When I was 6 years old, I got my first Gamecube and one of the first games I got with it was Animal Crossing. This game and the others in the franchise (the most recent being Animal Crossing: New Leaf) are open-ended. Most games cut to the credits once you complete the story or a minimum number of goals/missions/quests/whatever, but not so with Animal Crossing. You can pay off your house, but then you just get another remodel and debt to pay off. You can work tirelessly to turn your town into a lush garden oasis, but there will always be weeds for you to pull out. You could focus on keeping the villagers happy, but that, too, is a daily task with no clear terminus. This sounds like it would get tedious, yet it is a wildly popular franchise. I can attest from firsthand experience that it is a lovely, calming game (most of the time) that has absorbed my attention for hours at a time. Why does this matter? Lots of people like to play lots of different video games — why does this one matter?
It’s not the game that matters, it is the principle of open-endedness. How many of you, dear readers, have spiraled into despair when a plan went awry or a goal became harder to reach? Why? Is it not the most normal thing in the world for future plans to go wrong? No one can account for every contingency, no human is omnipotent, our plans are unavoidably faulty. Goals, while good to have, should not be the measure of our happiness. Whether you have goals or not should not be the measure of your happiness. Life is open-ended, many times there are tasks we must engage in that require constant attention and have no end in sight. A painter may continue painting till she dies, but some decide to put their brushes down voluntarily. It is not as if they started hating art or thought there was nothing left to paint, but that their time engaging in that work was done. A farmer may toil day after day, year after year, to tame the land and bend toward her purpose, but should it be left untended than nature will take back the land. It will grow wild as it was before any ever touched it.
This is the nature of all we do — fragile. That should not lead us to despair. It is not good or bad, it merely is the nature of the world. Our lives are open ended and and the work is never done. If your goals seem far off, that is alright. That is the nature of an open-ended life. It is tiring, but we are never alone in it. There is a beauty to simply living. Day after day, bending our minds and strengths towards things we will have to do again tomorrow or next week, the mundane tedium of life. It is the stuff of being human! If we cannot rejoice in it, then let us at least find peace in the knowledge that this is how things should be.
