Friday 11 May 2012

Goals

I find it interesting how a lot of self-improvement metaphors seem to take on a sporting bent - "he knocked that out of the park", "they moved the goalposts", "shoot for the stars", "she aced that one". I imagine that there may be a correlation between positive mental attitude and sporting prowess, which is easily borne out in my personal years of experience as a pessimist realist. To have a goal, for example, is to aim directly at a target for which you desire to hit and do everything in your power to reach that stage and embrace the (imagined) delights and apparent answer to all your problems in that particular desired outcome.

But what do you do if you have no goal? No target to aim for? If you have no target, you are shooting at thin air and you are less effective than Don Quixote, tilting at windmills (at least, that is my understanding of the point of the story). Does this mean the Nihilists are right? I mean, as Walter said, at least its an ethos. Its not an alluring thought, and doesn't inspire much hope for future plans, but is it not similar to the believer who, knowing with certainty that an unearthly paradise awaits him after death is content with the mire of day to day life, compared to the atheist whom, without evidence stating otherwise, experiences the apparent random, chaotic universe which does not care for him as an individual.

The question that I struggle with is to what extent this line of thinking is depressive and pessimistic, compared to a realist view. George Bernard Shaw once said that the secret of misery was to have the leisure to ponder about whether you are happy or not, and if thats true, then the happiest members of society are those that are ingrained in mindless busywork. Again, it has been said that if you find something you love doing you will never work a day in your life, but how true can this be for those on the lowest rung? I'd imagine it would be easy to find a writer, or a teacher or model, who loves their job and lives for day to day work, but by necessity these people are in the minority. So why do people work? To provide for their families and future seems to be the optimum response, but are we slaves to biology in such a way that all we can hope for is a passing on of the genes? I feel like I'm quoting too much, but Oscar Wilde's famous maxim; "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars"; implies that it must be metaphorically possible for people to roll over and point their faces skyward. How to implement this change? Perhaps thats a question for a stronger, more optimistic mind than mine.

By focusing on the barriers to employment happiness, I see no way out of the cave of shitty jobs, without even the torch of knowledge to guide me to the exit. The worst part of it is, even if I find the exit, what awaits me there may not be what I desire. In other words, if you can see no goal, what can prompt the drive?