The Purpose Trap: How Purpose-Focused Teaching Is Quietly Harming the Students We’re Trying to Help

A professor noticed his students kept saying the same troubling thing after taking a standard meaning-in-life assessment. The instrument was well-validated. The harm was real anyway, and it points to a problem in how we teach young people to think about their own lives.

Image by Geralt for Pixabay

Gerald L. Finch

A few years ago, a student in my course on Existential Psychology said something I have not been able to shake since: “If I can’t find my purpose for living, maybe I don’t have a reason to live.”

She was not in a psychiatric crisis. She was a thoughtful, creative, relationally rich young woman who had just completed a widely used, well-validated questionnaire about meaning in life and scored low on the items asking about her “purpose.” The instrument had done exactly what it was built to do. This essay is about what that cost her, and about a quiet design flaw in how we teach meaning and purpose to young people more broadly.

I have spent decades in the classroom, and decades before that as a military officer and corporate executive, working inside some of the most mission-driven institutions on earth. I am not a professor who is allergic to purpose talk. I have used it, taught it, and benefited from organizing parts of my own life around it. But something has gone wrong with how educators — myself included for years — have handed this framework to students without first examining it. I think it’s worth presenting the other side of the argument, with classroom evidence to back it up.

The Instrument Every Educator Knows

If you teach psychology, counseling, student development, or any course touching on identity and meaning, you have almost certainly encountered some version of the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (MLQ), or a close cousin of it, such as the Purpose in Life (PIL) questionnaire. MLQ is well-validated, widely used in research and applied settings, and built around a reasonable-sounding premise: that a well-lived life requires a clear sense of purpose, and that purpose is something to be discovered and named.

That premise didn’t originate with the instrument. It is much older and much bigger than any one questionnaire. Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life sold more than 50 million copies on exactly this premise. Simon Sinek’s Start With Why brought on engagement training. The “Ikigai” framework, a flattened and Westernized version of a more subtle Japanese idea, turned it into curriculum-friendly worksheets you’ll find in plenty of career-readiness and life-skills classrooms.

The assumption underneath all of it, the one that has quietly made its way into how many of us teach meaning and identity: a well-lived life requires a clear, singular, discoverable, future-facing purpose — and a student who can’t name one has a problem to be solved.

I want to push back on that assumption, specifically as an educator. Not because purpose is a bad thing to help a student find. Because building curriculum and assessment around the assumption that everyone must have one, and soon, costs some students more than it helps them, and that cost has never been adequately accounted for in how we train future teachers and counselors to use these tools.

Where This Assumption in Our Curricula Actually Comes From

It feels like educational common sense. It is not. It is a specific cultural inheritance, worth tracing if we’re going to keep teaching it uncritically.

The “purpose” frame is, at root, a secularized version of Calvinist vocation — the idea that each person is assigned a calling, and a well-lived life is the fulfillment of that assignment. Max Weber documented how this idea became the scaffolding of the entire modern Western work ethic. Warren’s book put the theology back in explicitly. The self-help and, downstream of it, the education world took the theology back out and kept the structure, including in curricula that present purpose-finding as a developmentally necessary task for adolescents and young adults.

This matters in a classroom specifically because an idea that feels universal but is not, when handed to students from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, produces exactly the kind of confusion my students kept describing. They were not failing the assignment. The assignment was failing them.

What My Students Actually Bring into the Classroom

Here is what took me the longest to see clearly because it ran counter to everything in the literature I’d been trained in.

My students were not short on meaning. They were short on one particular kind of meaning — the future-organizing, mission-shaped kind that purpose-focused curricula treat as the only kind worth assessing. What they had in abundance, and what our standard instruments have no way to credit, was something else: deep, present-tense engagement, including art, music, friendship, creativity, exploration, and discovery. The pleasure of a conversation, a well-made thing, a shared meal. They could talk for an hour about what made them feel alive in the moment. They went blank the instant I asked what larger purpose all of it was “for.”

A curriculum built around purpose-discovery has no box for that kind of richness. It treats present-tense engagement as a pleasant detour — fine, but not the real lesson, not until it adds up to something pointed at a future destination. I think that ordering is backward, and I think Viktor Frankl, the thinker most often cited to justify purpose-first teaching, would agree with me.

The Frankl Inversion We Keep Teaching Wrong

Frankl is the patron saint of purpose-focused pedagogy. Man’s Search for Meaning gets assigned in education and counseling courses as proof that meaning — specifically future-oriented purpose — is what keeps people going even under the worst conditions imaginable.

Here is what most of those syllabi leave out: Frankl developed his future-orientation in concentration camps, where the present had been deliberately stripped away. He had very little left in the present worth holding onto, so he held onto the future — a lecture he hoped to give, a wife he hoped to find. Even then, he noted that some prisoners found fragments of present-tense meaning too, in small acts like sharing a piece of bread with someone more desperate than themselves. But the future was his load-bearing strategy. That was not a universal lesson plan for meaning. It was a specific survival strategy for a specific kind of devastation and assigning it to students whose present lives are often rich rather than annihilated is a category error worth correcting in how we teach the text.

Read Frankl’s writings carefully, and you can see that he distinguished three sources of meaning: what you create, what you receive through love and beauty, and the stance you take toward unavoidable suffering. None of the three requires a future orientation — creating something, like receiving beauty or bearing suffering well, can be entirely a present-tense act. But creative meaning is also the easiest of the three to bend toward the future, simply by asking what the created thing will lead to or leave behind. That bend is optional, not built in.

The Generator, As I Now Use It with Students

Years ago, working with an international peacekeeping organization in the Sinai, I found myself imagining two mechanical engineers who loved working on the massive generators that powered the base. They loved the craft of it — the diagnostics, the tuning, the satisfaction of a motor running clean. One day, one of them discovered that his favorite generator — the one he’d spent the most hours refining — was never actually wired to anything. No cable. No load. It had never powered a single light. It was just spinning on its own.

I now put this directly to students: would that discovery change anything for you, if you were him?

The room always splits. For some students, it would be devastating — a retroactive collapse of years of work. For others, it genuinely wouldn’t matter. They loved the work itself. The cable was never where their satisfaction lived.

That split is itself a teaching tool, because it shows students something about their own assumptions before I must lecture them into it. The student who needs the cable to be worthwhile has built their sense of mattering on a single unverifiable fact about a future or larger outcome. The student who doesn’t need it has built their satisfaction on something no discovery can touch: the quality of their own engagement, right now. Purpose-focused teaching, structurally, asks every student to bet on the cable being there. Some students can’t verify that bet for years, if ever — and that unresolved bet is where I think a meaningful share of purpose-related distress actually originates.

The Sentence That Should Concern Every Educator Using These Tools

Go back to where I started. “If I can’t find my purpose for living, maybe I don’t have a reason to live.”

That sentence did not come from a personal breakdown. It came from a syllogism that a curriculum helped build for her: A meaningful life requires a clear purpose. I don’t have one. Therefore, my life might not be worth living. She supplied the conclusion. The instrument and the framing around it supplied the premises.

This is the part I think deserves more attention in teacher and counselor training than it currently gets. We do not, as a field, track how many students move through purpose-focused units in a state of quiet, unaddressed dread because the clarity the curriculum promised never arrived. We do not ask whether the assessment itself — administered without context, without a debrief, without a competing framework offered alongside it — is doing some of the harm it claims to be diagnosing.

What I Now Do Differently in My Course

I didn’t stop using the questionnaire. I started teaching its failure as the actual lesson.

Students complete it, and then we discuss which items felt difficult to answer — not as a personal shortcoming, but as data about the instrument itself. What did it feel like to be asked that question? Anxiety, blankness, relief — every response is useful classroom material. Then I ask the students to reason out who the instrument was likely built for, and who would find the results easy to accept. That discussion, run well, gets a class to the Protestant-vocation, future-biased, individualist assumptions embedded in the instrument faster than a lecture on the history of the concept ever could.

Only then do I introduce an alternative framework, drawn from the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein’s work on mattering: not what is your purpose, but where do you already feel that you count — to someone, in some part of your life, right now.

Mattering, unlike purpose, doesn’t require a single tense. A student can matter to people who love them today. They can matter through a craft they return to daily. They can matter by holding themselves to a standard nobody else sees. They can matter by building toward something that will outlast them. All of these are legitimate, gradable, and — critically for classroom use — available to every student in the room regardless of whether they’ve settled on a future mission yet.

A Practical Sequence Other Educators Could Use

What I’d recommend to colleagues teaching identity, meaning, or purpose units is roughly this sequence: administer the standard purpose instrument (MLQ), but build in time afterward for students to interrogate it rather than simply score it. Let the discomfort some students report become the discussion, not a private burden they carry out of the room. Introduce a mattering-based alternative before moving on to purpose-setting exercises, so students have a present-tense, achievable foundation before being asked to speculate about a future they may not yet be able to see.

Then, if purpose work follows, frame it explicitly as one possible expression of an already-established sense of mattering, rather than as the prerequisite for being a person whose life counts. A student who knows where they already matter can explore purpose from a position of stability. A student handed the purpose question first, with nothing underneath it, is the one most likely to produce the sentence that started this essay.

That sequencing change costs almost nothing in instructional time. What it changes is whether the unit helps every student in the room or only those whose lives already fit the assumption on which the curriculum was quietly built.

Gerald L. Finch, PhD, is a professor at Universidad San Francisco de Quito and founder of The Lunar Society of Quito — Challenging Conventions Under the Full Moon. This essay is the first in a series examining what purpose-focused approaches to teaching meaning get wrong, and what a more inclusive alternative looks like in practice. For comments and questions about The Lunar Society or purpose-focused living, contact the author: gfinch@usfq.edu.ec or geraldfinch5@gmail.com