Hot Take #1 Achieving your goals won't make you happy.
Never is our obsession with goals and achievements more visible than at the end of a year and the beginning of another. Then, in that uncertain space between two chunks of time, humans usually feel pressed to draw the line and make an inventory of what has been achieved versus what is still to be done. But also to think about the future. Commitments are written, resolutions made and shared with everyone on social media (even though, in all honesty, no one really cares about your goals). All this struggle for all the plans to be abandoned by the time Blue Monday rolls in.
But do you know what’s worse than not meeting your goals? Meeting your goals and still not feeling what you think you should feel. As Oscar Wilde eloquently sums up,
“In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
Why reaching your goals won't make you any happier
💡Reason 1: Hedonic Adaptation
As humans, we excel at rolling with life's changes, a skill that proves invaluable during tough times and transitions to new environments. However, this adaptability comes with a catch. When we attain significant milestones; such as getting a new car, a new job, or a new relationship, we adapt too quickly. Those new things become familiar very quickly and that amazing burst of happiness is just that, a temporary dose.
💡Reason 2: As cliche as it sounds, the secret is in the process and daily doses, not the end milestone.
Only 10% of our happiness is determined by our circumstances, while 40% of our happiness is determined by our everyday thoughts and behaviour and 50% of our happiness is genetically determined. So, if being happy once we achieve that major milestone only accounts for 10% of happiness, thinking you’ll be happy when you achieve that big goal just isn’t going to cut it. Achieving long-lasting happiness means focusing on daily doses, rather than just those major events.
💡Reason 3: The arrival fallacy
The arrival fallacy usually goes like this: upon meeting a goal, you will initially feel delighted. But, very quickly, you find yourself back at your usual level of happiness or even facing a sense of emptiness. The disappointment of not experiencing the expected happiness, or only experiencing it briefly, can subsequently impact your well-being.
But why do we care about goals so much?
We have been programmed to associate goals with purpose and often make the act of setting and pursuing the epitome of a meaningful life. They also become a cornerstone of our identities. Having goals and working to achieve them is taken to mean you are a hard-working, productive person.
Said differently, society today frames productivity and success in a way that only sees “doing” and excludes “being”. Hence, the issue lies not just in the widespread influence and dominance of the productivity and success narrative in our lives, but that these two constructs are only measured in relation to economic gains. We don’t really think of productivity as a measure of being a great partner, parent, friend, caregiver, lover, artist, craftsperson, neighbour, creative, sibling, contemplator, savorer, rest taker, etc.
And, unfortunately, a more insidious trend unfolds: as we align our lives with the restrictive definition of productivity, our yearning for meaning, enjoyment, leisure, mental clarity, and social connections intensifies and, unfortunately, becomes susceptible to exploitation.:
“In general, what happens is that our need for these things gets sold back to us in the form of consumption, all the things that are filed under ‘leisure’, the annual holiday in the sun, and – perhaps most toxic of all – the promise of retirement, when the lucky among us get a decade or two to travel the world and consume all the experiences it has to offer, before mortality catches up with us.”
Dougald Hine
So if achieving goals isn’t the pathway to lasting fulfilment, what is it then?
Since we all have at least a few extrinsic goals, and we all want to be happier... yep: we're kind of stuck.
Unless we start using a new measure entirely, a new KPI or north star, so to say, to lead a more fulfilling life. Maybe, what we need to do is to…
…look for what makes us feel alive and happy instead of what makes us productive!
“To being” instead of “To doing”. Or to put it differently, to give your extrinsic goals personal, intrinsic meaning. Also known as setting intentions.
Intentions, it turns out, capture the reason we set the goals in the first place. They point towards the beliefs, assumptions and worldviews that inform our drive towards the next milestone. Intentions, compared to goals, are not a rat race towards always achieving the next shiny thing, but rather about who do we wish to be or become.
While ‘being’ and ‘doing’ are both indispensable aspects of a conscious life, people focus on the latter at the expense of the former. Therefore, I invite you to reflect on this balance and take some time to set some intentions for the person waiting to come into being over the next 12 months.
📚️ Recommendations worth exploring
➡️ To read on your commute to work
Our annual festival of self-improvement is not such a new idea. The custom of making New Year’s resolutions has been around for thousands of years, but it hasn’t always looked the way it does today.
First, there was hygge, then there was lagom. Now there’s another Northern European trend that’s being embraced as a way to combat our increasingly busy and often stressful lives: niksen. The Dutch concept is as simple as, well, doing nothing.
➡️ For the bookworms: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
When the technologies we use every day collapse our experiences into 24/7 availability, platforms for personal branding, and products to be monetized, nothing can be quite so radical as… doing nothing. Here, Jenny Odell sends up a flare from the heart of Silicon Valley, delivering an action plan to resist capitalist narratives of productivity and techno-determinism and to become more meaningfully connected in the process.
➡️ Binge-eating while binge-watching
Intentions are not important only when we talk about ourselves as individuals, but also when we talk about businesses and our scope when building one. So let’s see how we can use our good intentions for building a business that will make the world a little bit better instead of the opposite.
➡️ For podcasts lovers
This episode talks about how until the era of industrial modernity, there had never been a way of life in which humans were bound to choose the more efficient way of doing something over the more enjoyable way of doing it, the more profitable way of doing something over the more meaningful way of doing it.
Many of us know that we can’t go on like this. We might not have a worked-out explanation, but we know in our bones that something is wrong. But we struggle to know where to start. So, what if we started by remembering that we used to have fun together?
➡️Laugh & learn
🤝Let’s work together!
When you are ready, here's how I can support you:
See you again next Wednesday, with another hot take 🔥
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