Fruition

The end is attained, and the will rests in it. Fruition is enjoyment in the strong sense: not the pleasure taken along the way, but the repose of a striving that has arrived.

Aquinas draws a distinction here that the whole scheme depends on. We use means and we enjoy ends; to enjoy what should have been used is disordered, and to merely use what should have been enjoyed is to miss the point of having done any of it. The twelve stages are not a machine for producing more stages. They terminate. Something is supposed to be arrived at and rested in.

This is the stage modern productivity culture has most thoroughly lost, and it loses it structurally: a system whose completed items disappear from view has quietly declared that arrival is not a thing that happens, only clearing. But an end that cannot be finished cannot be enjoyed, and a life composed entirely of means is the exact disorder Aquinas is describing.

In Actus Humani

Fruition is why an attained end does not vanish. It moves to Fruition in the record and stays there, with its criterion and the hours you actually spent, permanently readable. The application asks you to judge the criterion met yourself — because arriving is a judgment, and it deserves to be made deliberately rather than inferred from an empty list.