Imagine you’re at dinner and you overhear a middle-aged couple talking about their retirement and the end of times. You tune them out, trying to focus on your steak dinner, but suddenly the man comes up to you and says, “Excuse me, we are having a debate, and I wonder if you will help us settle it. Do you know where we are all headed?”

At that point, you either take the question seriously and respond in a lengthy, well-thought-out answer that probably has something to do with big words and religion and paradoxes, or you blow them off. 

If you blow them off, you miss the opportunity to connect with the meaning of life, but if you respond, you enter a thought-world none of us really know how to navigate.

Sure, we will watch dystopian movies and read end-of-times books and religious texts, but, as a generation, we aren’t invested in the conversation like, say, Aristotle was.

It was his conviction, his ground zero argument, that everything in life has a purpose, and that purpose is mainly intrinsic, applied from the inside-out, part of the fabric of creation itself. And if there is a purpose, then there is a destined end-point, or goal. 

He would call it the telos. A whole branch of philosophy is termed teleology after this study of the purpose of things.

Most in our culture would disagree with Aristotle since most of Americans base their understanding of life on a chaotic beginning and evolution. Which is why this conversation has come back to the forefront.

But if we can agree that there is purpose in everything, then there are two camps to choose from: intrinsic purpose (applied from the inside), and extrinsic purpose (applied from the outside).

The intrinsic bunch believe the world was created with order and purpose, that an acorn was meant to become an oak, and that purpose is locked inside it, no matter what we say about it, and that the entire world was meant to come to an end-point regardless of human intervention.

The extrinsic group would disagree and say that purpose is applied from the outside-in, a concoction of human ingenuity, that the world is our story to write, and if we think it’s going to explode, we better get to Mars fast!

If we could plop this couple with the crisis down into Ancient Greece and host a debate for them, we would find no better context for deciding the fate of our world today.

For instance, you can’t build a retirement plan for a couple who doesn’t think the world will be around to see them retire.

So instead of debating and worrying about how much money we need, where the future tax brackets will be, and if we can identify the perfect retirement home, we are starting to have more primary conversations about things bigger than us.

The irony is, while we do everything we can to manage risk, we do it only inside the box. We can’t avoid the major risks, but we live as if they won’t affect us. We humans, even the best and brightest, can’t protect against death, but we can utilize life insurance to help not put the family at risk due to loss of life.

In a happy world, we accept the box that is drawn around us and buy our insurance and invest for our retirement, and peacefully enjoy our steak dinner. 

As happiness fades during times of crisis, we may find ourselves delaying such decisions until we can ruin a few good steak dinners with questions of teleological importance.

“If you have a family mission statement that clarifies what your purpose is, then you use that as the criterion by which you make the decisions.” ~Stephen Covey