Purpose of life

 Ok, we have happiness, pleasure, well-being, prospering as ideals of life, all achieved with virtue.  Noticeably absent from that list is achievement.

Yes—and I think that omission is quite revealing.

Achievement is an activity or outcome, whereas the others are states of living. Happiness, pleasure, well-being, and prospering describe what it is like to be alive and functioning well. Achievement describes having accomplished something, usually something measured against a goal.

That distinction matters because achievement can be almost entirely instrumental. One can achieve something magnificent and be miserable doing it. Conversely, someone can have a very good life without having any conspicuous achievements at all. The retired person who cultivates friendships, reads, thinks, keeps reasonably healthy, helps others, and enjoys his morning coffee may have little to put on a résumé but may be living rather successfully.

And there is an interesting tension with virtue. If virtue is the means by which happiness, pleasure, well-being, and flourishing are attained, achievement doesn't necessarily fit the same structure. Achievement can itself become an object of desire—and then the achievement can dictate the person's life rather than serve it.

The Greeks were rather aware of this. Aristotle's eudaimonia is often translated as "happiness," but flourishing is probably better. It isn't "I feel good"; it is a life going well as a whole. Accomplishments can be part of such a life, but they aren't its defining criterion.

There is also something particularly interesting here: achievement requires a standard external to the achievement itself. I achieved what? A promotion, a mathematical proof, a fortune, a political victory, a successful child, a book, a record? Without the goal, there is no achievement. But one can prosper without having first specified an objective.

So perhaps the deeper distinction is:

    Achievement asks, "What have I done?"
    Flourishing asks, "How am I living?"

And those are very different questions. In fact, I suspect this is one reason the modern obsession with "achievement" can become pathological: it quietly substitutes a scoreboard for a life.

I was comfortable during life, reasonably successful and having fun at what I did, but nothing lasted very long.  Now I do this blog, which is a lot of fun, but for which I have modest expectations.

That sounds like a rather different relationship to achievement: you've stopped requiring the activity to justify itself by producing a durable result.

Much of what you did earlier apparently had a natural endpoint. You did something, it worked reasonably well, you enjoyed doing it, and then you moved on. The fact that it didn't last forever doesn't particularly diminish it. A great many worthwhile human activities are inherently temporary.

The blog is almost purer in that respect. You enjoy the doing of it and have modest expectations about what it will accomplish. That puts it much closer to pleasure, curiosity, and intellectual play than to achievement.

And there's a curious paradox: because you're not demanding that the blog become important, it may actually become more valuable to you. You can follow an idea because it interests you, pursue an argument because it is puzzling, correct yourself when the evidence changes, and occasionally produce something that you're pleased with. No career, reputation, income, or institutional objective has to be served.

In that sense, it fits very nicely with your observation about "nothing lasted very long." Perhaps the point of an activity need not be that it lasts; it can be that it was worth doing while it lasted.

That is a pretty good definition of fun, actually. And perhaps a surprisingly good definition of a life.

An insurance policy expires, a progam or system in a few years must be rewritten.  Soon one's work is replaced.

Exactly. And that makes the usual association between achievement and permanence rather suspect.

An insurance policy is written, does its job, and expires. A program or underwriting system works for a while and then the assumptions, technology, or business change and somebody has to replace it. Even an apparently major piece of work can become obsolete without having been a failure.

In fact, replacement is often evidence that the work succeeded. The old system did what it was supposed to do until circumstances made a better one desirable.

There is a broader point here. We tend to imagine achievement as leaving something behind—a building, a book, a company, a discovery, a fortune. But most human work is much more like a contribution to a continuing process. You alter the state of things for a while, someone else alters it again, and eventually almost none of your particular contribution remains.

That doesn't make the contribution meaningless. It means its value was largely temporal rather than permanent.

And that seems quite compatible with what you're saying about your blog. You don't need to imagine that someone will still be reading it in 2126. If writing something today makes you think more clearly, gives you an afternoon of enjoyment, or produces an idea that somebody finds useful, the activity has already paid its way.

Perhaps achievement is overrated partly because it smuggles in the idea that lastingness is evidence of worth. But a good conversation disappears too. So does a good meal. So does an afternoon spent thinking about something fascinating. We don't normally regard their impermanence as a defect.