It’s tempting to try to simplify complex problems. Someone might say, “If everyone would just live and let live, the world would be a lot simpler.” It’s true. But the only way it would be simpler is if you followed the idea to the extreme. Everyone would have to be hermits. You wouldn’t have computers, natural gas, heat in the winter, running water, food at a store, etc. The reason you’d have to be hermits is because, as soon as you try to do something bigger than yourself, you can no longer “live and let live.” Even something as basic as a relationship will introduce competing goals. As a hermit, I wanted to grow corn and potatoes, but she wants to plant a lavender plant. We have a conflict that must be resolved. Assuming we have limited planting space or limited energy on the types of plants that we can maintain or some other limiting factor, then I can no longer live and let live.
If we want cars and computers and all of the products that come from the highly skilled, specialized capitalistic economy, then we enter into a world of competing goals, conflict, negotiating, prodding, forcing, influencing, and bargaining. If I want to create a Linux computer, but you want to create a Windows computer, and we only have so much money between us, then we’re at a point where we have to make a decision. How do we decide which computer to make? We’ll need to convince the other person to our side. How do you do that? Maybe you make a pro’s and con’s list. Maybe you think about what functionality we need the computer to perform, and you try to analyze which computer will perform those functions better. Maybe you try to bargain, if I get this one, you can get the next one. I’m sure we can think of more strategies we could employ to try to get our way.
In all of these strategies, there’s an assumption that we almost never think about. It seems to be entirely a matter of subconsciousness – of our automatic mind. This assumption is that the computer is useful to us. The computer matters. The computer is going to be an important tool to achieve our goal. What is our goal though?
If we think about it really hard, we can normally figure out our goal. But until we ask the question, the goal isn’t clearly conceptualized in our mind. Frequently, it’s a fuzzy concept that we feel like we understand, but we’d have a hard time putting it into words. All we have is a gut feeling that tells us which decisions to make.
(This whole paragraph is an aside…) However, the more you know about your mind, the more you know that you’re not a single, decision-making machine. There are many parts to you, most of them quietly operating in the background without bothering to interrupt your self narrative, and some of these parts are pushing you to do things that they think are in your best interest but may be counter productive to achieving this particular goal. You really can’t trust yourself to always be making the best decision to achieve your goal. For example, a part of you that fears you might fail may be causing you to procrastinate because that part thinks it can forestall a future failure by causing you to procrastinate. What’s crazy is that the actual procrastination itself is more likely to bring about the failure. You would have been better off if you had just done the thing! Nonetheless, that part is trying to protect you from failure, but it’s doing it in a way that’s counter-productive.
Understanding your goal is vitally important. And by understand, I mean you need to be able to clearly articulate exactly what you’re trying to achieve. It’s not vague language. It’s specific and measurable. The better you can communicate your goal, the more actionable the goal will become. You’ll have a higher chance to see the path to achieve the goal, or at least the first steps to take to move towards the goal.
There’s more to goals then what I have said so far though. Your goals are going to define what is important to you. Let me illustrate this with a story. I have a group of people who I used to play a game with. I no longer play the game, but I still talk to the people. The game we played is the most teamwork-centric game that you can think of. When we are not playing, then we have a chat group where we talk about anything and everything under the sun. The group has been playing together for 4 years, and the group hasn’t needed to recruit anyone in about 2 years. Amazingly, no one has left the group in that time either.
We know each other really well, warts and all. For example, one of the people is anti-Semitic. We also have Semitic people in the group. We have anarchists, communists, liberals, conservatives, and capitalists. When the group is chatting, these different beliefs will be vigorously argued against each other. People will say biting things to each other and truly be at each others throats. But, when it’s time to play the game, all of those conversations are put aside. Why is that?
The goal has changed. When the group is outside of the game, there is no unifying goal. Everyone has their own lives with their own values of what is important to them. However, when we come together for the game, everyone’s lives goals become subordinate to the superordinate goal of working together to win the game. It’s not that the anti-Semitic person stopped being anti-Semitic. It’s that something became more important to each person.
Here’s the point: Your goal determines what is important to you. Actions are only useful or wasteful when you consider them in light of a goal. Likewise, values are only valuable when you judge them against each other. Do these actions and values get you closer to your goal? If so, those things will be important to you. If not, those things will either be unimportant to you, or if those things move you further away from your goal, then you may become hostile to those things.
For example, let’s say you are a Christian who believes that they should act Christ-like. The first thing we should do is recognize the blessed clarity that your faith has given you in life: It has told you what the goal is, and it has told you what is valuable with regards to achieving that goal. It tells you how to behave (actions) and what to believe.
If you reject religion, then you’re in a position where you have to determine your own goals. You have to set your own values. Many people don’t explicitly do this. They’ll say something basic like, “Easy. Just don’t do harm to others.” But these kinds of life philosophies can be picked apart with different scenarios. How do you determine what to value? What if you’re wrong?
I firmly believe that all beliefs are subject to being wrong. If I believe that the boiling point of water is 212 degrees Fahrenheit at 1 bar of atmospheric pressure, there’s a chance that we learn something in the future that revolutionizes how we understand boiling water. I think that chance is next to zero, but it’s possible. And if such evidence was presented, I would necessarily need to change my belief about boiling water. This is what it means to be logical and rational.
If you can’t prove the belief, then you should be more suspect of the veracity of the belief. Why do you believe that thing? Maybe it’s because you were socialized into the belief. Maybe it’s because it’s easier to understand life if you choose to believe this thing, even if it is irrational. For example, some people choose to believe that we are all equal without being able to prove it because it makes life easier for them. You can’t prove that God is real. However, faith that God is real makes life simpler for many people. It tells you what your goals are and helps you to determine what to value in relation to that goal. I envy the simplicity of your worldview.
So back to the goals. Goals matter because it’s the mechanism by which you determine what is important in life. If your goal is to survive, then safety, security, food, water, and shelter all become very important. If your goal is to make sure your family survives when you’re being attacked, then all of suddenly those survival goals don’t matter. If your goal is Nirvana, Heaven, Jannah, Paradise, or other such religious end games, then you’ll consider certain actions and values important.
I can set whatever goal I want for myself. But not all goals are created equal. Goals will take us somewhere. By definition, a goal is a future state. It’s the outcome of our actions. Metaphorically, some goals lead you to heaven, some hell, and some somewhere in between. So how do we compare goals against each other?
Let’s do that in another post.