New Scientist
FeatureWhy am I here?
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Beyond happiness
Today, researchers define purpose as a sense of direction in life – a long-term goal set around one's core values, that makes life worth living, and shapes daily behaviour. It is a component of broader measures of subjective well-being or happiness (see “How do you measure purpose?”), in which there has been a surge of interest in the past two decades. That's why, in 2012, then United Nations secretary-general Ban Ki-moon commissioned the first ever World Happiness Report, which has been
Health benefits
But a 2007 Gallup poll of 141,000 people in 132 countries found that, even though people from wealthier countries rate themselves higher on measures of happiness, people from poorer nations tend to view their lives as more meaningful. Shigehiro Oishi at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, who analysed the poll data, suspects this is in part because people in developing countries have more concrete things to focus on. “Their goals are clearer perhaps: to survive and believe. In rich
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