Telic vs Atelic activities Flashcards
Philosophy can solve the midlife crisis, at least in one of its forms. This crisis turns on the exhaustibility of our ends. The solution is to value ends that are ‘atelic,’ so inexhaustible. Topics include: John Stuart Mill’s nervous breakdown; Aristotle on the finality of the highest good; and Schopenhauer on the futility of desire.
We should distinguish between telic and atelic activities:
Telic: Almost anything we call a ‘project’ will be telic: buying a house, starting a family, earning a promotion, getting a job. These are all things one can finish or complete.
Atelic: Not all activities are like this. Some do not aim at a point of termination or exhaustion: a final state in which they have been achieved and there is nothing more to do. For instance, you can go for a walk with no particular destination. Going for a walk is an ‘atelic’ activity.
The same is true of hanging out with friends or family, of studying philosophy, of living a decent life. You can stop doing these things and you eventually will, but you cannot complete them in the relevant sense…. they do not have a telic character. So, “If you are going for a walk, hanging out with friends, studying philosophy, or living a decent life, you are not on the way to achieving your end. You are already there.”
This, however, does not mean that one should only invest in the atelic. The issue is where you derive value: locating the majority of life’s meaning in the telic will leave you unfulfilled, and often precipitates a midlife crisis.
As Setiya writes, “it is at midlife that the telic character of one’s most cherished ends are liable to appear, as they are completed or prove impossible. One has the job one has worked for many years to get, the partner one hoped to meet, the family one meant to start — or one does not. Until this point, one may have had no reason to dwell on the exhaustion of one’s ambitions”
To avoid or resolve the midlife crisis, “invest… more deeply in atelic ends. Among the activities that matter most to you, the ones that give meaning to your life, must be activities that have no terminal point. Since they cannot be completed, your engagement with atelic ends will not exhaust or destroy them”
But you can — and should — also continue pursuing telic activities. Just pursue them FOR THEIR OWN SAKE instead of for the end product: “Instead of spending time with friends in order to complete a shared project, one pursues a common project in order to spend time with friends”. As Setiya advises, “Do not work only to solve this problem or discover that truth, as if the tasks you complete are all that matter; solve the problem or seek the truth in order to be at work”
As we have seen, what elicits the crisis, for many, is a confrontation with mortality. Something about the fact that we will eventually die, that life is finite, makes us feel that everything we do is empty or futile. Somehow the succession of projects and accomplishments, each one rational in itself, falls short.
The midlife crisis is an apparent absence of meaning or significance in life that allows for the continued presence of reasons to act. Although it is often inspired by
the acknowledgement of mortality, the crisis can occur in other ways.
It may be enough to prompt the midlife crisis that you see in your future, at best, only more of the achievements and projects that make up your past. Your life will differ only in quantity from the life you have already lived, a mere accumulation of deeds.
The problem is about the content of the midlife crisis:
how to identify what is lacking in someone’s life when they come to feel this way — that the procession of projects is empty, even if the projects succeed. The constraints are: first, that the crisis does not involve a total absence of value; second, that it is commonly, though not only, elicited by reflection on one’s own mortality; and third, that despite this fact, it is not assuaged by immortality as such.
If you are interested in metaphysics and the meaning of existence, ontology may be a good field of study for you. Ontology comes from two Greek words: on, which means “being,” and logia, which means “study.” So ontology is the study of being alive and existing.
The mid-life crisis is a curious phenomenon, a point at which many people feel that, despite having completed many of the things they set out to achieve in life and which they do really believe were worthwhile, they haven’t managed to assemble a sense of meaning from them and still feel an ontological emptiness.
“If you have a desire for a goal and your life is guided by it, that’s what’s giving meaning to your life, in a way by aiming to complete that goal, to finish that project, the effect of your success will be to eliminate that project from your life. It’s now done, and therefore eliminates that source of meaning from your life. So pursuing projects has this paradoxical, self-destructive quality whereby things that are giving purpose to your existence are the very things that, in pursuing which, you’re extinguishing, thereby destroying the purpose of your life.”
“At least one central form of mid-life crisis is the striving type A high achiever who’s precisely project driven and is, in pursuing these projects, which seem worthwhile and meaningful, one by one relentlessly emptying their life of all of its sources of meaning.”
Living in a social media age where everyone is fixated on accruing achievements and showing them off, we seem fated to experience mid-life crises, so what can be done?
“The problem arises from being excessively focused on and invested in telic activities and the solution, I think, is to reorientate oneself to become more fully invested in atelic activities - then you won’t have this sense that what you want is at a distance from where you are now because one of the features of atelic activities is they don’t have an endpoint that you’re aiming at in the future, they’re realised in the present as much as they can ever be realised … so they won’t inspire this sense that their capacity to give meaning to one’s life will be extinguished.”
