Purpose In Life As Ancient but Nascent Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2025
Envisioning the experience and study of purpose as timeless pursuits, this chapter is used to imagine five transformative trajectories likely to guide purpose scholarship in the years ahead.
These trajectories aim to deepen understanding of purpose across cultural landscapes, against a backdrop of emerging technologies, and amid profound societal changes. They also strive to illuminate innovative solutions for helping more people feel purposeful while unifying diverse intellectual perspectives on purpose that can be leveraged to that end. To close out this volume with these trajectories is to hope they serve as beacons for researchers, practitioners, and lay readers alike, respectful of where purpose inquiry has been, is currently, and is likely heading.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.