Achieve something. Find your purpose in life. Live a meaningful life. Have you heard these whispers in your head? It’s natural to think these aims are the most important parts in our lives. It’s engrained in our societies, in our books, and in our minds. But putting too much priority on these kinds of aims isn’t a great recipe for living well. No matter how successful we are at accomplishing them, the fulfillment they promise is simply hard to attain. We’re better off finding other ways to use our rationality, that are more easily experienced as fulfilling, and that don’t require us to sacrifice other good things in life. Thankfully, there are!
One of the most fascinating ways we use reason is to pursue goals. It’s something we do naturally and, often, easily. Other times it takes more of a struggle. In either case, our ability to do this is downright remarkable. It falls under the umbrella of “self-regulation”, a capacity I’ve argued is a virtue.
We pursue goals all the time while hardly noticing it, yet have you ever paused to think about what is involved in pursuing a goal, and the capacities it requires? First, we need to decide that something is worth prioritizing in our lives. This reflects our ability to shape our lives and to transform them according to what we prioritize. This is huge. This is our ability to be agents. Agents take control of their lives while others just take what comes and ride it out. We don’t always act as agents, but the simple fact that we can opens to us the possibility of living rich and full good lives that just aren’t possible for creatures who can’t be agents.
My dogs live good lives, great lives, even. They are spoiled, they always have someone to play with and someone to cuddle with, they’ve trained my husband to feed them at 4:30am, and they come and go out the pet door as they please. Our cat even takes pride in delivering them mice to bat around. They live great lives, in fact, and more than once I’ve felt that wish that hits all pet lovers: “if only I could be a dog [sub your favorite pet]”.
My dogs’ lives are good because their basic needs are met in (what I think is) the best possible way. But for better or worse, humans don’t live good lives just by having their basic needs for food and companionship met. Even if they are very well met, we crave more in life than basic functioning. We’re not here to stumble through life and rest in mediocracy. We want to thrive. We want to live our best possible lives. Our capacity to be agents makes it possible to shape our own good lives by selecting the goals we think are worthwhile. If we do this well, we’ll find some sense of fulfillment.
Have you ever flexed your capacity for goal pursuit? I’m not talking about the diets or the New Year’s resolutions. Sometimes those goals trigger nice instances of fulfilling pursuits—especially if we do a little research,[1] but often they don’t deliver anything but misery. I’m talking more about pursuing a goal for the sake of the pursuit. Something more like “giving up something for Lent” than “losing five pounds”.
My sophomore year in college, my friend Amy and I made a pact: We wouldn’t miss a single class all semester. We’d coasted through freshman year with poor attendance, which no doubt affected our grades, but that wasn’t the reason driving our pact. We just wanted to see if we could do it. And we did. I made it the whole year, and many years after that. It turns out it is not actually that hard for a healthy full-time college student with zero obligations outside of class to show up to class. (FYI, it also turns out you learn more and enjoy the class more when you go to it.)
I saw Amy recently and we laughed about how silly we were, thinking it was such a big deal, when most students, in my experience, just do this anyway. But the point was never about the “importance” of going to class. It was just to see if we could do it. It was a game, a test. And it delivered. The feeling of fulfillment I got from that pact stays with me now. Feelings of fulfillment just feel so much better—stronger, more durable—when they arise because of your actions than when they arise because someone else happens to notice your efforts. Finding fulfillment in your own actions, independently of what they achieve and who cares about them, is a surefire recipe. It delivers. We’ve just got to get over the baggage of thinking fulfillment should derive from more.
Discovering the kind of fulfillment that derives from goal pursuit, and successful agency more generally, helps us learn to look for fulfillment in the process, rather than in the aims. This is liberating, and, at last, sets us on the fast track towards living our best possible lives. No Pulitzer’s on the horizon? When we find fulfillment in the process, it’ll arise regardless of the weight of the goal we are pursuing and regardless of whomever may (or may not) respect us for pursuing that goal. It’s this—the experience of fulfillment—that counts, that makes our lives go better.
So what can you pursue, today? Have you ever committed to a goal just to see if you could do it? Why not try? It doesn’t matter what it is, just that it requires you to shape, to control, and to change. Don’t stress about finding the “right” goal but try to avoid goals that you are too wrapped up and that might make you feel bad (such as a dreaded weight loss goal). The point isn’t to accomplish, but to pursue. Could you wake up at a certain time every day? Could you try to wear your favorite color for a month straight? Or read a novel for 20 minutes a day during your lunch break? Could you take a lunch break? Start with something that requires change, but nonetheless is clearly within your control.
See how it feels; relish in how it feels. That’s fulfillment, and it’s in your reach.
[1] The fascinating psychological research on self-regulation during goal pursuit reveals a host of strategies and ways in which we can develop intentions and monitor (even subconsciously!) the successes and failures of our goal pursuit. Gollwitzer’s work on “implementation intentions” is especially revelatory, as is Carver and Scheier’s analysis of the feedback loops we can form to monitor progress in goal pursuit. See Gollwitzer, P. M., and G. Oettingen. “Planning Promotes Goal Striving.” In Handbook of Self-Regulation: Research, Theory, and Applications, edited by K. D. Vohs and R. F. Baumeister, 2nd ed., 162–85. New York: Guilford Press, 2011; and Carver, C. S., and M. F. Scheier. On the Self-Regulation of Behavior. New York: Cambridge Univ Press, 2001.