The 'purposive' man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality ofr his actions by pushing his interests 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. For him, jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality.

Johsn Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930). Downloaded from yale.edu. Found in Four Thousand Weeks (2021) by Oliver Burkeman.