Purpose in life: Viktor Frankl's question and the scale built on it

As a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl noticed that fellow prisoners who still had something waiting for them, a person or a piece of work to finish, often held on longer than those who had lost it. He wrote about this in Man's Search for Meaning, first published in German in 1946, and borrowed a line from Nietzsche: a person with a why to live can bear almost any how.

Our Purpose in Life test takes its name and its starting point from the scale that grew out of Frankl's ideas.

From logotherapy to a questionnaire

Frankl called his approach logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, which he took to mean meaning. Its central claim is that the main human drive is a will to meaning. When that drive is frustrated, people fall into what Frankl called an existential vacuum: boredom, emptiness and a feeling that nothing is worth the effort.

In 1964 James Crumbaugh and Leonard Maholick turned this idea into a measure, the Purpose in Life test (PIL). It has 20 items, and each one sits between two opposite phrases, for example a life that feels empty at one end and a life full of good things at the other. You mark a point from 1 to 7 between them and get one total score.

What our version asks

We wrote the 12 statements ourselves in the spirit of the PIL, so this is a self-reflection tool, not the original questionnaire and not a validated one. Instead of two opposite phrases you see a statement and a seven-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The original gives one total; we split the statements into three scores of four statements each:

• Meaning: whether your life feels significant, for example "I feel that there is a deeper reason why I am alive."
• Purpose: whether you know where you are going, for example "I have clearly defined goals and objectives in life."
• Satisfaction: how you judge the life you have lived so far, for example "I feel that what I have achieved in life has been worthwhile."

Two statements are scored in reverse. One of them echoes a theme from the original PIL: "If I could choose, I would prefer never to have been born."

Why purpose gets so much attention

In 1989 Carol Ryff named purpose in life as one of six dimensions of psychological wellbeing, and it has since been studied for its links with health. In 2014 Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano followed several thousand American adults for more than a decade and found that those who reported a stronger sense of purpose were less likely to die during that time. The study shows a link, not that purpose itself makes people live longer.

How to read your scores

Look at the three scores together. High purpose with low satisfaction often fits busy periods, when you know what you are working towards but are not yet content with what you have. High satisfaction with low purpose can describe a settled stretch where old goals are met and new ones have not appeared. Frankl described three sources of meaning: creating something or doing a deed, experiencing something or loving someone, and the attitude a person takes towards suffering that cannot be avoided. A low purpose score can be a prompt to ask which of these is missing right now.

Your score does not diagnose anything. If you agreed with the statement about never having been born, or if a sense of emptiness has stayed with you for weeks, talk to a doctor or psychologist.

Newer research separates having meaning from looking for it, and the Meaning in Life Questionnaire measures those two separately. If your satisfaction score caught your attention, the Satisfaction with Life Scale looks at that judgement on its own.