Your Endgame

What is your endgame?

I'm about to make a case for living your life as if you're a super-villain, so don't let the fact that it looks like I'm holding Thanos up as an example right up front confuse you. The comparison is deliberate. We spend a lot of time talking about "bucket-lists" in culture. The mythical list of things you'd like to experience or do before you "kick the bucket" (a pun I absolutely failed to grasp the first time I watched It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, a fact I recall because I ground the movie to a halt so that someone could explain the joke to me). This focus on endings wrapped around the deadline of your personal shuffling off from this mortal coil seems admirable to me. But generally speaking these bucket list items tend to be experiential, and require a good deal of, for lack of a better term, youth to pull off. So if you have a bucket list you're working on, more power to you (and best of luck getting that trip to Europe checked off, I'm sure the pandemic will end with something other than the ultimate collapse of civilization and the subsequent impossibility of global travel).

Again I ask, however, what is your endgame?

See, the title of the film Avengers: Endgame is obviously intended to refer to their own endgame in the fight to defeat Thanos. Dr. Strange says as much after giving the time stone to the Mad Titan. But to suggest that the filmmakers didn't also intend the title to refer to Thanos' own plans would be an insult to the creative minds at work, most particularly Kevin Feige, who is a bigger comics nerd than you are and definitely thinks through these implications.

And what was Thanos' endgame? It wasn't the snap. That was his objective. His bucket-list item, if you would. Something to accomplish before he died. But he had his endgame planned too, as Nebula reveals at the beginning of the film, and his endgame was actually what commenced following Strange's admission. The farm. His retirement years, for all intents, during which he intended to set aside his theoretically righteous pursuit in favor of a personal endgame.

It obviously doesn't last for too long before he gets his head cut off, but my point here isn't that it panned out for him, but rather that in the fiction of the MCU, arguably the most driven and most powerful dude around had his retirement planned.

On the one hand that's a great example of how to write your characters such that they feel more real. Your villain's goal can't just be "POWER" unless you intend them to appear short-sighted. Which is fine, just make sure you confront them with their short-sightedness at some point so the audience can see that was intentional. And your hero needs to have motivations beyond just "oh I'm gonna save the world from this one dude", even if they fully expect to die in the process. Sam didn't expect he was ever going to make it back to the Shire when he hoisted Frodo over his shoulder, but the endgame goal of raising a family in the pastoral paradise of his youth was absolutely and obviously still there.

On the other hand it's something you need to know about yourself. Obviously it's difficult for most of us to predict exactly how we'll spend that last decade or two, given how the intervening years are going to change that outcome a lot. But having some sort of almost platonic ideal in mind will help you make decisions now. If your goal is to retire to a remote farm and live off the grid, you might want to spend some time now figuring out how to maintain your house and procure stuff like food and energy without the infrastructure of a city or town to rely on. And maybe start looking for some land to procure now; prices aren't exactly going down at the moment.

So you've got some life goals; that's good! You have a bucket list of awesome experiences you'd like to do. Awesome. The northern lights are super cool, I'm sure you'll love seeing them. And honestly having a room packed to the rafters with rare 90's Beanie Babies sounds pretty dope too. But what then? After you've accomplished your goals, or even if you leave a few of them unrealized due to the aforementioned breakdown in global travel due to the collapse of civilization, what is your endgame? Where do you want to be when it's all said and done?

It bears thinking about.

Yes Lawrence, thank you.