How Goal-Oriented Thinking Almost F***ed Me Up

In the most recent phase of my life, a constant source of unhappiness for me has been about accomplishment: what am I doing, and why am I not getting more of it done? I fuss about my work accomplishments like publishing academic papers, but I also fuss about my extracurricular ones. Why can't I learn Italian more seriously, or read more books? Why can't I be an accomplished amateur musician, or someone who knows how to cook amazing food?

At some level I know this fussing is silly and pointless, because ultimately who cares what boxes you're checking? When I was young, I had a chaotic life, but I also had a healthy sense of just living -- being alive and experiencing things. Plus, as longtime readers know, I've always thought life is essentially a mutual aid association, where connecting with other people is the thing, and connecting with people is not a box-checking activity. So how did I get into this loop of relentless self-evaluation?

One thing I've noticed is that spending more time on the internet seems to make the loop harder to get out of and the sense of pressure more intense. I've always assumed the mechanism for this was obvious: that other people on the internet are accomplishing things. If I go on Twitter, I see a stream of posts like "So humbled to be awarded the X prize!" and "Just ran a personal best for my 10-mile run!" and "check out my new paper on X topic!" Even perusing the news, I see people reflecting on how they became internationally known ballroom dance stars or amateur astronomers or whatever in their spare time.

But since I wrote about the age before the internet last week, I came to think the connection is more subtle. Because the post was about recapturing a sense of mild boredom, I tried a tiny experiment: forcing myself to engage in activities like "looking out the window" during a work-break,"staring at the ceiling" while at home, and "checking out the scene" while on a transit ride -- all instead of "looking at the internet."

It's been good. And I came to think the mechanism of the connection between internet and the accomplishments self-evaluation was not quite the "obvious" one and had more to do with my relationship to my life activities. At some point, I got jolted into a realization: things that are actually just life I have been treating as "accessories to goal accomplishment."

That is, at the risk of stating the obvious, I came to think that activities like going from place to place, putting away clean laundry, eating, etc. are not just "things I have to do to meet my goals" but are actually life. It doesn't even matter if you "enjoy" them or they're a pain; either way, you're experiencing them and that's what's up.

Conceptually, the problem was I thought "X is what I am trying to do" and "A, B, C are what I have to do to get to X." No wonder my obsessions with X got me into self-destructive loops where A, B, and C had to be as efficient as possible and where not getting to X led to a chorus of self-criticism. I was shaping everything into goal-oriented thinking and downgrading all the things that are just, I don't know, being a person.

Our entire culture has adopted a goal-oriented structure for life so it's not a surprising mistake to fall into. If an activity isn't perfectly pleasant, there's an assumption you're doing it to get something else or because you have some "project" you are working on. You can't get a gym membership without being asked to state your goals. My running app, which I use just to remind myself what I did when, is constantly nudging me to frame my activities as accomplishments. Even e-reading apps are set by default to help you keep moving toward your "reading goals." WTF?

The goal-oriented approach is so pervasive, it's part of the standard theory of how people make decisions. In rational choice theory, there are things you want, and there are things you're will to do or giving up to get the things you want, and that's just how it is. From a theoretical perspective, it's always bothered me that the "things you want" category has to be so unambiguous: are we saying that, say, cooking has to be either a "want" -- a pleasure, and a goal -- or a "do not want" -- a payment, a cost you're willing to bear? Couldn't it be a bit in-between? Or neither? And now I'm wondering, does everything even need an evaluation that fits it into a set of ordered preferences? Can I just stop evaluating?

Don't worry, my plan isn't to give up on goals. As we've discussed, when I lived a much less structured life, I got into habits like eating cake for lunch everyday, so this post is not leading up to some radical anti-planning manifesto. I'm just hoping to dial it back, to where living my life is living my life, and not something I do in order to achieve something else.