And, the degree to which people wanted things was even more incoherent than I thought. I thought people wanted things but didn’t know how to pursue them.
How does one figure out goals and what to want? Usually I find myself following the gradient of my impulses. When I can find coherent goals, executing is relatively straightforward. Finding goals in the first place is IMO much harder. If you map it onto the question of how to find meaning in life, it’s more colloquially recognizable as a hard thing!
I am pretty far from having fully solved this problem myself, but I think I’m better at this than most people, so I’ll offer my thoughts.
My suggestion is to not attempt to “figure out goals and what to want,” but to “figure out blockers that are making it hard to have things to want, and solve those blockers, and wait to let things emerge.”
Some things this can look like:
Critch’s “boredom for healing from burnout” procedures. Critch has some blog posts recommending boredom (and resting until quite bored) as a method for recovering one’s ability to have wants after burnout:
Physically cleaning things out. David Allen recommends cleaning out one’s literal garage (or, for those of us who don’t have one, I’d suggest one’s literal room, closet, inbox, etc.) so as to have many pieces of “stuck goal” that can resolve and leave more space in one’s mind/heart (e.g., finding an old library book from a city you don’t live in anymore, and either returning it anyhow somehow, or giving up on it and donating it to goodwill or whatever, thus freeing up whatever part of your psyche was still stuck in that goal).
Refusing that which does not “spark joy.” Marie Kondo suggests getting in touch with a thing you want your house to be like (e.g., by looking through magazines and daydreaming about your desired vibe/life), and then throwing out whatever does not “spark joy”, after thanking those objects for their service thus far.
Analogously, a friend of mine has spent the last several months refusing all requests to which they are not a “hell yes,” basically to get in touch with their ability to be a “hell yes” to things.
Repeatedly asking one’s viscera “would there be anything wrong with just not doing this?”. I’ve personally gotten a fair bit of mileage from repeatedly dropping my goals and seeing if they regenerate. For example, I would sit down at my desk, would notice at some point that I was trying to “do work” instead of to actually accomplish anything, and then I would vividly imagine simply ceasing work for the week, and would ask my viscera if there would be any trouble with that or if it would in fact be chill to simply go to the park and stare at clouds or whatever. Generally I would get back some concrete answer my viscera cared about, such as “no! then there won’t be any food at the upcoming workshop, which would be terrible,” whereupon I could take that as a goal (“okay, new plan: I have an hour of chance to do actual work before becoming unable to do work for the rest of the week; I should let my goal of making sure there’s food at the workshop come out through my fingertips and let me contact the caterers” or whatever.
Gendlin’s “Focusing.” For me and at least some others I’ve watched, doing this procedure (which is easier with a skilled partner/facilitator—consider the sessions or classes here if you’re fairly new to Focusing and want to learn it well) is reliably useful for clearing out the barriers to wanting, if I do it regularly (once every week or two) for some period of time.
Grieving in general. Not sure how to operationalize this one. But allowing despair to be processed, and to leave my current conceptions of myself and of my identity and plans, is sort of the connecting thread through all of the above imo. Letting go of that which I no longer believe in.
I think the above works much better in contact also with something beautiful or worth believing in, which for me can mean walking in nature, reading good books of any sort, having contact with people who are alive and not despairing, etc.
This is often my problem—I think “I could probably do it if I really wanted to” and “I’m not doing it”, and conclude “Therefore I don’t really want to do it (strongly enough).”
Have you tried this technique, “if it was easier/less resource demanding to do it, would I be more inclined to do it?”—if so does the answer change much?
Sometimes the answer is “absolutely yes.” For example, I’d love to be able to understand Japanese, but I’m not about to dedicate a year or more of my life to studying the language in order to do it. (As I’ve mentioned before, learning foreign language vocabulary is relatively difficult for me, because there’s no way to use partial knowledge to recover something you can’t quite remember; knowing that “azul” means “blue” and “rojo” means red doesn’t help me remember that “verde” means green. I have to resort to brute force memorization, and I hate it.)
Another thing that I might like to do but I’m not sure is worth trying is making my own game using something like RPG Maker. I imagine that it would take a year or more to go from where I am to a working game I’d be satisfied with, and I don’t know if it would “pay off”—even if I did make a really amazing game, how many people would ever play it?
Perhaps I am misreading you original comment but is your issue not about formulating goals—as the examples with Japanese and something like RPG Maker suggest you can and could even be motivated if conditions were different. But lies with formulating viable or likely-to-succeed goals?
In the short run, I have my hands full with keeping up with household chores, walking my dog, and visiting and being an advocate for my severely ill wife, who has been in hospitals almost continuously since December 2022. I don’t have a job (besides taking care of my family’s rental property) and don’t think I could handle one right now.
Most of the actual goals I manage to set for myself and achieve involve playing video games. :/
This is some unsolicited commentary but it does sounds like you have your priorities straight already.
Its sad to hear you’re so consumed by responsibilities and set backs. At least you have control in the video games right? I wish the best for you and your wife.
I make space in my week to be bored, and where there are no options for short-term distractions that will zombify me (like videogames or YouTube). I usually find that ideas come to me then that I want that take a bit more work but will be more satisfying, like learning a song on the guitar or reading a book or doing something with a friend.
Chatting with friends who are alive and wanting things is another way I notice such things in myself, usually I catch some excitement from them as I’m empathizing with them.
I wrote the above before reading Anna’s comment to see how our answers differed; seems like our number 1 recommendation is the same!
Cleaning things out also works for me, I did that yesterday and it helped me believe in my ability to make my world better.
I also concur with the grieving one, but I never know how to communicate it. When I try, I come up with sentences like “Now vividly imagine failing to get the thing you want. Feel all the pain and sorrow and nausea associated with it. Great, now go get it!” but that doesn’t seem to communicate why it helps and reads to me like unhelpful advice.
As someone with the opposite problem, who can babble countless goals that interest me, and is rigidly married to a few interrelated ones (i.e. make music videos, make films) but struggling to execute them anywhere near to my liking, I hope I can provide some insight into how to find goals or what you want.
I believe that big goals are no different than small goals in terms of finding them.
I’ll be happy to write a post on this if any of this seems intriguing or useful but here’s the dotpoints:
If you have heroes, who are they? What adjectives would you use to describe them? For example, I would describe one of my heroes, Miuccia Prada, as “innovative” “insightful” “paradoxical” and “sophisticated”. I could make it my goal to cultivate one of these qualities in myself, and that would require finding an exercise or even enrolling in a course or activity which would allow me to do so?
i.e. the go-to example would be if you want to be more ‘charismatic’ take up public speaking, join a amateur theatre troupe as that is meant to be a means of developing it.
If you don’t have heroes, who among your social group or friends have the traits or manners that you most envy (in a non-destructive way)? Same as above.
Both of these exercises can be inverted by looking at people you detest or at least have a strong aversion to. Pride and Shame are good indicators too of what you want.
Coming up with goals is easy, committing to them is hard. Just babble. Here’s a template: “I would feel proud if I had a reputation based on fixing/making X”. Prune out the ones that don’t elicit a passionate response.
Analyze your Revealed Preferences on groceries as an Economist would. Everything from buying biodegradable dishwashing detergent to anti-aging wrinkle cream to tickets to a UFC match are all commitments to a certain lifestyle or living with certain principals or values. Those commitments should point you towards broader patterns of goals
Okay sure? But what works for me? “How do you come up with goals”. Here’s how I do it.
I’ve known since I was a teenager that I’ve wanted to be involved in motion pictures however last year I asked myself “okay you say you want to make films, but what is a film you would be deliriously proud of look like?” so I brainstormed all the qualities and elements, and made a video-moodboard (a hour long montage of films, music videos, retro TV commercials, even Beckett plays and experimental animations that inspired me) and that too formed the vague outline of a story. Now my goal is to write a screenplay that incorporates all those elements seamlessly, and then the subsequent goal to make that screenplay into a film. There’s certainly a lot of functionary goals and steppingstones that must be met to achieve those goals.
Do I know how to make that film? Not with any confidence. But that’s because coming up with a goal, being specific about what I want, what I’m passionate and dedicated to is the easy part.
How does one figure out goals and what to want? Usually I find myself following the gradient of my impulses. When I can find coherent goals, executing is relatively straightforward. Finding goals in the first place is IMO much harder. If you map it onto the question of how to find meaning in life, it’s more colloquially recognizable as a hard thing!
I am pretty far from having fully solved this problem myself, but I think I’m better at this than most people, so I’ll offer my thoughts.
My suggestion is to not attempt to “figure out goals and what to want,” but to “figure out blockers that are making it hard to have things to want, and solve those blockers, and wait to let things emerge.”
Some things this can look like:
https://acritch.com/fun-does-not-preclude-burnout/
https://acritch.com/boredom/
Physically cleaning things out. David Allen recommends cleaning out one’s literal garage (or, for those of us who don’t have one, I’d suggest one’s literal room, closet, inbox, etc.) so as to have many pieces of “stuck goal” that can resolve and leave more space in one’s mind/heart (e.g., finding an old library book from a city you don’t live in anymore, and either returning it anyhow somehow, or giving up on it and donating it to goodwill or whatever, thus freeing up whatever part of your psyche was still stuck in that goal).
Refusing that which does not “spark joy.” Marie Kondo suggests getting in touch with a thing you want your house to be like (e.g., by looking through magazines and daydreaming about your desired vibe/life), and then throwing out whatever does not “spark joy”, after thanking those objects for their service thus far.
Analogously, a friend of mine has spent the last several months refusing all requests to which they are not a “hell yes,” basically to get in touch with their ability to be a “hell yes” to things.
Repeatedly asking one’s viscera “would there be anything wrong with just not doing this?”. I’ve personally gotten a fair bit of mileage from repeatedly dropping my goals and seeing if they regenerate. For example, I would sit down at my desk, would notice at some point that I was trying to “do work” instead of to actually accomplish anything, and then I would vividly imagine simply ceasing work for the week, and would ask my viscera if there would be any trouble with that or if it would in fact be chill to simply go to the park and stare at clouds or whatever. Generally I would get back some concrete answer my viscera cared about, such as “no! then there won’t be any food at the upcoming workshop, which would be terrible,” whereupon I could take that as a goal (“okay, new plan: I have an hour of chance to do actual work before becoming unable to do work for the rest of the week; I should let my goal of making sure there’s food at the workshop come out through my fingertips and let me contact the caterers” or whatever.
Gendlin’s “Focusing.” For me and at least some others I’ve watched, doing this procedure (which is easier with a skilled partner/facilitator—consider the sessions or classes here if you’re fairly new to Focusing and want to learn it well) is reliably useful for clearing out the barriers to wanting, if I do it regularly (once every week or two) for some period of time.
Grieving in general. Not sure how to operationalize this one. But allowing despair to be processed, and to leave my current conceptions of myself and of my identity and plans, is sort of the connecting thread through all of the above imo. Letting go of that which I no longer believe in.
I think the above works much better in contact also with something beautiful or worth believing in, which for me can mean walking in nature, reading good books of any sort, having contact with people who are alive and not despairing, etc.
This is often my problem—I think “I could probably do it if I really wanted to” and “I’m not doing it”, and conclude “Therefore I don’t really want to do it (strongly enough).”
Have you tried this technique, “if it was easier/less resource demanding to do it, would I be more inclined to do it?”—if so does the answer change much?
Sometimes the answer is “absolutely yes.” For example, I’d love to be able to understand Japanese, but I’m not about to dedicate a year or more of my life to studying the language in order to do it. (As I’ve mentioned before, learning foreign language vocabulary is relatively difficult for me, because there’s no way to use partial knowledge to recover something you can’t quite remember; knowing that “azul” means “blue” and “rojo” means red doesn’t help me remember that “verde” means green. I have to resort to brute force memorization, and I hate it.)
Another thing that I might like to do but I’m not sure is worth trying is making my own game using something like RPG Maker. I imagine that it would take a year or more to go from where I am to a working game I’d be satisfied with, and I don’t know if it would “pay off”—even if I did make a really amazing game, how many people would ever play it?
Perhaps I am misreading you original comment but is your issue not about formulating goals—as the examples with Japanese and something like RPG Maker suggest you can and could even be motivated if conditions were different. But lies with formulating viable or likely-to-succeed goals?
In the short run, I have my hands full with keeping up with household chores, walking my dog, and visiting and being an advocate for my severely ill wife, who has been in hospitals almost continuously since December 2022. I don’t have a job (besides taking care of my family’s rental property) and don’t think I could handle one right now.
Most of the actual goals I manage to set for myself and achieve involve playing video games. :/
This is some unsolicited commentary but it does sounds like you have your priorities straight already.
Its sad to hear you’re so consumed by responsibilities and set backs. At least you have control in the video games right? I wish the best for you and your wife.
I make space in my week to be bored, and where there are no options for short-term distractions that will zombify me (like videogames or YouTube). I usually find that ideas come to me then that I want that take a bit more work but will be more satisfying, like learning a song on the guitar or reading a book or doing something with a friend.
Chatting with friends who are alive and wanting things is another way I notice such things in myself, usually I catch some excitement from them as I’m empathizing with them.
I wrote the above before reading Anna’s comment to see how our answers differed; seems like our number 1 recommendation is the same!
Cleaning things out also works for me, I did that yesterday and it helped me believe in my ability to make my world better.
I also concur with the grieving one, but I never know how to communicate it. When I try, I come up with sentences like “Now vividly imagine failing to get the thing you want. Feel all the pain and sorrow and nausea associated with it. Great, now go get it!” but that doesn’t seem to communicate why it helps and reads to me like unhelpful advice.
As someone with the opposite problem, who can babble countless goals that interest me, and is rigidly married to a few interrelated ones (i.e. make music videos, make films) but struggling to execute them anywhere near to my liking, I hope I can provide some insight into how to find goals or what you want.
I believe that big goals are no different than small goals in terms of finding them.
I’ll be happy to write a post on this if any of this seems intriguing or useful but here’s the dotpoints:
If you have heroes, who are they? What adjectives would you use to describe them? For example, I would describe one of my heroes, Miuccia Prada, as “innovative” “insightful” “paradoxical” and “sophisticated”. I could make it my goal to cultivate one of these qualities in myself, and that would require finding an exercise or even enrolling in a course or activity which would allow me to do so?
i.e. the go-to example would be if you want to be more ‘charismatic’ take up public speaking, join a amateur theatre troupe as that is meant to be a means of developing it.
If you don’t have heroes, who among your social group or friends have the traits or manners that you most envy (in a non-destructive way)? Same as above.
Both of these exercises can be inverted by looking at people you detest or at least have a strong aversion to. Pride and Shame are good indicators too of what you want.
Coming up with goals is easy, committing to them is hard. Just babble. Here’s a template: “I would feel proud if I had a reputation based on fixing/making X”. Prune out the ones that don’t elicit a passionate response.
Analyze your Revealed Preferences on groceries as an Economist would. Everything from buying biodegradable dishwashing detergent to anti-aging wrinkle cream to tickets to a UFC match are all commitments to a certain lifestyle or living with certain principals or values. Those commitments should point you towards broader patterns of goals
Okay sure? But what works for me? “How do you come up with goals”. Here’s how I do it.
I’ve known since I was a teenager that I’ve wanted to be involved in motion pictures however last year I asked myself “okay you say you want to make films, but what is a film you would be deliriously proud of look like?” so I brainstormed all the qualities and elements, and made a video-moodboard (a hour long montage of films, music videos, retro TV commercials, even Beckett plays and experimental animations that inspired me) and that too formed the vague outline of a story. Now my goal is to write a screenplay that incorporates all those elements seamlessly, and then the subsequent goal to make that screenplay into a film. There’s certainly a lot of functionary goals and steppingstones that must be met to achieve those goals.
Do I know how to make that film? Not with any confidence. But that’s because coming up with a goal, being specific about what I want, what I’m passionate and dedicated to is the easy part.