health status.”

In a final analysis, Martela and his colleagues tested how a person’s life satisfaction affected the role of purpose on longevity, and vice versa. They found that purpose was still important, no matter one’s life satisfaction—but life satisfaction wasn’t significant if someone had low levels of purpose. This supports the conclusion that purpose is more helpful than life satisfaction for extending one’s life.

Why would purpose in life affect longevity this way? Martela suggests that since purpose involves striving for something meaningful, it’s more active than life satisfaction, which is more of a passive assessment of one’s life situation. Additionally, he thinks purpose might be a kind of coping mechanism, allowing people to get through hard times better than life satisfaction.

That doesn’t mean having life satisfaction isn’t important to longevity at all, he says. But their research suggests that its importance may depend on other things, like your general health, ethnicity, gender, or health risk factors. Purpose in life, on the other hand, may be less dependent on these things, and so worth cultivating for its own sake.

Fortunately, there are ways to deliberately find one’s purpose, even in midlife. And, since we have these tools at our disposal, we should consider developing a sense of purpose at any age, says Martela.

“We should not only focus on life satisfaction but also think about questions related to purpose when we think about our lives,” he says. “A life of purpose can energize and give hope even during those moments when the conditions of one’s life leave one unsatisfied.”