Several weeks ago, on a Friday, I went to a local restaurant to get a breakfast sandwich for my son to take to work. He has one of these jobs where you have to be somewhere five days a week, and I wanted to support him. 

The restaurant owner is something of a local legend. She is often, well, surly. My son and I love it. She’s authentic in a way that never happens with the “Hi, I’m so-and-so, and I’ll be taking care of you today” scripts found in corporate food service. 

After she made the sandwich, she handed it to me in a bag, and then she started telling me about her life. While I didn’t expect this, it didn’t entirely surprise me. With age, I seem to have developed a “tell me about yourself” vibe, and so it happens with some regularity. Maybe it’s because I study life purpose. People subconsciously sniff out that I am interested in how people live their lives. 

I stood in front of the counter in my morning attire—slippers, pajama pants, BBQ-themed t-shirt, and tousled hair. My mind was planning what I’d get done that morning when I realized that she had veered into something deeply personal and meaningful. 

Some years back, she had someone very dear to her disappear. Not disappear in the sense of calling the police. Rather, disappear as in a loved one unexpectedly breaking all contact and moving away. The resulting confusion and pain were overwhelming for her. Even hearing about it years later was deeply emotional. 

Ultimately, there was resolution. They realized that there had been an underlying and most unfortunate misunderstanding. They ended up reuniting at a family wedding. The restaurant owner showed me photographs of that moment. There they were, in formal attire, holding each other tightly, joy on their faces. 

My simple breakfast-sandwich run ended up being this beautiful moment. In it, I experienced her loss, grief, joy, and tentative hope for the future. Her sense of self involved her family member, and when that person left, it was as if part of her disappeared as well. This got me thinking about purpose and relationships.

There’s a paradox with purpose. We focus on “our” life purpose, but it almost always involves “other” people. 

Stanford psychologist William Damon identifies purpose as having several core characteristics: it is forward-facing, meaningful, and beyond the self. 

“Beyond the self” takes different forms. It could involve the physical world or even animals. It could be going beyond our current self. But, most of the time, it’s located in how we interact with other people. So, take them away, and we have much less opportunity for purpose. 

Naturally, society has a say in how this happens. We implicitly think of purpose as our own personal journey. This is true. But it's also shaped by the world around us.

Consider how we live today when it comes to relationships.

We live many miles away from those we love most—too far for daily contact. The small, unplanned moments that form the bedrock of life together disappear. 

We spend hours a day looking at screens. While we’re looking at people—our favorite subjects—we’re not interacting with them. In fact, we usually don’t know them personally. Instead, we’re just… looking at screens. 

We’re wealthy enough that we can avoid the awkwardness of asking other people for help. We just hire professionals. This removes the forced interdependence that brings people together as they trade favors. 

Purpose involves other people. By virtue of steadily pulling us away from others, modern society is eroding our ability to live purposefully. 

What’s the answer? As with most solutions, it combines awareness and action. Knowing how society works against us, we can’t assume that deep, meaningful relationships will naturally spring up in our lives. Instead, we need to work at making them happen. This means forethought, planning, and effort. 

Psychologists call this “minding” relationships. Minding is the ongoing work of making relationships work. We manage them as we would any other important resource in our lives. 

Minding takes various forms. It is knowing and being known, interpreting people’s behavior generously, showing acceptance and respect, and acting in ways that protect and strengthen the bond. Rather than taking a relationship for granted, it actively nurtures it. In the end, people feel seen, valued, and emotionally connected.