Recently I have been thinking about purpose or meaning a lot. It’s one of the four motivators from RAMP that seems to be the hard to explain and achieve.
When I first started looking into gamification, people used to talk about Epic Meaning when speaking of game mechanics (incorrectly, but that is another story). This is the feeling of being part of something greater. An example I often use is Wikipedia. People contribute to that, freely, because many of them like to feel that they are contributing to something that is larger than themselves and has great meaning to others. So for Wikipedia contributors that is their purpose – “epic meaning”.