Life goals and how we (might) get them

Building on yesterday’s post, I want to know how/why people end up with the life goals they do. Although I am certain this will read like scattered musings, this topic has important implications. Life goals guide our behavior, and our behavior has externalities, so, to blatantly oversimplify, we ought to make our Bill Gates to Hitler ratio as high as it can be. The first step is to find out where goals come from.

Maybe a better term than "life goals" is "life purposes" because I am not talking about accomplishments we hope to achieve but instead the motivation that underlies our efforts toward those accomplishments and that underlies our day-to-day behavior more generally. Some "goals" (I'll stick with that term for now) seem to be pretty easily labeled such as “hedonist” or “truth-seeker”. Others maybe don’t have such a clean label but are easily recognizable, such as “live-life-to-the-fullest”, and the seeking of spiritual meaning.

Robin Hanson is the poster boy of truth-seeking, and most academics seem to fall in this category to a lesser extent. The goals, of course, are not mutually exclusive, and people pursue various goals to various degrees.

There is a temptation to believe that all life goals are equally as good. As I made clear in my posts on hedonism, that’s not my view. My view is that while there is no “right” goal, some goals have big flaws just by the nature of what they are trying to accomplish (in the case of hedonism, the goal is simply incompatible with biological/psychological reality).

But I won’t make the mistake of debating the merits of life goals again on the individual level. Choose whichever goal you want, fine, knock yourself out. But it cannot be denied that different goals will have different effects from a societal perspective. That is why we should care about trying to answer the question of why/how people end up with the goals that they do.

Now, the theory...

My assumption is that most people stumble into some default goal or set of goals without explicitly considering it, and my guess is that most of the “chosen” goals rise to the surface during the grand experiment that is young adulthood.

What you do most of the time becomes your image, and your image defines who you are and shapes your subsequent actions. Based on that logic, I would hypothesize that the people who were wilder in high school or college were more likely to adopt hedonist or live-life-to-the-fullest goals, while people who were more quiet and reserved were more likely to adopt truth-seeking or spiritual goals – not because they are naturally oriented toward those goals but simply because the image they developed was more consistent with one goal (or set of goals) over others. And there is nothing special about adjectives like “wild” or “reserved”, I am just using those as examples.

Of course big disruptive life events such as the death of a loved one or birth of a child can and do affect life goals, but my assertion here is that initial defaults are primarily shaped by young-adulthood actions and corresponding image.

My only data point right now is me. And to prevent this post from rambling on any more than it already has, I will save that story until tomorrow. Sadly, the story does not do much to support my theory. Let me know if you have a better one.