What Goals Are
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What Goals Are
“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for…”
-U2
“The reward for success and growth is more work and opportunities for growth.”
-Tom Sachs (paraphrased)
Yesterday I was talking to a client about growth, progress, etc.
He said something to the effect of “We achieve goals and then need to set new ones.”
Now, that may seem obvious to you, but don’t mistake the statement’s simplicity for a lack of profundity or insight. It is actually the conclusion of a deep existential reflection in which we had engaged, and was uttered with a mix of musing and resignation.
There is an implicit overwhelm in this expression, and it is a remarkably succinct diagnosis of the nature of reality and our existence within it.
Consider the way you spend your day.
You wake up, and quickly realize that you have been sleeping. You are horizontal, in your pajamas, your bladder is full, you may be hungry or undercaffeinated, and you need to start your day.
See what’s happening? We begin with a condition, or a superposition of conditions, and from there derive a series of goals to structure our time.
Overlapping conditions:
Still in bed
In pajamas
Full bladder
Hunger/Undercaffeination
Derived goals:
Get out of bed
Get dressed
Evacuate bladder
Eat breakfast and/or coffee
This is, of course, a highly general example, and our respective morning rituals are simply a reliable series of goals and execution strategies that continue to work.
It happens with such habitual regularity that we don’t even realize what it is. Habits are reliable goals that arise from conditions. They can be productive or destructive, but let’s not dwell there.
Now, my client’s observation.
He runs a complex and sophisticated business. He is a community leader with involvement in his local scouting troop. He is a devoted family man.
All of these domains require him to think about goals in various ways.
But it’s always the same pattern:
We experience initial conditions.
We compare them to desired results.
We calculate the difference.
We set goals to bridge the gap.
We execute the resulting strategy.
We evaluate the results…⤴️
And some, like our morning rituals, become routinized, while others like company or educational goals have greater novelty.
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So far I expect this isn’t anything new for you. Perhaps you have not given it this level of analysis, but it shouldn’t be controversial or arresting for you to contemplate.
So, what’s the existential condition behind all this?
Well, I think it’s this.
Achieving goals gives us metaphysical closure, which is both satisfying and, if we’re honest, highly frustrating.
Humans, at the deepest level I believe, crave stasis. Stasis is (pure state), or “static”. And stability is essentially an approximation of stasis within motion, and we are all consigned to motion.
A goal represents a better version of reality than that which we experience. And there is a conflict here. Because we desire a better state than we have, but we also desire (pure state). The contradiction is our craving for stasis and also a better state of stasis. They are superimposed, contradictory desires.
And all of existence must be engaged in this, including the laws of nature, because nature saw fit to generate spacetime, which is the medium by which we discern our current state, compare it to a better one, and execute our strategy as we navigate spacetime in pursuit of a better (pure state). But we never arrive. The achievement of the goal, which we anticipate to be (pure state), quickly becomes our new reality. Reality includes time, which demands to be filled, and so the process repeats and perpetuates, again and again, at every social scale and temporal cycle.
This is the blessing and curse of existence. And the blessing and curse of human existence is to be aware of the very condition. We are the self-observing electrons, forced to collapse superimposed possibility into actuality at every social scale and temporal cycle.
And when my client uttered, with such deceptive and concise directness, “We achieve goals and then need to set new ones”, this is the deep existential ache he was sensing.
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The tension of existence is change and stasis. Parts of us sense the (pure state) of the ideal - beyond time and space. Other parts of us see the need to navigate the endless dynamic change of particular reality. And that contradiction hurts on the deepest level.
And goals, then, are our envisioned glimpse of (pure state), that static ideal state beyond time and space. The only way to find happiness, then, is for the (pure state) of our achievements to be superior to the starting conditions. Of course, we can try to pin down (pure state), but reality doesn’t let us.
And this, itself, is an existential condition that some find cruel and overwhelming. We’re all in this together, finding our paths, making as much sense of it as we can, and searching for our own little slice of (pure state), one goal/strategy/execution/completion at a time.
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If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in my essay on “Completion Psychology”, which diagnoses this condition more systematically. It’s FREE.
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