Fuller's real genius here lies in anchoring purpose to *generational responsibility*—not to personal fulfillment or abstract ideals, but to a chain of actual people whose lives you'll touch and those you'll never meet. Most of us frame our work around immediate results or legacy, but he's suggesting something stranger: that the measure of a life is whether it genuinely improves the conditions for others across time, a kind of moral mathematics most people never attempt. Consider the engineer who designs a water filtration system that costs more upfront but outlasts her by decades, serving villages she'll never visit—that's Fuller's vision made practical, where the payoff isn't recognition but the simple fact of reduced suffering downstream. It's a sobering standard because it asks whether your daily choices are actually making room for others to breathe, think, and flourish rather than merely accumulating.