Learned it from [[Four thousand weeks, Oliver Burkeman]] and [[Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman]]: The origin is from [Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren](http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf), a 1930 paper by Keynes: > For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment. The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens’ kittens, and so on forward forever to the end of cat-dom. This is highly related to [[Choose positive payoff curves]], and essentially what happens to it in the limit. #published 2025-05-28