The Christmas season often brings stress for many people. In addition to busy schedules, there’s the added pressure of decorating, sending cards, attending gatherings, entertaining guests, buying presents, hosting dinners and more. This time of year can amplify an already prevalent mindset: A solely forward-looking, future-oriented perspective.
An exclusively future-oriented mindset views activities as mere means to an end. The real value is placed on completing tasks – decorating the house, sending out cards, buying presents, attending or hosting events – all to move on to the next item on the to-do list. This approach sees activities solely as a means of achieving goals.
Amidst the rush to check items off the to-do list, life may not feel very meaningful. It can seem like a continuous cycle of goal-oriented activities, reminiscent of the myth of Sisyphus, making life feel devoid of meaning. This is where philosophy, as highlighted by MIT professor Kieran Setiya in his book “Life is Hard,” can offer valuable insights.
Drawing lessons from Dostoevsky and Aristotle, Setiya suggests a shift in orientation. In Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” the protagonist Myshkin teaches us that the value and meaning in life are found not only in the end result but also in the process, in the journey. Aristotle further refines this idea by distinguishing between telic and entelic activities.
Telic actions are goal-oriented, like walking to the store to buy milk. Entelic activities, unlike telic ones, are fulfilled or completed in the action itself. According to Aristotle, entelic activities function simultaneously as ends and means. For example, in the “Metaphysics,” he points out that entelic activities, like seeing, understanding and thinking, are ones wherein “one is [simultaneously] seeing and has seen, [one] is [simultaneously] understanding and has understood, and [one] is [simultaneously] thinking and has thought.”
From this it seems true that we can participate in activities that are simultaneously both means and ends. That is, take some activity involving accomplishing a goal. It is telic. This same activity can also be entelic once additional value is added to the act itself. For example, when telic activities are performed in cooperation with friends, family or spouses, then they can also be simultaneously means and ends. This is because seeing them, enjoying them and knowing them can be completed at each telic step in the journey.
This Christmas season can be a laboratory to test this reorientation. Before engaging in goal-oriented activities, consider shifting your focus to enjoying the process, and valuing the journey and not just the end result. Recognize the steps toward a goal as valuable for its own sake. For example, each step can be seen as fostering virtuous character. If done with others, the value of knowing them better during the journey adds additional value to each step in the process towards completing the task.
For those without company, and if you’re a theist, use this time to reorient yourself towards God. Depict your activities as dependent on God, fostering a sense of yielding, cooperating, uniting and communing with the divine. Aligning your agency with God’s turns any telic activity into an entelic one. It’s possible to revel in knowing God better through activities aimed at a goal. Indeed, this kind of entelic activity involving dependency and cooperation with God can result in an infinite journey, a never-ending divine dance, providing a sustainable way of fully enjoying life’s activities in the here and now – simultaneously enjoying the journey towards each new goal!
ED. NOTE: Dr. Osmundsen was born and raised in Erma, and is a 1993 graduate of Lower Cape May Regional High School. Before pursuing a career in academia, he worked at Sig’s Dock – a family-owned commercial fishing business. Osmundsen is an instructor of philosophy at Grand Canyon University’s College of Theology in Arizona.
