When Am I Done Being Good?

The closest I’ve come to success as a self-help guru is drawing the distinction between telic and atelic activities. This language gained some traction as a way to clarify the contrast we register implicitly between project and process.

Projects are telic in that they aim at an end or telos that completes them. Listening to a song, making a friend, commuting to work: these activities strive towards terminal states. The song is over, the friendship formed, you are back at the office again.

Atelic activities are different. Listening to music, spending time with your new friend, working thoughtfully and well: these activities aren’t defined by endpoints that exhaust them, but are forms of process. You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you can’t complete them, leaving no more left to do.

I borrowed my terminology from the linguistics of verbs, but the distinction corresponds to one that Aristotle draws in his Metaphysics, between two kinds of action:

But if you are le…