Will I live longer if I have a sense of purpose in life?

Two large American long-term studies, the HRS and MIDUS studies, together involving nearly 6,000 participants and a follow-up of 12 to 23 years, consistently show that people with a stronger sense of life purpose live longer on average. This association held up after the researchers adjusted for age, sex, health, and other factors that influence life expectancy.

That said, this is a statistical association, not proven causality. The studies show that people with a sense of life purpose tend to live longer on average, but they do not prove that life purpose itself is the cause of that longer lifespan. It is quite possible that other characteristics linked to both purpose and health explain part of the relationship.

Life purpose also appears to act as a kind of protective buffer. People who rated their own health as poor but at the same time had a strong sense of life purpose died less prematurely than people with equally poor health who lacked that sense of purpose. This protective effect appeared in most ethnic groups studied, but not among Black participants in the MIDUS study, a caveat the researchers themselves explicitly acknowledge.

It is also notable that life purpose predicted lifespan slightly better than life satisfaction, the feeling that life is going well. When both were included in the analysis simultaneously, life satisfaction largely lost its predictive power, whereas life purpose did not. This suggests that what matters is specifically having direction and meaning, and not simply feeling positive about life.