What a fruitful question. There are already things I deemed impossible that I managed to make happen :)
So two examples of what feel impossible now (but still in the realm of reality, not like wanting to eat the concept of a color x) ) :
Preventing the general European move towards fascism (even achieving that in my country, France, would be amazing). Feels impossible because :
Many competent and intelligent people already attempted that, without success.
I don’t think these kind of mass movements are controllable by one person. It feels like they behave following laws we don’t necessarily know but can hardly break.
I tried a little my hand at politics, it seems like a domain where deontology loses against consequentialism and it felt rotten + was really bad for my happiness. That’s the most obvious way to fight fascism and it’s extremely difficult and too exhausting for me to make the kind of effort necessary to have a chance
Approaches like debate or education are great on paper but more long-term approaches.
I am one person, it already requires a ton of effort to change minds at the level of my family or my company, the effort to change the minds of several countries i.e millions / billions of people feel inhuman
I want to (non-negotiable) be happy and I get exhausted quickly, this has to be taken into account to assess the feasibility of any solution
Finding an extremely satisfying place to live, which satisfy all the important criterion I care about : close enough to my family and friends in Paris and Rennes (several hours maximum), where people speak french, a great non-remote job with less than 30″ commute by bike, both calm, clean and safe and full of life, where people are kind to each other, where there is a feeling of community and welcoming of newcomers but no harsh judgment of difference, where I can find easily like-minded people to learn with, dance with and sing with, very close to beautiful nature, cheap enough to live well with a 80% part time salary. Feels impossible because :
A lot of people look for that, if it existed, I would likely know about it
I am looking for a combination of the best qualities I found in places I visited. Typically, I want the pros of big cities and of the countryside without accepting the cons. I want to have my cake and eat it, which is impossible :D
The location limitation reduces tremendously the chances. The number of candidate places is finite and not so big, I’ve visited dozens of cities within the location bounds and they all fall short in one way or another. My current city is great in many ways, but the center is dirty, not so safe and smells like piss, which sucks.
Start with a finite and not so big number of candidates, add more and more constraints which are very hard to satisfy and go in opposite directions … That’s the recipe for building a problem with no solution
>> It is likely really impossible when the problem is presented like that. I see it as a hint that I should look for a better description of a place that would feel like a fully satisfying home. No cause for despair yet here.
Thank you for this post, it gives more precision (and actionable precision !) to the narrative that extrinsic motivation kills intrinsic motivation that I have seen elsewhere.
The link to Goals as Excuses or Guides by Fishbach & Dhar is now broken. A quick search didn’t give me any new legal and free link to a pdf, though I expect it to be on scihub.