The Tale of the Woman Who Gave Up on Goals
8 minute read
There was once a woman who lived in the North-West. It doesn’t matter which North-West, only that it was a North-West somewhere. She was born to and raised by two perfectly adequate parents, who loved her and treated both her and her brother with as much equality as could be hoped for of middle-class parents at the tail end of the millenium.
The woman (then a girl) was told that if she studied hard she could achieve her lifelong goal of becoming a vet - for she was a caring soul, our girl, and she loved animals in all shapes and sizes (except for snakes, whose smiles she found slightly disturbing).
So study hard she did, achieving good grades in most of her subjects by the end of her state-mandated education, which allowed her to get into a good college and achieve good grades, which allowed her to get into a good veterinary school and achieve good grades, which allowed her to qualify and get into a good veterinary practice.
After more years of steady work she bought a share in the practice, and through an accredited CPD course went on to specialise in veterinary dermatology, because she liked stroking animals.
And then, after many more really quite adequate years, she died.
Thus endeth the Tale of the Woman Who Achieved All Her Goals.
Inspiring stuff.
You could flesh it out with a few more goals, but you’d probably end up in the same, slightly anti-climatic place.
The problem is, goals are an end. Achieving them is the end of the story, or the end of a chapter if you have a couple more.
On its own it’s a rather dull story.
Neil Gaiman once wrote a short piece as part of his Sandman series on the theme of desire, where the protagonist’s longing to possess a particular man ‘burned like a forest fire’.
“I should warn you, getting what you want and being happy are two quite different things” [says Desire].
All except the last page of this story is dedicated to the pursuit and climax of this want. The rest of the protagonist’s life is played out on the final page - marriage, children, aging, death. She had all that she wanted by the previous page, and with it gone had nothing left to do but wait, recalling what it was to have a desire that was everything.
In the same vein, I once saw a documentary about the man who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, one of the most famous mathematical problems of all time. After seven years of work he achieved what no one else had done in 350 years. But the thing that remained with me was that he sounded so incredibly sad, not triumphant, when describing how a few years earlier he had achieved his lifelong dream. In his early 40s he now had nothing left to do and half a lifetime to do it with.
Achieving your goals can really get you down.
Don’t get me wrong; meeting your goals does tend to make you happier. For a while.
And then it doesn’t anymore.
This is because our brains are pretty thrifty when it comes to finding ways to save processing power. If something doesn’t change, we tend to stop noticing it.
I bought my first ever sofa many years back. It was a fine sofa, with a little corner piece that fitted into the room just perfectly. For weeks after I’d get a little kick out of seeing it in the living room. And then I didn’t.
Maybe your sofa has suffered a similar fate.
The same happened with my new bookcase, that painting I got on holiday, and a bargain of a mighty rug. Get it, love it, then invisible.
Exactly the same happens when we achieve goals we set for ourselves. Work for it, grow/save/learn/build a little more everyday, smash that goal, big happy hormone rush, aaaaaaaand back to baseline.
Remember the happiness boost from your first paycheck/a good grade/hitting your cardio targets?
Once achieved, our achievement no longer changes so our brains stop noticing it and, however great the accomplishment, we become as happy as we were before.
My sofa, which I started seeing again for a brief period in 2018 when I bought new covers
In a study looking at people who had won the lottery compared to people paralysed in an accident and controls, researchers found all three groups enjoyed daily pleasures in life about as much as each other. Although happiness might immediately go up as soon as your numbers are called, or down as soon as you realise the extent of your injuries, over time the brain adapts - quite incredibly - so both groups are as happy as they were before.
This is known as the hedonistic treadmill.
Again, don’t get me wrong, goals can be great. They can motivate and they do give a happiness boost through a sense of accomplishment. It’s an integral part of many psychological therapies that you set goals for yourself because they have been shown to help.
But they will not keep you happy for long. That’s why it’s called a treadmill.
And if you don’t achieve them you can feel like crap instead.
So if we can’t set a permanent uptick in happiness as a goal, what can we do?
The process of adventure
If our brains stop noticing what doesn’t change, then the real trick to happiness is being surrounded by things that do.
There are two categories of things we can’t get used to:
living things, like people, plants and pets
dynamic processes, like purposeful living
The second one sounds very fluffy I know, but hear me out.
People, plants and pets are great because they grow and change a little bit everyday. As long as a plant is in line of sight you will not fail to notice it during the week because your brain picks up on those tiny movements, growths and dying-offs that make it unique to each moment in time.
Whether more plants leads to more happiness or reaches a saturation point is still debated amongst happiness researchers
People in general are so full of variability in their conversation, their expressions, their voice, their interest, etc. that you cannot get used to them even if you tried (incidentally, this is great when you like them but absolutely awful when you don’t because you cannot adapt to the sheer abrasiveness of their existence).
This category of happy-makers has no goal to fulfil; they simply are and continue to be in all their wondrous variability.
The second category is that, but with life in general.
And it’s actually surprisingly easy to do.
After the goal-setters of late 20th Century psychological therapy calmed down a bit, they realised they were missing something, that setting any goal was not nearly as good as setting a meaningful goal.
And that’s where values come in.
Values don’t have goals, although they are essential for setting targets we care about. When we act in accordance with our values we:
create a meaningful life for ourselves, and
do it right then and there, not on the completion of a goal in the future.
As Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap, points out:
“The values-focused life will always be more fulfilling than the goal-focused life because you get to appreciate the journey even as you’re moving towards your goals...living by your values gives you satisfaction right now.”
So while goals are all about ‘I’ll be happy when…’, acting in fulfillment of the things we hold most dear is all about ‘I’m doing important things now’ and that makes us happy.
And best of all, there’s no natural end point. If you value ‘a fulfilling career’ you can engage in that process indefinitely, regardless of how fulfilled you are, as long as you act in ways to complement the value.
Engaging with this kind of meaningful process is a bit like the whole adventure before the end of the story. That’s the really interesting bit, when the heroes struggle, strive, seek and shine in their attempts to fulfill the storyline. Finding the treasure/slaying the endangered reptile/reconciling with the inner turmoil are important to the end of the story, but not to the enjoyment that comes before it.
And best of all, we act in accordance with our values all the time.
They may not be our best values, and if we consciously chose them we’d feel happier about it, but they are values nonetheless. The value of ‘a relaxed evening’ in front of the TV, or ‘resource consolidation’ with long lie-ins, or ‘bacchanalian revelry’ with alcohol and strangers are only one conscious realisation away from adding even more to our happiness.
Choosing to live as we do, however we live, and choosing anew every moment, will make you happier than all the goals in the world.
“This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore”
(Henry David Thoreau, describing a cloudy, windy, cold day as he talks about how much he enjoys living in a shack in Waldon: Or Life in the Woods)
The Tale of the Woman Who Gave Up on Goals
There was once a woman who lived in the North-West. Not that North-West, a different one. She was born to and raised by two reasonably satisfactory parents, who loved her and treated both her and her brother with as much equality as could be hoped for in an era before hashtags really became a thing.
The woman (then a girl) was told that if she studied hard she could achieve her lifelong goal of becoming a vet - for she was a caring soul, our girl, and she loved animals in all shapes and sizes (except for pandas, whose refusal to give into extinction she believed a grave violation of evolutionary principles).
The girl studied hard and found she enjoyed learning new things. She studied art history and medieval politics; she immersed herself in cell biology and chinese poetry. The girl didn’t care what she learned as long as it was new, for she was a bit slutty when it came to knowledge.
The more she learned the more she saw and she developed a slightly irritating habit of sharing her latest learnings with those around her. When it came time to take her exams she achieved good grades, which allowed her to get into a good college.
The girl, now a young woman, applied for several veterinary courses and failed to get on any of them, because the world works that way sometimes. She ended up on a philosophy course instead, since their standards were lower than for vets and she thought she should have an education of sorts.
She learned more and enjoyed that too, even though it wasn’t the same as giving drugs to animals. While studying she decided she quite liked writing, and after graduation went to live in Patagonia for a year to write a novela on a crime-fighting sheep dog who lived near the Beagle Channel (unpublished).
On her return the woman decided to put her habit of sharing learning to good use and became a teacher. The work was tough but rewarding until a major budget reallocation and staff restructure made a rather fun job into a rather less tolerable one.
The woman decided enough was quite enough and left teaching to set up a flower shop. She made a new arrangement almost everyday to help people celebrate other people on days that were just as mundane as all the other days except for the flowers. She specialised in imported flowers from Patagonia and cards with high-resolution images of plant cells from the bouquets.
And then, after many more years of these daily celebrations and small joys, she died, never achieving whatever it was she wanted to be when she was little.