How I (might have) arrived at my life goal

Editor's Note: This post is not likely to be worth your time unless you have a creepy fascination with what I was like in high school, you creep.

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I introduced yesterday a pretty sloppy theory for how people arrive at the goals they do. In this post, I'll psychoanalyze how I came to mine.

I think I am guilty of having a somewhat jumbled set of goals, as most people probably are. I admire Robin Hanson’s truth-seekage, but for me truth plays a much more reduced role of falsifying or vetoing constructs that I would like to be true, but aren’t. (At least I like to think so.) Judging by my past behavior, my primary goal, while not consciously chosen, is not to find meaning but to create meaning – to do meaningful and useful things. Most of my intentions for reading and writing what I do seem to center around this theme.

When I consider how I might have arrived at that default, the theory I proposed yesterday is already looking pretty flimsy. As a young schoolboy (3 to 11 years ago) I was an accomplished loaf. I was the type who would take pride in his slobitude. Nobody wants to know how many hours I spent playing NFL Blitz 2000 on N64, least of all me. (I never upgraded to Blitz 2001 or to a newer console because of my supreme laziness.) At least in high school, I consistently looked and acted like I just took a puff of some serious weed. In truth, I was as sober as a MADD meeting, but extreme laziness has a tendency to look stonerish.

In summary, the life goal I eventually arrived at could not have been the logical step from my young adulthood image. Instead, it must have been the rebellion to it.

On second thought, maybe if I fudge the story a little it is consistent with my "actions—image—goals" theory because rebelliousness is sort of a big part of my image. I have a tendency to do things differently just because it’s different. (As an aside, I understand rebellion is often unwise. As Paul Graham said, “Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do.” Hat tip: Rebecca) It’s a scary thought, but it could be that I have temporarily arrived at my current goal until I find a more compelling force to rebel against.

I think it’s more likely that my goal slowly developed out of my actions and image in a more straightforward way. Yes, I was an accomplished loaf, but my loafishness was often still centered around a strong curiosity in the natural world, such as watching the National Geographic channel for hours at a time, or observing human behavior (sports and reality shows). That eventually led into reading blogs written by people who were also interested in behavior and such things, giving me a niche of surprisingly productive and motivated people to form a revised identity around. That’s, I think, a big part of how I became the current “me”.

When I look at it that way, I still feel that there must be some connection between actions, identity, and default goal. This motivates me to learn more about how identity is formed, and fortunately it is a rich topic in psychology.

To leave you with a slightly more polished version of the theory, I suspect that people generally slide into a default goal or set of goals based primarily on their identity (and I believe we slide into our identity based primarily on our randomish actions). Our identity and thus our goals can and do change throughout the lifespan, but I suspect they are shaped to a higher degree during our high school and college years simply because that seems to be the time of greatest experimentation.

The implication? To increase societal welfare, we ought to tell young people how curious and action-oriented and motivated and sensitive and charitable they are. I'd bet that one of the most common threads between successful people is that they believed (largely because they were told, implicitly or explicitly) that adjectives like these were true of themselves.