Do People Think About Meaning and Purpose All the Time?

Or was that just me?

“What’s your meaning? What’s your purpose in life?” I swear to you that I heard those questions over and over again as a kid, especially in my teenage years growing up in an evangelical youth group. I don’t know if asking a 15-year-old to ruminate constantly on meaning and purpose is necessarily a good thing. I feel like it may have caused me to have an existential crisis or two when I was in high school. I distinctly remember having a full-on emotional breakdown in my truck when I was a junior because so many people in my church had told me that “God had made me for a special purpose,” and I only felt like I was going to be a big disappointment.

I was thinking back on that time in my life the other day and wondering if everyone was so obsessed with meaning and purpose like teenage Ryan. This is a common theme in my thinking, by the way: “Was I just a weird kid, or was it totally normal to be thinking these thoughts?” That’s probably a big motivation for this whole newsletter, really. And today, I actually have a really good answer to this question about meaning and purpose.

Pew included a question on their Religious Landscape Survey that was really simple: “How often do you think about the meaning and purpose of life?” The response options ranged from “never” to “at least once a week.” This was absolutely an example of a time when I had zero idea how folks would respond to a question like that.

Come to find out, lots of people seem to be ruminating on meaning and purpose on a regular basis. Nearly half the sample (47%) said that this was a thought they had at least once a week. (As an aside, I think the response options should be expanded to include an option for “every day,” but that’s neither here nor there.) But the distribution of responses to this question certainly tilted in the direction of higher frequency—two-thirds of respondents said that they thought about meaning and purpose at least on a monthly basis.

That means that very few people are at the bottom end of the distribution. Only 3% said that they never thought about the meaning and purpose of life, and another 12% said it was a seldom occurrence. In other words, almost all American adults are thinking about these “big picture” philosophical questions on a pretty regular basis.

The next logical step here is bringing age into the equation. I was always under the impression that thoughts of meaning and purpose were especially prominent when you were trying to navigate the big decisions in life—where to go to college, what kind of job to work in, who to marry, etc. Then, once your life got settled, questions of meaning and purpose began to fade.

Yeah, that hunch about how the world works is pretty much incorrect based on this data. Among the oldest folks in the dataset (those born before 1950), the share who thought about meaning and purpose every week was 49%. Just 18% chose the seldom/never options. And honestly, those percentages don’t change that much at all when looking at younger birth cohorts. Among folks born in the 1970s, 46% are thinking about meaning and purpose every week—that’s just three points less than the oldest respondents.

You do see that “weekly” number decline just a little bit among younger folks, but it’s not by a huge amount. Among respondents who were born in the early 2000s, 44% were thinking about meaning and purpose every week. That’s five points lower than those born sixty years earlier. But then an even bigger share (24%) say that they think about these topics every month. So, if you add together the monthly and weekly shares among the youngest cohort, it’s 68%. For the oldest respondents, it’s 64%.

Taken together, I just don’t know if it’s reasonable to conclude that existential questions become more or less commonplace as we age. In reality, it doesn’t seem like it makes much of a difference overall.

You know what time it is, though—we have to throw religion into the mix.

Now, I don’t really know what I expected when I pulled this bit of analysis together, but I was surprised by how clear the results were from this question about meaning and purpose. Atheists are easily the least inclined to think about these types of questions. Only 26% of them said that this was a weekly concern of theirs—that was 21 points lower than the full sample and nine points lower than the next group in line (Buddhists). You can see that agnostics are near the top of the graph, too. They’re in the same general neighborhood as Buddhists, Jews, and those who identify as nothing in particular. But it’s undoubtedly true that non-religious folks are thinking about these questions a whole lot less than the average American.

Which means that a lot of really religious groups can be found at the other end of the graph. The two groups that think about these existential questions the most are Latter-day Saints and Black Protestants—two-thirds are thinking about this stuff on a weekly basis. Then there’s a bit of a gap before evangelicals show up at 58%. But it’s fascinating to me how there’s a clear connection between religious groups that have a high level of engagement and groups that also think about meaning and purpose a whole bunch. It’s like those two things run hand in hand with each other.

Let me combine the last two graphs on religious affiliation and age of respondent into a single bit of simplified analysis. I’ll use just two religious groups—Christians and the nones—and focus on the oldest two birth cohorts and the youngest two as well.

The group that clearly thinks about meaning and purpose infrequently is older nones. Just 28% said it was on their minds every week. Meanwhile, 34% said that they didn’t think about these questions even on a yearly basis. Older Christians are completely the opposite of that—they are basically twice as likely to think about these issues on a weekly basis (54%). It’s wild to think that older folks can be so incredibly different in how much they think about purpose and meaning.

When looking at younger folks, the divide between Christians and the non-religious is a whole lot smaller. Among Christians born in 1990 or later, 51% are thinking about meaning and purpose every single week, compared to 39% of the non-religious. The gap here is 12 percentage points. It was 26 points when comparing these two groups in the older age cohort.

But here’s something else worth flagging—older Christians think about meaning and purpose with greater frequency than younger Christians. Among the non-religious, it’s the exact opposite. Retired nones rarely think about these questions, while younger nones are considering them often. I don’t have a good explanation for that, honestly.

Why would a Latter-day Saint think about this stuff more than an atheist, though? Or maybe even more probing—why do Black Protestants score higher on this question than Catholics? I had a theory: Black Protestants go to church a whole lot more than Catholics. Let’s just test that one out.

And we have hit paydirt here. That’s an incredibly clean result across every single group that I tested on this question. The more often folks attend church, the more likely they are to be thinking about meaning and purpose on a weekly basis. You can often see a clean break in the data when looking at weekly or weekly+ attendance. Looking at evangelicals makes that really plain. For those who attend monthly, 51% are thinking about meaning and purpose with high frequency. Among weekly attenders, it’s 63%, and then it rises to 74% among those who attend multiple times per week.

For mainline Protestants, the divide is between weekly (57%) and more than once per week (73%). You can also see a jump among Black Protestants who are attending more than once a week, as well. For Catholics, there’s a clear connection between Mass attendance and thinking about meaning and purpose—it rises nine percentage points when going from monthly to weekly attendance, and then it goes up a whopping 18 percentage points for those who go to Mass multiple times per week.

Even though the Latter-day Saint sample is not very large, you can see that those who go to church on a weekly basis are thinking about meaning and purpose a whole lot more than those who attend less frequently. This is basically a universal conclusion from this data: attending church opens one up to thinking about the higher things in life.

Before I close up, I just wanted to check one more thing: does going to church online have the same impact as attending in person? I restricted my sample to just the six groups included in the prior graph and looked at each combination of online and in-person attendance.

Given the prior graph, it should come as little surprise that the top-right square (weekly attendance for both online and in person) scores the highest—73%. No other grouping really comes close, honestly. Dropping down to monthly in-person attendance results in a decline of nearly ten points. So that’s a finding we can take to the bank: sitting in a pew creates space for existential questions.

Look at the top-left square in the heatmap. This is folks who never attend in person but watch online all the time. Among this subgroup, 60% of people think about meaning and purpose on a weekly basis. Now look at the bottom right—these are people who go in person all the time but never attend online. The percentage here is 58%. That’s actually really surprising to me because it suggests that being heavily involved in worship, whether online or in person, doesn’t make much of a difference when it comes to people contemplating the big questions in life.

Of course, doing both is still more conducive to internal contemplation, but this is a situation in which online attendance does seem to be doing some “work” on other variables. That doesn’t happen very often.

So, who is thinking about the higher things in life? Generally speaking, there’s not much of an age difference when looking at the entire sample. But when you bring religion into the mix, there’s a clear delineation between non-religious folks and those who are part of “high-intensity” Christian groups. That difference is really because of regular church attendance. Engaging in regular worship is incredibly predictive of thinking about meaning and purpose on a regular basis.

Or maybe it’s the opposite: folks who are always thinking about meaning and purpose are more inclined to seek out opportunities to ponder those ideas on a regular basis.

That’s a great question for another time.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.