The List on the Refrigerator

Every kitchen has some version of it: the list on the refrigerator, held up by a magnet from a pizza place that closed two summers ago. Call the dentist. Eggs. A birthday card for Ruth. Renew the plates. Each line is a small promise pointed at the future, and each line will be crossed off or quietly rewritten next week. Now ask a different question about the same kitchen: what is the refrigerator for? That answer hasn’t changed in decades and won’t change with the list. The list is intention. The humming box behind it is purpose.

We use the two words as synonyms, and the sloppiness costs us. They started as different postures. To intend comes from the Latin intendere, to stretch toward, the way you stretch a bowstring. Purpose arrived through French from proponere, to put forward, to set a thing down in front of you. Ask what do you mean to do and you are asking about intention. Ask what is it for and the room goes quieter, because now you are asking about purpose. The questions can pull a life in opposite directions, and the confusion is expensive. It produces resolutions that die by February and careers that read well on paper and feel like somebody else’s errands.

Or take the phone call you keep meaning to make. You intend to call your mother on Sunday. The intention is real and schedulable; it fits on the list. The purpose is older and less tidy: to keep the thread between the two of you from fraying. One day nobody will answer at that number.

The law sorted this out long before the self-help industry did. When the American Law Institute completed the Model Penal Code in 1962, it graded guilty minds into four levels: purposely, knowingly, recklessly, negligently. A nurse who slips a patient an overdose meaning to kill has acted purposely. A man who bombs an airliner for the insurance money may sincerely wish the passengers somewhere else, and he has still acted knowingly, because their deaths are practically certain to follow. The nurse and the bomber stand in different grades of guilt, and judges and juries argue about the difference every day, because it decides years of a defendant’s life. In a courtroom, purpose is the aim itself, and intention in the looser everyday sense can stop at the foreseeable side effect.

Philosophy keeps its own grocery store. Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention, published in 1957, took the word apart and put it back together. Her best example is a man shopping with a list and a detective tailing him, writing down everything that goes into the cart. The two lists match, line for line. They face opposite ways. If the detective’s list is wrong, he made a mistake in the recording. If the shopper’s cart is wrong, the mistake is in the shopping, and he corrects the cart. An intention is the shopper’s list: reality is supposed to come into line with it. A purpose is something else again, the reason the errand exists at all, the dinner guests arriving at seven.

A little over a century ago, science threw both words out of the laboratory. In 1890 William James could still write about will and aim as proper topics of psychology. A generation later John Watson’s 1913 behaviorist manifesto declared psychology the study of what organisms do, full stop, and minds, aims, and reasons were dismissed as furniture from a séance. B. F. Skinner spent the next few decades showing how much of a pigeon could be explained without consulting the pigeon. The exile worked, in its limited way. Biology even got a replacement word in 1958, when Colin Pittendrigh coined teleonomy, a license to say what an eye is for without smuggling in a for-whom. The timing makes you wince. The same decades that scrubbed purpose from the journals watched Europe scrape it back out of the ruins. In October 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre told a packed Paris lecture room that existence precedes essence: you arrive with no factory-installed purpose, so you have to make one. A year later Viktor Frankl published a book he said he wrote in nine days, drawn from the wreckage of the camps, arguing that making meaning is the one freedom no jailer can confiscate. Frankl leaned on Nietzsche’s line: he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. Science had banished purpose at the very hour survivors needed it most, and the survivors wrote the better books.

The laboratories crept back. By 1964 James Crumbaugh and Leonard Maholick had turned Frankl’s logotherapy into the Purpose in Life Test, twenty statements long, and purpose became something you could score. Two decades later Michael Bratman gave intention its formal machinery: a plan, something stronger than a wish, that commits you to the steps that follow. Peter Gollwitzer’s 1999 review of the evidence showed what separates live intentions from dead ones. People who wrote down when and where they would act, Tuesday at seven, the park loop before breakfast, followed through far more reliably than people who merely vowed. The January gym crowd is a crowd of intentions. The March regulars are the ones who attached theirs to a clock. Plenty of people keep paying the monthly fee long after they stop going, because canceling would mean admitting the intention is dead.

Then the marketplace pulled the pair apart and sold the halves on separate shelves. Wayne Dyer’s The Power of Intention, 2004, and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, 2006, turned intention into a force field: wish correctly and the universe rearranges itself. Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, 2002, made purpose a forty-day program, and Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, 2009, made it a keynote. Intention moved in with the incense sellers; purpose put on a lanyard and booked a breakout session. Yoga studios say set your intention at the start of class, and corporations printed their purpose on the lobby wall, where it collects dust and fingerprints. When Patrick Hill and Nicholas Turiano published their study in 2014, following more than six thousand American adults over roughly fourteen years, they found that higher purpose-in-life scores tracked with lower mortality, through every statistical control they threw at the data. The Okinawan idea of ikigai, a reason for getting up in the morning, became an English-language bookstore staple in the same years. Those numbers are a correlation, and correlations have broken hearts before. Still, a reason to get up appears to do work inside a body that a mission statement on a wall cannot.

Both words are everywhere now, mostly as decoration. Your watch invites you to set an intention. The annual report at work declares a purpose. The phone in your pocket holds more intentions than a medieval monastery, each notification a stretched bowstring, and we now build machines and argue, usually after midnight, about whether they can intend anything at all. That old distinction still does its work. Intention is how a purpose gets an appointment. Purpose is why the appointment matters.

Back to the kitchen. The list changes weekly; the hum behind it doesn’t. Call the dentist is an intention. Being able to eat dinner with your grandchildren in ten years is a purpose, and it is the only reason the first item exists. When a list keeps failing, adding more items is the natural move and the wrong one. Ask what the list is for. Let that answer write the next list.