The Dangers of Goal Setting
Understanding the systems of desire that influence what we want
We hear a lot about goal setting, but hardly anything about why we are so obsessed with goal setting in the first place. Many of us relentlessly pursue goals — which we take for granted as good — without pausing to ask ourselves whether we should.
There’s a meta dimension to goal setting. What are the circumstances and environments out of which certain kinds of goals emerge? Where, or who, do we adopt our goals from in the first place?
It turns out that there are systems of desire behind nearly every goal — from education to investing to social media — which generate and shape the goals of the people within the systems. And the systems I’m referring to are systems of desire.
We should spend a lot more time thinking about these systems — even mapping them out and understanding our place within them — and less time talking about how to achieve the many socially derived goals that emerge from them.
If we see the systems, we gain the ability to see goals that lie outside them.