The Goal of Life
Plus our upcoming café on work and identity, recommendations from co-moderator Alex Rose, suggested readings and resources, and more.
Introduction
By Adrian Ma
When we hear the word “goal,” we often think of conscious, resolute intentions. We think of New Year’s resolutions, professional milestones, and the question that’s given countless teenagers an early taste of existential dread: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Goal-directed action, however, arguably extends well beyond the intentional and the ambitious and into the realm of our unthinking everyday behaviours. I eat my breakfast to satiate my hunger; I start my car so I can drive to the mall. Even our purely physiological processes, such as heartbeats, are often said to have something like a “purpose” (as when we say that the function of the heart is to pump blood)—not to mention that even non-human organisms from bacteria to hummingbirds have been described as exhibiting goal-directed behaviour, for reasons ranging from the evolutionary to the theological.
In other words, goal-directedness, whatever the goal may be, appears to be a central feature of human—and perhaps even non-human—life. At our Curiosity Café last Tuesday, moderated by philosophy graduate student Alex Rose and our very own Marybel Menzies, we engaged in a collaborative discussion on the nature (and nurture) of goals, why we succeed in some goals and fail in others, and whether there is a single ultimate goal that is shared by all living things. But first:
Featured Content:
Curiosity Café Recap: The Goal of Life
Upcoming Events
Community Survey
Alex’s Recommendations: Britt Frank on Getting Unstuck
Toronto Events
Readings & Resources
Curiosity Café Recap: The Goal of Life: Why Do Living Things Do What They Do?
By Adrian Ma
Our latest Curiosity Café, moderated by Alex Rose and Marybel Menzies, began with a deceptively simple governing question: What is a goal? Feeding into this big-picture question was a series of more personal sub-questions:
What types of goals do you have?
Consider a particular goal that you have achieved. What was required for you to achieve that goal? What did you need to change about your circumstances, context, and behaviour to achieve that goal?
Consider a goal that you failed to achieve. What prevented you from attaining that goal? What could you have changed about your circumstances to accomplish that goal?
What are the relationships between the different goals that you have? (At different timescales, levels of complexity, etc.).
Here’s what some of you had to say in the first half:
There is a difference between goals and dreams. Dreams are outcomes that we merely fantasize about, whereas goals are objectives we are actively working towards.
Goals are more likely to be accomplished when they account for the limits of your willpower. Very demanding goals (such as eliminating all sugar from your diet) are likely to be thrown out altogether, whereas more modest goals allow for steadier and more enduring, if slower, progress.
We tend to think of success as hinging on aspects of individual character, such as discipline or courage. However, success is also determined by larger contextual factors, like your circumstances, social circle, or environment, which can reduce the need for individual virtue. For example, I would be more likely to develop a habit of going to the gym if I hung out with people who made fitness a way of life.
To make progress toward my goals, I must be forgiving toward my past self; self-forgiveness allows me to move on from and avoid defining myself in terms of my failures.
Even when we fall short of our goal, that does not necessarily mean we “failed.” Imagine someone who resolves to quit smoking but gives in after three weeks of abstinence. Judged solely by the standards of their original goal, they’ve failed. But there’s also a sense in which they’ve succeeded—they’ve gone three weeks without smoking! In such cases, it can be helpful to redefine what it means to succeed.
We don’t always choose our goals; the latter often derive from sources that lie beyond our awareness or our control.
To what extent are my goals mine? A great many of the goals we have are inherited or externally implanted. I want to get married and start a family because that is the life society tells me to want; I want to buy this new piece of technology because I have been bombarded by advertisements informing me that my life is not complete without it.
Does the fact that a goal was not voluntarily chosen make it any less meaningful or desirable?
Goals can be distinguished according to their concreteness and the rigidity of the process by which they are pursued. Some goals come with very specific timelines; others are approached sporadically over a vaguely defined period. For some, professional goals are firmer and less flexible than personal ones, because they tend to involve constraints, like externally imposed deadlines, that we have little power to waive or negotiate. On the other hand, personal goals can seem more consequential because they tend to be expressions of deeper values or interests.
Some goals are instrumental to others. I want to finish my degree because I want to find a job; I want to find a job because I want to buy a house; and so on. Moreover, even seemingly divergent goals can ultimately converge on a single aim. Perhaps most or all of our seemingly disconnected actions—binge-watching Netflix, hanging out with friends, going to work—are in fact directed, consciously or otherwise, at a single broad, overarching purpose, such as living a life of meaning or pleasure.
Goals are a means of self-expression—they reflect who we are, or aspire to be. Reconceptualizing our goals as matters of identity can also motivate us to take them more seriously. Instead of asking ourselves, “Should I hit the snooze button?” we can ask, “Do I want to be the kind of person who hits the snooze button?”
In the final analysis, there may be a sense in which we all want to be the same kind of person—the kind of person who leads a good life, however that is defined.
After the break, we transitioned from the particular to the universal and zeroed in on the notion of the ultimate goal of life—the goal that all human beings, and even non-human organisms, share. In groups small and large, we engaged with a few commonly held ideas as to what this all-encompassing goal may be—including the possibility that no such goal exists in the first place:
Is survival, whether individual or genetic, the goal of life? If the goal of life is written in our genes, then how do we explain soldiers who die at war for the peace of their nation or martyrs who die for a cause?
Is pleasure the goal of life? What about ascetic monks who starve themselves to prove their resilience or dedication?
Is authentic self-expression the goal of life, whatever that means to you? If you think it is, how could it apply to non-human organisms, if at all? Do humans have a different underlying goal than all other life?
Do you think something else is the ultimate goal of life? Do you even think there is a single goal of life that all of our actions can be reduced to?
Here are a few of your responses (as you can see, questions one and four received a great deal of attention):
There is no overarching goal for all of human life, let alone for all of life in general. Rather, life admits of a plurality of goals, and none can be reduced to the others. The goal for us humans is to survive, and seek pleasure, and express ourselves authentically.
The goal of life is determined by an individual’s values and priorities, and can’t simply be dictated from the top down.
According to behaviourism, a school of psychology that was popular in the mid-20th century, behaviours are learned through repeated interactions with the environment, which either encourage a certain behaviour through pleasant and desirable rewards or discourage it through unpleasant and aversive punishments. If behaviourism is a good model of human behaviour, including goal-setting, then we should expect that the goal of life is to gain more desirable rewards and avoid undesirable punishments.
However, even if behaviourism is true, there remains the question of why we enjoy these rewards and dislike these punishments. Maybe there is some further goal to which these subjectively pleasurable and painful experiences are pointing.
Survival and reproduction are the goals we naturally seek on account of our evolutionary drives, but what is natural is not necessarily good. (Violent behaviour has biological roots; that doesn’t mean we should embrace it.) Maybe humans are distinguished from other organisms by their ability to pursue goals that run counter to, and even override, what evolution demands.
Similarly, some of the things that make life meaningful—and are, by extension, pursued as goals—are valued because they appear to transcend biological necessity. Creative works like poetry and music, for example, are beautiful in part because they cannot be reduced to instruments of survival.
Maybe setting goals over and above what evolution requires is a privilege, reserved for those whose basic survival needs can be reliably met.
If life does have a single ultimate goal, that means some people may be living their lives wrong. It might be healthy to preserve this possibility—after all, not all ways of life are equally right or good, and we don’t want to open the door to legitimizing all of them.
Even if such an all-encompassing goal exists, we shouldn’t act as though there is. Taking for granted or enforcing a single conception of the purpose of life would lead to the alienation, and even oppression, of those who do not subscribe to that purpose.
Our conversation has seemed to be exclusively focused on individual goals. But what about collective goals?
Is there something distinctive about collective goals, or do they all boil down to collections of overlapping individual goals?
Collective goals and individual goals often enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Fulfilling individual goals can contribute to our collective goals, and fulfilling collective goals can often advance our individual goals.
Alex and Marybel concluded the discussion with a very practical takeaway:
If you’re having trouble doing what you expect yourself to do, or often find yourself confused by your behaviour, ask yourself if there is some underlying goal that explains what’s happening. What could that goal be, and why is it creating these disruptions? How might you change your immediate goals to better align with your guiding ones?
Thanks for reading. If you’re curious about our next café (or if you’re new around here and wondering what a Curiosity Café even is) be sure to check out the “Upcoming Events” section below. And if, like many of us, you often find that the hardest part of pursuing a goal is starting, Alex knows some resources that might help. Scroll down for his recommendations on the topic of getting “unstuck.”
I hope you accomplish everything you set out to do this week.
Upcoming Events
Curiosity Café: Bi-weekly on Tuesdays, tickets below!
About: For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: Every two weeks, we invite members of our community (that includes you, dear reader!) to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about. After our scheduled programming, we encourage attendees to stay and mingle over food and drinks.
We will be hosting our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, August 6th from 6:00 - 8:30 pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1). Please get a ticket using the button below the event description. If tickets are sold out, please contact us, either on Instagram @beingnbecomingorg or over email at sophia@beingnbecoming.org, and we will let you know if we are able to accommodate you. (Yes, this is new! We are so excited about our growing community; however, we also want to preserve the amazing quality of our discussions and ensure that everyone present has the opportunity to participate. As a result of this, we are working towards limiting numbers at our cafés. Thank you for working with us through these changes!)
The topic of our next café is: Work and Identity
The average Canadian spends 1,750 hours a year working paid jobs—almost one-third of their waking hours. With so much of our time spent at work, it’s difficult not to identify ourselves by the very thing that we spend much of our time doing.
We often ask children “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and adults “What do you do?” at dinner parties, as a way to get to know others. The unspoken expectation is for that answer to be about work and professional occupations rather than other aspects of our lives. We regularly make assumptions about who a person is based on their answers to those questions: the argumentative lawyer, the boring accountant, the patient pre-school teacher. Work and identity conflate in our day-to-day lives.
But what does it mean to work? Does work always have to be about utility, or is it possible to truly enjoy what we do for the sake of doing it? Can we live a full and happy life while also working a job we don’t connect with in an emotional or spiritual way? How does work conflict with our personal values or make us question who we are? Are you the same person when you’re working as you are when you’re at home or with friends? Put another way, are we “bringing our whole selves to work” or do we find value in holding some of ourselves back?
Join our moderators, Minami Alguire and Zachary Grey, at our next Curiosity Café where we will explore the dynamics between work and self.
Both the “Pay-What-You-Can” and “free” tickets serve as a ticket to our café! We ask that you consider making a donation by purchasing a “Pay-What-You-Can” ticket to help us make our work and growth as an organization possible. If you have accessibility-related concerns, please visit our Eventbrite Page—in the event description you will find some accessibility-related information about the venue and the event.
Community Survey
For those who’ve attended our Curiosity Cafés, please consider taking our brief community survey. We are conducting this survey to gather feedback on our events, and it should only take a few minutes to complete. Your responses are completely anonymous and will be invaluable in helping us improve our offerings. Thank you in advance!
Alex’s Recommendation: Britt Frank on Getting Unstuck
By Alex Rose
At our café last week on the goal of life, many people had questions about a familiar experience: the complete inability to even begin pursuing a goal that we set out for ourselves. We identify something we want to accomplish, a deadline we want to accomplish it by, and set time aside to do it. And then... nothing. We do our laundry, or binge Netflix, or sleep off last night’s hangover. Maybe we’re even extraordinarily productive in our pursuit of other tasks that we have nonetheless identified as less important than the one we intend to accomplish. It’s not that we begin working on this goal and fail to meet our expected standards. It’s that we fail to begin working on it in the first place.
This phenomenon is known by psychologists as the intention-action gap. I didn’t know that until last month, when I listened to a podcast on this very topic: the June 24 episode of You Are Not So Smart, featuring psychotherapist Britt Frank. Frank discussed her recently released workbook, The Getting Unstuck Workbook, followed by audio from an earlier episode featuring Frank speaking about procrastination. The main message from the June 24 episode is that we should think of the intention-action gap not primarily as a mental or emotional issue, but as a physiological one. We are responding in a way that makes sense based on the way our nervous system has evaluated the situation. It may decide to shut down and conserve energy, or overwhelm the system with hyperactivity, depending on what threat it is evaluating. But either way, it will not provide us with the focus and motivation to do what we think we want because it first needs to take care of the more important goal of assuring our safety.
However, that doesn’t mean the best way to respond to procrastination is an internal deep dive. If we find ourselves stuck in a procrastination loop, the worst thing we can do is ask ourselves why exactly we feel this way. That’s how a loop turns into a spiral. Instead, we just need to acknowledge that our nervous system doesn’t feel safe and use strategies that are designed to restore its sense of safety, so we can return to our rational brains, as Frank puts it. If we’re too amped up, that could be pushing on a wall. If we’re devoid of energy, that could be doing the smallest possible action available to us in that moment. The point is to directly address the sense of insecurity experienced by the nervous system. Just like we discussed at the café, we may think we have a goal, but if our behaviour isn’t lining up with our intention, it may be because our unconscious body has identified something more pressing.
There’s more information in Frank’s previous book, The Science of Stuck. The Getting Unstuck Workbook is for people who just want to get unstuck as quickly as possible. As soon as I finished listening to the episode, I bought both immediately. You may not feel the same motivation to go that far, but for those of you who have the explicit goal of traversing the intention-action gap, hopefully the information contained in this podcast episode can help transform it into an actionable goal as well.
Toronto Events
Chris’s Toronto Event Calendar
If you want more opportunities to connect, inquire and mingle with like-minded people, check out Chris’s calendar on Notion. Chris curates this calendar with events happening in Toronto. Events include thought-provoking lectures, group discussions, and workshops.
makeworld’s Calendar of Toronto Events
makeworld’s curated list of recurrent events in Toronto, which include tech meetups, lectures, unconventional comedy shows, and discussion-based events (like ours!).
Readings & Resources
Sophia’s Recommendation
“Depression and the Good” by Brendan de Kenessey. Here, de Kenessey provides an account of the relationship between depression and the “estrangement from value” it involves, informed by his own experience with depression. What does this have to do with goals, you may ask? Well, de Kenessey argues that if we attach value to the achievement of goals, we put ourselves in a far-from-ideal position. Here’s a little sneak peak of how de Kenessey’s argument goes: “A person who experiences value in terms of how well the world matches what they want is always vulnerable to depression: all it takes is for the world to fall sufficiently out of sync with their desires. The lesson of this may be that desire is the wrong way to relate to value. What’s the right way?” (click here to find out!).
Featured Quote
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
- Langston Hughes
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