How to rediscover your purpose later in life

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.