After reading your post, I realize don’t like the framing implied by “what is the point?”. It feels like a leading question, where what it’s leading the respondent towards is picking a single answer, where as you point out, the things we do often serve multiple purposes at the same time. “Why are you doing this/why do you want to do this?” is a similar but more open-ended version, which doesn’t have this issue.
Asking when someone should know why they are doing what they are doing, seems to me to have the answer “almost always”, even very early on—although one can discover new reasons as one proceeds, that were not predicted in advance. I mean, it’s fine to feel like doing something and not understand why you feel that way, at first, but introspection and deeper understanding of one’s motivations is broadly helpful, in my experience.
On the other hand, having clarity about the dominant reason for doing something, being able to pick just one when asked “what is the point?”, may never happen for a particular action, or may involve suppressing useful information. E. G., if the truth is that university provides both job market value and social value and you commit to an answer where only one of those is what you focus on, you’ll have a worse time. Potentially as a result of someone asking you what the point of it was, and you then feeling like you’d be wrong to focus on something that isn’t the point you’d reasoned your way to earlier.
After reading your post, I realize don’t like the framing implied by “what is the point?”. It feels like a leading question, where what it’s leading the respondent towards is picking a single answer, where as you point out, the things we do often serve multiple purposes at the same time. “Why are you doing this/why do you want to do this?” is a similar but more open-ended version, which doesn’t have this issue.
Asking when someone should know why they are doing what they are doing, seems to me to have the answer “almost always”, even very early on—although one can discover new reasons as one proceeds, that were not predicted in advance. I mean, it’s fine to feel like doing something and not understand why you feel that way, at first, but introspection and deeper understanding of one’s motivations is broadly helpful, in my experience.
On the other hand, having clarity about the dominant reason for doing something, being able to pick just one when asked “what is the point?”, may never happen for a particular action, or may involve suppressing useful information. E. G., if the truth is that university provides both job market value and social value and you commit to an answer where only one of those is what you focus on, you’ll have a worse time. Potentially as a result of someone asking you what the point of it was, and you then feeling like you’d be wrong to focus on something that isn’t the point you’d reasoned your way to earlier.