Analyzing What Makes Life Meaningful

Authors: Ian Kim (Project lead), Ella Hinkle, Logan So, Nikhil Dewitt

A data deep-dive into the purpose-in-life scores of 4,100+ older Americans

Being born as a living, conscious being with the instinct to try to understand the world around us, it is only natural to ask: What exactly is the meaning of life?

It’s a question so vast and fundamental to our very existence, but even just asking it can feel absurd because of how hard it is to give a single, concrete answer to. Yet the underlying answer, however hidden it is to us, is realistically what motivates us, drives us to live each of our lives.

While it may not strike at the very heart of this impossible question, this article will explore around the edges of any definitive answer and examine how various life factors influence one’s perception of how meaningful their lives truly feel.

In the following sections, we analyze datasets from the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a longitudinal study that surveys a representative sample of thousands of older Americans aged 50+ on a wide range of life variables. Using HRS 2022 data, the project specifically evaluated the relationship of monetary assets, physical health, mental health, and social relationships with scores on the Ryff Purpose in Life subscale, a psychometrically validated quantification of one’s sense of meaning in life.

By translating our abstract, intangible perception of what makes us feel we have a direction and meaning to living our day-to-day lives into numbers we can measure, we hope to uncover the life factors we should actually focus on cultivating to make life feel more meaningful.

People often say that money can’t buy happiness; while people with extra income can typically afford more luxuries and have less financial worries, these things can also add stress and anxiety. While people who may have more may feel more meaning in life, their standards may also be much more stringent, especially given that people with many assets often associate with each other.

Instead of just looking at whether assets as a whole correlate with purpose in life, this chart breaks it down into different categories. From here, you can see that while having a significant amount in transportation assets has a positive correlation with purpose in life, having a sizable amount of certificates and bonds has a negative correlation. This makes sense because people who use their money to buy cars and in general use their wealth are satisfied with life while those who have a lot of money locked away are far more anxious.

However, it’s important to note that these correlations are actually quite minimal. Ultimately, both poor people and wealthy people vary significantly in their perceptions on their purpose in life. Poor people can either be satisfied with their income or be resentful of their positions, while rich people can either be content with their sheer amount of wealth or consistently be looking out for more.

People might often associate physical health with purpose in life, with the assumption that engaging in health behaviors and physical activity positively impact longer lifespans, improved motivation, and optimism. While these variables may have some effect on one’s outlook on life, the data provides a surprising insight.

This boxplot details the correlation between those who reported a limitation due to impairment or health issue and its relationship to one’s reported purpose in life. Specifically, it highlights how individuals who are limited in their everyday lives by physical factors actually reported slightly higher average purpose in life scores than those without such limitations. While the difference is marginal, it challenges the common assumption that improved physical health positively correlates with a greater sense of purpose.

These findings suggest that purpose may not be dependent on one’s physical ability or freedom from health struggles. Instead, individuals facing physical challenges may be more likely to reflect inward, deeply consider their core values, and look for meaning in something greater outside of their immediate circumstances. Without the distractions of having an active physical lifestyle, it seems that some may turn to spiritual reflection or find deeper appreciation in the relationships and small joys in life.

Though in a different way, mental health acts just as much of an integral aspect to our well-being as physical health. Only, mental health is even more directly tied to shaping our intrinsic perception of ourselves and the world around us. In general, people associate problems of believing life is not worth living to poor mental health, so we hypothesize mental health conditions connect to a lower perception of meaning in life.

To test this proposition, we also conducted an analysis on the relationship of mental health with sense of meaning in life. In particular, we explored how the traditional mental health conditions of anxiety and depression seemed to influence purpose in life scores.

This contour plot visualizes the relationship between people’s measured anxiety and sense of meaning in life from respective psychological test metrics. An overall slight negative trend between the two variables is indicated, as lower anxiety scores progressively concentrate more towards higher purpose in life scores.

In addition, this boxplot compares the distributions in purpose in life scores of people who did & did not experience feelings of depression for 2+ weeks in a row in the past year. As might be expected, statistically on average, the purpose in life scores from the group that experienced depressive symptoms were significantly lower than the group that didn’t experience them.

Overall, mental health conditions, in particular depression, hold negative predictions for one’s feeling of meaning in life. This especially lines up with what might be expected from depression, as it presumably would lead one to devolve into a darker, more nihilistic state of mind about the value of their life and make them feel life is less meaningful compared to people who are not depressed.

Familial bonds impact one’s life from the moment one is born. Many psychological studies have shown that one’s family affects one’s ideologies, romantic relationships, and personality. Along these lines, family could also impact one’s meaning in life.

In the leave-behind survey, there are 7 questions relating to the “quality” of the respondent’s immediate family. Here, quality means how much family members contribute to an individual’s well-being. Each respondent had an average family quality score calculated from these seven questions. A score from 1–2 was considered low, 2–3 medium, and 3–4 high. Below, these groups were binned and then plotted as boxplots against the respondents’ meaning in life score.

According to the above graph, the respondents with high family quality have a higher distribution of meaning in life scores when compared with medium and low family qualities. However, there doesn’t appear to be much difference between the low and medium distributions.

To verify the findings from the boxplots, we conducted a three-way t-test between the three groups based on the ideas in the graph. After applying the Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons and using a one-sided alternative hypothesis that high family quality is greater than lower levels, the differences in mean outcomes between high and low, as well as high and medium family quality groups, were statistically significant. The difference between the low and medium groups was not. This supports the findings from the graph that individuals with a higher family quality score tend to have a higher sense of their meaning of life.

Lastly, broadly speaking, a human being’s personality defines everything that makes them innately unique and manifests in how they think, feel, and behave to interact with the world around them.

The Big Five model is widely accepted as the most scientifically valid framework to capture all major aspects of human personality. The five dimensions of personality represented in the model are openness to experience (measuring curiosity and imagination), conscientiousness (measuring self-discipline and organization), extraversion (measuring sociability and boldness), agreeableness (measuring interpersonal warmth and cooperativeness), and neuroticism (measuring moodiness and emotional reactivity).

Scoring high or low on each of these traits isn’t supposed to be inherently good or bad, as defined by the creators of the model. While noting this disclaimer, we still wanted to analyze if there were certain traits that predict a higher sense of meaning in life, given personality is indispensably important in defining who we are.

In our panel plot of the linear relationship between purpose in life scores and each dimension of the Big Five model, we found mild-to-moderate positive correlations for openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, and agreeableness, along with a mild-to-moderate negative correlation for neuroticism.

The positive correlations with agreeableness and extraversion overlap with our previous finding that better familial bonds predict higher purpose in life, and the negative correlation with neuroticism aligns with how mental health conditions predict lower purpose in life.

Overall, these correlations suggest that the traits likely tied to a sense of meaning are those that promote exploration of life (higher openness), self-discipline (higher conscientiousness), and positive social bonds (higher extraversion & agreeableness), while higher neuroticism might pose a barrier by increasing emotional turbulence.

In closing, we found that owning higher-valued assets largely lacked a positive relationship with purpose in life scores, while physical limitations held no negative relationship with purpose in life. More in-line with expectations however, we did find that mental health conditions and suboptimal family quality predicted significant decreases in purpose in life scores. On top of this, personality traits associated with self-discipline, exploration, and social connection seem to connect to higher purpose in life.

All of these findings suggest that focusing on improving mental wellness and social bonds is more important than increasing the monetary value of our assets or lacking physical limitations for making our lives meaningful. As for answering what the meaning of life is, for us humans, our analyses suggest that it is likely tied to our identity as mentally driven creatures who enjoy connecting with other humans and exploring the world around us.

Ultimately, defining who we fundamentally are at our core and why we came to be in this world in the first place is hard and outside the scope of this article. But what we choose to build into the story that is our lives, particularly mental drive and supportive relationships, can still create the raw material of a life worth living and worth meaning.

Health and Retirement Study, (HRS 2022 Core Early Release) public use dataset. Produced and distributed by the University of Michigan with funding from the National Institute on Aging (grant number NIA U01AG009740). Ann Arbor, MI, (2025).

Mahardika, Andri T. Stylized white-dressed woman hovering in water. July 26, 2024. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/vectors/girl-anime-water-digital-art-8922722/.