What Makes an Environment Actually Good for You

Andrew Soren opens this episode admitting a running problem: he runs a company called Eudaimonic by Design, and he still has to explain what "eudaimonia" means at the start of nearly every conversation. His guest, Dr. Kaylin Ratner, has the opposite problem in a sense. She's spent years building out a new corner of that same idea, one specific enough that it now has its own name: eudaimonic utility. It's not about whether an activity feels meaningful. It's about whether the place you're doing it in will actually let you become who you're trying to be.

A Career Shaped by Its Own Subject Matter

Ratner is an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she leads the Self and Psychological Well-Being Lab and advises doctoral students across counselling psychology and developmental science. Her own path there wasn't a straight line, which feels appropriate given what she studies.

She started out certain she'd become a therapist, worked her way into research almost by accident, and eventually landed a clinical placement doing acute crisis stabilization at a local hospital, working with teenagers in the days immediately following a suicide attempt. It was there, she says, that she began to feel the limits of her training. The cognitive behavioural approaches she was learning were built for correcting distorted thinking. What she was actually facing, again and again, were teenagers grappling with the most basic developmental questions there are: who am I, and where am I going, now that I'm still here. She didn't have the tools for that conversation. It pushed her toward the psychoeducational side of the field instead, and eventually into a PhD in human development at Cornell, under developmental psychologist Anthony Burrow, a program she graduated from in 2020.

It's a fitting origin story for someone who now studies identity and purpose for a living: it's one more example of her own advice to students, that self-discovery is rarely linear, and that trying something and learning it isn't for you is still data worth having.

Flipping the Question

Most research on meaningful pursuits asks whether a given activity feels personally expressive to the person doing it. Ratner's work asks a different question: does the environment around that activity actually support the person trying to grow inside it?

She defines eudaimonia as the sense of coming into yourself, doing things that are authentically you, even when they're difficult. Eudaimonic utility extends that outward: it's the perception that a given place, like a school, a program, a job, has what you need to become who you're meant to be.

Imagine a teenager who's passionate about music production, stuck in an underfunded school with no resources for it. By conventional measures, that student's eventual truancy or dropout looks like failure. Ratner's framing suggests something else might be happening: the student has correctly assessed that this particular environment has no utility for who they're trying to become, and is spending their energy elsewhere instead. The problem is a mismatch between the environment and the development it's supposed to be supporting.

Four Things People Are Actually Checking For

Ratner's research breaks eudaimonic utility into four components, drawn from the work of Veronica Huta and Alan Waterman on the core features of eudaimonia across philosophy and psychology. When someone sizes up an environment, she argues, they're implicitly checking whether it lets them:

• pursue goals that feel personally significant,

• act in ways that feel authentic to who they are,

• grow and develop as a person, and

• reach toward their own version of excellence.

Underneath all four sits self-determination theory from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, that people have basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Ratner treats need-supportive environments and eudaimonically supportive environments as closely related but distinct: where you find one, she says, you tend to find the other, even though they're answering slightly different questions.

GripTape: The Program the Concept Was Built On

The research behind eudaimonic utility started with a question from a practitioner. GripTape, the youth program at the center of Ratner's study, was founded in 2015 by Mark Murphy, formerly Delaware's Secretary of Education, after he kept noticing the same thing in conversations with disengaged students: ask a kid who seems checked out in class about something they actually care about, and they light up. His example was a student who could talk for an hour about how to build a skateboard.

GripTape's core offering is something it calls the Learning Challenge: roughly ten weeks in which a young person picks literally any topic (from Japanese, beatboxing, homelessness advocacy, to skateboard construction) and drives their own learning, with three supports built around them. They get a small stipend, usually around $500, to cover materials most schools would never fund. They get paired with an adult "champion" who checks in regularly but isn't there to teach the subject or steer the outcome. And they get full ownership of the goals, the pace, and the definition of progress. Since 2015, the fully remote program has worked with more than 4,000 young people across the country.

When Ratner's postdoctoral advisor landed a grant to study the program, the question came from GripTape's own staff, who wanted to understand why the model worked as well as it seemed to. That's how eudaimonic utility got its start. As Ratner describes it, a practitioner's instinct paired with a researcher's vocabulary for naming what was already happening.

What the Data Actually Showed

The findings track closely with the theory. On days when GripTape participants met with their champion, they reported higher self-concept clarity, greater self-esteem, and a stronger sense of purpose than on days they didn't. Participants who came in with the strongest existing sense of agency tended to be the ones who gained the most purpose over the ten-week Learning Challenge; the open-ended structure rewarded people who were already prepared to drive their own direction.

On days participants felt more purposeful, they tended to report more progress on their project the following day, and vice versa. The people who made the most overall progress by the end of the program were the ones with the tightest link between their daily sense of purpose and their daily movement toward their goal. Researchers have long assumed that purpose and goal pursuit reinforce each other. Ratner's data is some of the first to actually show that loop in motion, day by day.

Beyond Adolescence

Ratner built the eudaimonic utility scale so its language could be swapped for different settings, like a 4-H program, a university, or in principle a workplace. She's already collected some early workplace data, though it's still waiting on the right graduate student to dig into it. In the meantime, she offers a simple set of questions anyone can ask about where they work:

• Does it support my autonomy, my sense of competence, my relationships with others?

• And building from there, does it let me grow?

• Does it let me be who I actually am?

• Can I work on goals that matter to me here, or am I just going through motions that belong to someone else's definition of success?

She also situates the whole conversation across the lifespan, borrowing from Erik Erikson's stages of development. For young people, she suggests, eudaimonia functions almost like a beacon pulling them toward the identity exploration that adolescence and early adulthood are built for. For people further along, deep into what Erikson called generativity, the same drive shows up differently: less about discovering who you are, more about building whatever legacy you're going to leave through work and family, and eventually making peace with it.

The Risk of Disappearing Into It

Ratner’s concern is what she calls engulfment, the point where a person loses themselves entirely inside a role or an organization. Her example: a nonprofit job so eudaimonic, so perfectly aligned with everything you care about, that it becomes the only place you exist as a person. Then the funding falls through, and that identity falls apart.

Her advice isn't to hedge against meaningful work, but to make sure it isn't the only leg you're standing on. She borrows a line she used to tell adolescent clients about relationships: one plus one equals eleven. You're a whole number on your own, and also part of something larger, but the whole number has to still be there. She thinks the same logic applies to work. The goal is making sure that whatever the workplace is asking of you, there's still a "you" outside of it that would survive the job disappearing tomorrow.

That, more than any framework or four-part model, is a throughline of the whole conversation: environments can genuinely help you become who you're meant to be. They just can't be allowed to become the only place that person exists.

Mentioned in This Episode

• GripTape, the youth learning program at the center of Kaylin's research

• Kaylin Ratner's research on eudaimonic utility

• Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan

• Anne Brafford on self-determination theory

• Veronica Huta and Alan Waterman's review of the core components of eudaimonia

• Erik Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, including identity, generativity, and integrity vs. despair

• Dr. Anthony Burrow, Cornell University