How to rediscover your purpose later in life

Drawing on these insights, rather than reinventing yourself in later life, I propose a solution that I call reorientation. This approach acknowledges that your direction of growth is changing, becoming more selective and reflective. What follows is a series of steps to help you work with that change rather than push against it.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson offers a complementary perspective. In The Life Cycle Completed (1982), he proposed that, in later adulthood, our developmental task moves toward integration: weaving accumulated experience into a more coherent, internally aligned sense of self. Discarding previous identities and starting afresh are not part of this process. Integration is about deepening and consolidating what is already there.

There are good reasons to doubt that reinvention is the answer to later-life malaise. The lifespan psychologist Laura Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory shows that, as people become more aware of time as finite, their priorities begin to change. Rather than seeking novelty or broad exploration, many older adults become more selective about where they invest their energy, favouring meaning, emotional depth and relationships over expansion for its own sake. A reduced appetite for reinvention, then, is not a loss of drive. It reflects an adaptive change in motivation.

If this resonates with you, you might have found that it’s easy to interpret your loss of direction as a personal failing, as if something needs fixing. You may also have noticed that much of the popular messaging around later life is far from helpful. From ‘second act’ narratives to the idea of an ‘encore career’, popularised by writers such as Marc Freedman, and the wider calls from TED talks and other media outlets to ‘reinvent’ yourself at 60 or beyond, later life is often framed as a time to begin again. For some, this is energising and appropriate. But many of my clients tell me that it just adds to their sense of failure and makes them feel under pressure.

Margaret and David are based on real clients of mine, but I’ve changed their names and personal details to conceal their identities. Their experiences are more common than we tend to acknowledge. Many people in their 60s and 70s and beyond remain active, capable and outwardly engaged. Their lives still look full. But, privately, many notice a growing gap between how life appears and how it actually feels: a subtle flatness or loss of direction.

As a psychologist and consultant who helps people find their purpose later in life, I hear stories like Margaret’s a lot. Take David, 71, a former GP, who described something similar. He volunteers, travels, stays socially connected, and would be seen by others as making the most of this stage of life. And yet, as he put it simply: ‘Everything looks fine on paper. I just don’t know what I’m actually doing it for any more.’

She is not depressed. But she feels tired, as if the effort of keeping everything going has become harder than it used to be. ‘I keep adding things,’ she said, ‘but nothing quite sticks the way it used to.’

Margaret is 67 and, by most measures, doing well. Since leaving her senior role two years ago, she has stayed busy: joining a community board, taking on consultancy work, signing up for courses and retreats. She is, as she put it, ‘doing all the right things’. And yet, she told me, something feels off.

Identify what still matters to you

Over time, our lives accumulate layers of roles, obligations and routines. Some remain deeply meaningful. Others persist largely through habit or a long-standing sense of responsibility. The first step towards reorientation is learning to tell the difference.

Try this: take one commitment you currently hold – such as a committee position, a social role, a regular obligation – and sit quietly with it for a few minutes. Ask yourself two questions: Does this still feel alive to me? And: If I were choosing this today, would I still choose it?

Notice what arises. You are not making a decision yet, simply observing. A role that once expressed your values may, over time, have become something you maintain out of inertia rather than genuine meaning. Noticing this, without judgment, is where reorientation begins. You can repeat the process with your various commitments in life.

My client Margaret tried this with her consultancy work. When she sat with it honestly, she realised she was continuing largely because it felt like proof that she was still useful, not because the work itself still engaged her. That recognition, uncomfortable as it was, gave her something real to work with.

I also tried this exercise myself, focusing on my role as secretary for a voluntary organisation. On paper, it still sounded like something I ‘should’ value. However, in practice, it had come to feel like an obligation rather than something that engaged me. When I sat with the two questions, the answers were clear. It no longer felt alive. And if I were choosing it today, I would not choose it. Even the events and visits, which might once have held interest, no longer drew me in.

That recognition was uncomfortable. But it was also clarifying. It shifted the question for me from ‘Should I continue?’ to something more honest about what I actually want to give my time to now.

Keep a brief energy log

Many of my clients tell me of their frustration at not feeling as energetic as they used to. But I tell them that not all tiredness signals the same thing. Some effort can be enlivening even when it’s demanding. Other effort creates a more diffuse exhaustion that lingers, a sign that energy is being directed in ways that no longer fit.

The cultural pressure to keep reinventing can make this harder to interpret. If things feel hard-going, you might assume that you should push harder or try something new. But persistent depletion in later life may simply mean your energy is being directed in ways that no longer align with what matters to you.

A more useful question than Am I tired? is: What kind of effort is this?

One way to explore this is to keep a brief energy log for a week. After each significant activity or commitment, note in a sentence or two how you feel, not just physically, but inwardly. Do you feel more settled, or drained and vaguely resentful? Over time, you’ll find that patterns tend to emerge.

Margaret noticed she could spend an entire afternoon writing, or in a meaningful one-to-one conversation, and feel replenished. In contrast, an hour in a committee meeting left her feeling flat for the rest of the day. The log made visible what she had previously been dismissing as general tiredness.

When I completed an energy log myself, I noticed something similar in my own week. Writing and time in nature tended to leave me more settled and energised. Some conversations had the opposite effect. Not all, but certain interactions left me feeling depleted in a way that lingered.

Paying attention to this changed how I responded. Rather than assuming I simply needed to be more available or more patient (the usual ‘push harder’ mentality), I began to place clearer boundaries around my time. In some situations, that meant deliberately keeping conversations brief. In others, it meant recognising that I did not need to engage at all.

I didn’t withdraw from people completely, but I began paying attention to when my energy was being spent in ways that no longer felt sustainable – and then I made adjustments accordingly. Use your energy log to make the same intentional tweaks to your own life so you spend more time doing things that leave you feeling energised.

Channel what has always mattered most to you

Earlier in life, growth often involves acquiring new skills, identities and experiences. In later life, development more frequently involves integrating and expressing what is already there.

This step involves a change in how you view your own depth. Rather than accepting the reinvention narrative and asking yourself: What new path should I take?, I suggest that it can be more helpful to ask: How might what I already know, value and do well be expressed in ways that better fit who I am now?

To make this more concrete, try mapping your experience. Take a sheet of paper or open your Notes app, and jot down three things: the knowledge or skills you have built over decades; the values that have remained consistent across your life; and the kinds of contribution that have felt most meaningful. Then look at where these overlap. Perhaps at this stage in your life you have a chance to give this particular intersection of skills, values and meaning greater priority.

For Margaret, this exercise surfaced something she had been undervaluing. Her deepest satisfaction had consistently come from helping individuals think more clearly about their own lives, not from managing, leading or consulting at scale.

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If you gain a similar kind of insight from the task, ask yourself one further question: How can I find a way to express this more in my life? Often the answer points not towards doing something entirely new, but to something already present in your life that has been crowded out by obligations that once made sense but no longer do.

For instance, Margaret realised she had been trying to maintain the form of her earlier career when the essence of what’s always mattered most to her is something more relational. She began to consider how this might take a different form. Instead of continuing with consultancy work that required her to maintain a professional identity that no longer fully fit, she explored offering more focused one-to-one conversations and creating space for writing, where she could express that relational depth more naturally.

I came to a similar realisation when I completed this reflective exercise during a three-month sabbatical. Stepping back from my usual consultancy work made it easier for me to see what I had always found most meaningful through my career – the opportunity for deep reflection.

I realised that writing and time spent managing my woodland were closer expressions of that same underlying value. They offered a different way of engaging, one that felt more aligned with how I wanted to spend my time now.

By rebalancing my priorities, I wasn’t reinventing myself, but giving more room to a purpose that had always been present but never fully expressed.

Reframe how you think about your contributions

Contemporary culture often equates contribution with visibility – celebrating concrete achievements, making a splash and building a brand. Similarly, if your identity has long been tied to visible achievement, this can make the natural evolution of later life feel like diminishment.

But while the kind of contributions people make in later life often change form and might seem less visible, they are certainly no less valuable. Mentoring, sharing perspective, offering sustained presence to others: these can carry real meaning, even when they are less externally visible than earlier achievements.

If you’ve been feeling anxious about what you can contribute later in life, one way to approach this is through a simple reframing exercise. Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On the left, write what you feel you still need to build or prove. On the right, write about all your stories, skills, experiences and perspectives that you could share. Give yourself 10 minutes, and resist the urge to edit as you go. Then read back the right-hand column slowly. For many people, the second column turns out to be richer than expected.

Now, try shifting the question you ask yourself, from What will I leave behind? to What knowledge and experience do I already carry that is worth passing on? That reframing can once again make your later life purpose feel less like a project requiring reinvention and more like a natural expression of who you have already become.

Margaret found that when she stepped back from maintaining the scale of her earlier career and began offering one-to-one conversations to a small number of people navigating their own later-life transitions, the flatness lifted. The work was less visible, but it felt, as she put it, ‘like mine again’.

I have reframed things similarly in my own life. Spending more time in my woodland, alongside a greater focus on writing, has brought me a deeper sense of purpose and satisfaction. Yes, the work itself is less visible, but it feels more fully aligned with how I want to live.

There is also a secondary beneficial effect. I like to think that having that space to think and write has also made me a calmer, more settled presence with others. The contribution is not always in what I do, but in how I am. If you are able to make similar adjustments in your own life, I hope you too will notice these kinds of secondary benefits.