Endings and Renewal

The Last Modern Illusion Is "Everything Will Be Fine Once I Arrive"

The previous articles discussed three problems in turn: how we participate in the world again through the body, how we rediscover the texture of life in the everyday, and how we move through emptiness through a responsive relationship with the world.

But one question keeps returning:

What will I ultimately get from doing all this?

If there is no ultimate achievement, no decisive highlight moment, no endpoint sufficient to prove a successful life, are these bodily experiences, everyday practices, and resonant relationships still enough to make a life worth living?

Modern anxiety often gets stuck here.

We find it hard to believe that present experience itself has weight. We keep feeling that life must lead to some larger endpoint before everything in front of us can count as worthwhile.

So we imagine life as a runway constantly leading into the future:

Present pain is for future freedom. Present fatigue is for future success. Present endurance is for future wholeness. The life now compressed, sacrificed, and consumed will all be compensated at some future endpoint.

This thought is not completely wrong.

People can of course bear certain pressures for future goals. A student can temporarily reduce entertainment for an exam. An entrepreneur can go through intensive work for a project. A writer can endure long solitude to complete a work. Facing the future is not the problem. The problem is whether this sacrifice has become long-term, normalized, and boundaryless self-exhaustion.

By the basic integrity of life, I mean that a person can still sleep, eat, recover, feel, form relationships, and retain at least a minimal sense of participation in daily life.

If a future goal requires you to sacrifice sleep for the long term, overdraw your body, suppress emotions, cut off relationships, give up life, and keep comforting yourself with "everything will be fine once that day comes," then the goal is no longer only a direction. It has begun to deprive the present of life.

So what the "arrival fallacy" truly reveals is not only that many people remain empty after success. It reveals a deeper problem: when we stake all meaning on the endpoint, every day within the process may be devalued in advance.

Even if the endpoint really arrives, even if the goal is truly completed, it cannot fully redeem the body overdrawn for too long, the mind repeatedly suppressed, the relationships suspended for too long, or the days we actively judged as "not really life."

The danger of terminal teleology lies here. Its problem is not that it gives people direction. Its problem is that it makes people believe life only truly begins after arrival.

But life does not begin only on some future day. It has always been unfolding in the present body, everyday life, relationships, and actions.

Opposing "Terminal Teleology" Is Not Opposing Goals

Therefore, this article must first make a crucial clarification: opposing terminal teleology does not mean opposing goals.

People of course need goals.

Without goals, action becomes scattered. Without direction, attention drifts. Without long-term investment, many important things cannot take shape. Writing a book, learning a language, cultivating a relationship, completing a project, and training an ability all require goals.

More precisely, many human actions are extended in time by nature. They need to unfold gradually through long practice and cannot be completed in an instant. This is exactly why goals are necessary. Goals link scattered time together, give attention a direction, bring the body into training, and let people establish more concrete and sustained contact with the world.

The problem is not that we set goals. It is how we understand them.

Terminal teleology treats goals as storage rooms for the meaning of life, as if meaning were locked somewhere in the future and could only be collected after arrival. Under this logic, today's life has no meaning in itself. It is merely saving up eligibility for later.

But the healthy function of a goal is to organize practice, not to store meaning.

Goals give action direction, continuity to practice, and allow a person to remain in concrete relation with the world over a longer period.

Results certainly have value. They change circumstances, open opportunities, and complete real achievements. The publication of a book, the completion of a project, the passing of an exam, or the stabilization of a relationship is not trivial.

But the result should not monopolize meaning, nor should it turn the whole process into mere cost.

When someone sets the goal of "writing a book," meaning does not exist only at the moment of publication. What truly constitutes meaning is the long process of observing, thinking, expressing, revising, bearing frustration, and reorganizing experience through writing.

When someone sets the goal of "reaching the summit," the summit certainly has value, but the view during those few minutes cannot exhaust the meaning of the whole mountain. The function of the goal is to bring the person onto the path: to let them feel breath, heartbeat, fatigue, wind, slope, tree shadow, bodily limits, and the extension of will along the way.

So a goal is not a life preserver. It is a compass.

A life preserver means: I am drowning now, and only grasping that result can keep me alive. A compass means: I am still inside life, but I need a direction so that my actions do not scatter.

Post-heroism does not cancel goals. It removes their absoluteness. Goals remain important, but they no longer have the power to define an entire life.

Endpoints can still exist, but their absolute status needs to be lowered. Results still have value, but they should not become the sole source of meaning.

Life Is Not "Turning In an Exam," but "Weaving"

Behind terminal teleology is a kind of "turning in the exam" mindset.

It imagines life as a large examination: as long as you hand in a sufficiently impressive answer sheet at the end, this life counts as qualified. If you fail to hand in that result, all the effort before it seems not to have truly completed anything.

The cruelest part of this thinking is that it makes people keep waiting for some final confirmation:

When I succeed, I can feel at ease. When I become free, I can live. When I am recognized, I can believe in myself. When I complete that goal, my life will finally add up.

But life is not an exam with standard answers.

Life of course contains staged completions. Exams end, projects are delivered, works are completed, relationships enter new stages, and careers reach certain turning points.

But these are staged completions, not a once-and-for-all confirmation of the meaning of an entire life.

There is no ultimate moment that can judge for us whether the whole of life was worth it. Nor is there any result that can compensate for all the broken, numb, and absent life that came before.

A better way to understand life is through "weaving."

Weaving does not mean that life has no direction. It means that the meaning of life is not issued all at once at some endpoint, but slowly forms through unfolding patterns of experience and relation.

Every piece of work genuinely invested in, every act of embodied labor, every moment of serious listening, every meal cooked for another person, every stretch of focused reading, every walk that lets the world be felt again, every response without instrumental calculation: none of these is merely collecting points for a distant endpoint.

They themselves are components of the meaning of life.

Of course, not every process is naturally meaningful. Mechanical repetition, draining routine, and forced endurance do not automatically become worthy simply because they are "process."

A process can constitute meaning because a person genuinely invests body, attention, and the capacity to respond within it.

Meaning is not an abstract label detached from experience, nor a prize hanging in the future. It is more like a structure of relation: when a person feels in action that they are genuinely connected with something, someone, or a world, they no longer merely live in the hollow passage of time. They confirm their place in existence through experience.

This is why the body, the everyday, and resonance matter so much.

The body brings a person back from abstract anxiety into reality. The everyday prevents meaning from depending only on grand events. Resonance reopens a responsive relation between person and world. Within that responsiveness, a person does more than complete tasks. They feel in concrete experience that they can still be touched by the world, and can still respond to it.

Therefore, meaning is not something that appears only at the endpoint. It gradually appears in every genuine investment, every concrete response, and every renewed participation in life.

This also answers the thread running through the previous articles:

The body keeps meaning from remaining only in the head. The everyday keeps life from becoming only an attachment to grand goals. Resonance lets person and world form a responsive relation again. This article adds that these experiences do not need to wait for some ultimate goal to prove them. They are already weaving a life.

Life is not handing in one final answer. It is gradually weaving its shape through everyday experience, action, relation, and response.

Having Goals Without Being Bound by the Endpoint

At this point, the true object of criticism is clear. It is not pursuit, goals, or results themselves. It is their gaining the power to define all of life. Results certainly have real value. They change opportunities, circumstances, and the relation between person and world. But they should not take on the function of "saving an entire life."

The more realistic question shifts from "Can I finally arrive at an absolutely complete endpoint?" to "How can I participate in life more truly at this moment?" It shifts from "Can this goal prove me once and for all?" to "Can this goal let me enter the world more deeply?" It shifts from "Will I finally begin living later?" to "Am I already inside life now?"

Therefore, a truly mature posture toward life can still have goals, action, and pursuit. The difference is this: goals no longer bind the whole of life, action no longer devalues life as cost, and pursuit no longer stakes all meaning on the future.

A person can delay gratification, but should not sacrifice body and mind for the long term. They can bear temporary pressure, but should not let pressure become boundaryless self-exhaustion. They can pursue results, but should not let results monopolize the meaning of life.

This also means that failure no longer has the power to negate an entire stretch of lived experience.

This does not mean success and failure make no difference. They certainly bring different real consequences: different opportunities, different circumstances, different relations, and possibly different self-understandings.

But failure cannot retroactively declare a practice in which one was genuinely invested to be meaningless.

A goal is worth pursuing not because it guarantees success, but because it allows a person to train themselves, understand the world, respond to others, and unfold life through the pursuit. Even if it fails in the end, that practice still genuinely constitutes part of a life, and need not be judged as time completely wasted.

This is where the whole column finally arrives.

We do not escape emptiness through an ultimate goal. We move through emptiness by participating in life again.

We confirm reality through the body, settle ourselves through the everyday, rebuild relation through resonance, and organize action through goals. In the end, we still move forward, but we no longer hand the whole of life over to some future endpoint.

If this posture needs a name, it can be called a kind of post-heroic, realistic existentialism: no longer fantasizing about ultimate victory, yet still continuing to experience, respond, and act inside real life.

So the real ending is not arriving at some absolutely complete future. It is giving up the demand that the future define the whole of life for us.

Life does not wait for some day before it is permitted to begin. It has already unfolded in our bodies, everyday lives, relationships, and actions.

And what we call renewal will not wait for permission after reaching the endpoint. It happens in the present act of beginning again to experience, respond, and act.