> Atelic activities are those activities where the continuous process is the goal. Certain types of learning, being a good parent, and so on.
Reading the article, I understand this differently. Telic activities are indeed activities that have a terminal goal. However, the idea of a continuous process being the goal seems orthogonal to the telic/atelic distinction. You can have an activity that is both enjoyable and has a final goal: one can play a video-game both because they want to beat it and because they enjoy playing it. An activity being telic doesn't mean it's not enjoyable by itself. You can also have atelic activities that don't have any goals.
There's no reason, a priori, that making an activity telic should take away from the day-to-day enjoyment. Having a final goal shouldn't stop people from enjoying the journey. It does change the game (from an open-ended sandbox to a more linear game), but it doesn't make it unenjoyable per se. What really takes out the enjoyment of the process is not the introduction of the goal, but rather an excessive optimization toward a goal at the expense of the process.
I recently came across a term for this. Telic vs. atelic activities [0]. Telic activities are things with some terminal state, e.g. a typical goal-oriented project, or something like the act of getting married.
Atelic activities are those activities where the continuous process is the goal. Certain types of learning, being a good parent, and so on.
The important thing to realize is that in most cases it's not the activity itself that defines whether it's atelic or telic, it's how we approach it. You can make "traveling the world" a very goal-oriented activity with a checklist that you must get through, or you can approach it as a continous lifelong project where the enjoyment is in figuring it out as you go.
I believe this distinction is also important for work. Making something telic, e.g. with an agile process, comes with the danger of taking the day-to-day enjoyment out of an activity such as programming that you would normally enjoy. Of course there must be some amount of planning, but I think we've pushed too far into the goal-oriented direction that makes people miserable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telicity