The Ones Who Have a Reason to Get Up

There were mornings after my mother died when the only reason I got up was that other people were expecting me.

Not hope. Not purpose. Not any of the words I use in this newsletter. Just a diary entry with somebody else's name in it, and a professional habit strong enough to carry a body that would otherwise have stayed exactly where it was. I would like to report that I met that season with wisdom. What I actually met it with was Tuesday, and a woman coming at ten.

I have thought about those mornings a lot since, because it turns out they were the whole subject in miniature. We treat purpose as a luxury item, something you get to once the mortgage is settled and the children are grown, a nice-to-have for the spiritually well-organised. The research says something much less romantic and much more urgent. It says purpose is load-bearing.

Let me show you, then tell you why it worries me.

In Japan there is a word we do not have: ikigai. It has been translated into a small industry of airport paperbacks, but the plain meaning is simply this: a reason to get up in the morning. A life worth living. In the early 2000s, researchers in northern Japan asked more than forty thousand adults aged forty to seventy-nine one direct question: do you have ikigai? Then they followed them for seven years. Those who said no died at around one and a half times the rate of those who said yes.

Not felt worse. Died.

Since then the finding has been chased across continents, and it keeps holding. A pooled analysis of ten studies and some hundred and thirty-six thousand people found that those with a strong sense of purpose had roughly a seventeen per cent lower risk of dying, and the same lower risk of a heart attack or stroke, than those without. A study of nearly seven thousand Americans over fifty found that those in the lowest band for life purpose died at more than twice the rate of those in the highest — after the researchers had accounted for wealth, education, and whether people were already ill.

And then the finding that stops me every time I read it. Patricia Boyle and her colleagues at Rush University followed a group of older adults for years, testing their thinking annually, and afterwards examined their brains. Some of those brains were full of the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer's disease. The people who reported a greater sense of purpose held on to their thinking better than their brain tissue suggested they should have. The pathology was there. The decline was not, or not yet, or not as fast.

I am a therapist, not a neurologist, and I am careful with findings like these. They are associations, not promises. Nobody has proved that purpose is doing the pushing; it may be that purpose gets you walking, gets you to the doctor, gets you answering the phone. Purpose measured by a questionnaire is a crude instrument for something enormous. And a whole shelf of books is willing to sell you ikigai as a lifestyle for $34.99.

But look at its shape. We have spent a generation telling women beyond midlife to manage their cholesterol, their bone density, their step count, their sleep. All of that is real, and I do all of it. And here, sitting quietly in the same journals, is a factor with numbers as strong as most of what we are lectured about, and almost nobody puts it on the list, because it cannot be sold in a pot.

Now here is my worry, and it is the reason I nearly did not write this letter.

I know exactly what we do with information like this. We turn it into homework. We take a finding about meaning, and we make it one more thing a woman in her sixties can fail at, one more column in the endless audit of the ageing female self, somewhere between collagen and pelvic floor. I can already hear the voice: so now I have to have a purpose, or I'll die. If that is the sentence forming in you, put it down. That is not what any of this says, and panic has never produced meaning for anyone.

Because notice what the Japanese researchers actually asked. Not what is your contribution to humanity. Not have you found your calling. They asked whether you have a reason to get up in the morning. That is a domestic-sized question, and the honest answers to it are almost always domestic-sized things. The garden that will not water itself. The grandchild on Thursdays. The choir. The dog. The friend whose treatment is on Wednesday. The half-finished thing on the table that you would like to see finished before you go.

We have been taught to think of purpose as a summit. The evidence suggests it is more like a pulse.

Which changes what we ought to be asking each other. Not the grand interrogation, what are you doing with the rest of your life, that makes every woman I know go quiet and reach for her tea. Something far smaller and far more useful: what got you up today? And on the mornings when the answer is only that somebody was expecting you, that counts. That is not a failure of meaning. That is the pulse, faint, still going.

I have watched this in Silver Sirens more times than I can tell you. A woman arrives flattened, retired, widowed, moved cities, finished raising everyone, and she does not need a mission statement. She needs a Thursday. Something on the calendar with her name against it and other people relying on her being there. And you can watch her come back up through the water over about six months, not because she found her purpose, but because something small and regular started expecting her.

So no prescription from me, as ever. Only a rearrangement of the furniture.

Purpose is not what you will be remembered for. It is what gets you out of bed on a Tuesday, and the body, it turns out, is keeping score.

If your reason is small this week, it still counts. If your reason is currently other people's expectations, that counts too; it counted for me, and it carried me until my own reasons came back. Next Sunday I want to talk about what happens when a reason that carried you for thirty years quietly expires, and why nobody sends flowers for that particular bereavement.

With love,

Faith

What got you up this morning? Not the noble version — the actual one. I would love to hear it in the comments, especially if it is very small.

I'm Faith, a therapist and founder of Silver Sirens, a community for women in midlife and beyond.

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Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

A standing weekly Zoom with my niece, who is in the middle of treatment for breast cancer.

Same time, every week. Her face comes up on the screen, and mine comes up on hers, and that is the whole of it. I am not there to improve her prognosis or manage her appointments or say anything useful — I have nothing useful. I am there to look at her, and to let her be looked at by someone who has loved her since she was small.

Some weeks she wants to talk about the treatment. Some weeks she wants to talk about absolutely anything else, and we do that instead. I have stopped arriving with an agenda. I arrive with my face.

And here is the part I did not expect, given everything I have just written to you. I thought I was the one holding it. It is holding me. It is in the diary. It has her name against it. On a flat morning, it is one of the reasons I get up, not because she needs me to, but because we said we would.

Small. Weekly. Load-bearing.