If you search on a search engine for “no goals” or “life without goals” you get some sites that emphasize the importance of setting and achieving goals, but there are some other voices who say that setting goals is often an issue for them, so they try to live without goals.
Some of the problems they indicate are that goals often end up being achieved differently or on a different schedule, so it seems pointless to set goals, or they can get things done without making it in to a “goal”.
I was curious if you’ve seen this philosophy and experimented with it: what are your opinions on “living without goals”?
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Now that I have a wife, a house, even kids in college… and see this comment. I had goals, I achieved goals. i have no new goals. Maybe I need new goals. I suppose retirement was/is a goal. I think you can be content without goals. Like, I recently got chickens for my backyard and between the chickens and vegetable gardening, I am content. I enjoy the eggs, the fruit of my labor. But I don’t have a “goal” to get 3 pounds of tomatoes, or 4 eggs a day, or anything like that.
But many people have no contentment and no goals. I think you need one or the other or both.
Seems like once you reach your outward goals, the new goal becomes maintenance. You get up in the morning and do what you need to because you’re happy with your life and if you don’t wake up and do that then your garden will go fallow and your chickens will die.
Until my son was born, I was in a moment like that where I didn’t need more, just to keep on track with what I was already doing.
Sometimes as an example in skateboarding I would just ride around and an idea of a trick to try would come up and I would just go try it out and see what happens… in a way you could say it was a “goal”, but in another way it wasn’t really, but lots of tricks got attempted and naturally one trick led to another without much of an elaborate " goal setting" process
I did zen training for many years, and spent a long time seeking the ideal of “being nobody, going nowhere”.
I believe that having no goals makes life a living hell. You get dopamine when you approach a goal. Without any goals, you get no dopamine. Without dopamine, you live in hell.
for some it’s just semantics, they want to do things but not call it a goal, or want to reform the goal seeking process
I think one of the issues is some goals don’t go according to plan so then people become more flexibile but then it can get to the point of like why set a goal at all