Goals and me: four theories

I was thinking about goals this evening.

You've read before that I find it hard to set and stick to goals. (For example here and here, to pick two posts at random out of many.) And I was mulling about why this might be.

One theory (one that Debbie was fond of): I never learned how to set long-term goals because my father didn't set them because he drank too much. (Debbie loved explanations that involved blaming alcohol.) OK maybe, although I kind of like the suggestion I heard somewhere else that past the age of forty you can no longer blame your parents for anything. At that point you are old enough to have outgrown whatever it was, if you chose.

Another theory: My shyness makes me want to stay inside my bubble, my comfort zone. Achieving a long-term goal takes me out of it. Again, this is possible but it's an oversimplification. As I figured out a few months ago, I have at least two setting -- outward and inward -- and they trade off. But even when I am in an outward-facing mode, it's hard for me to remember to focus on a particular goal.

But I thought of a third theory as I was driving to the UU Sangha this evening. It is just this: with all my meditations on "Sister Failure" I have actually rationalized failure. I have decided that it's not so bad. Part of this is related to my willingness to put up with almost anything (as evidence for which look at how long I put up with Wife) ... part of it is a kind of Buddhist willingness to be mindful of my breath and remember that everything is temporary, so success and failure are both a kind of illusion. And if failure isn't all that bad, it sure as hell is easier than success. So maybe that's it. Maybe the big difference between my father and me is that -- at least in Philip Schultz's sense -- he was a failure who kicked against it and always wished with all his heart that he had been a success; while I am only a little more successful in a narrow range of things (for example, I'm much better at getting along with bosses or working in authority structures) but I have developed a whole theory of failure that allows me to fail with a clean conscience. And in that case, why bother stressing about goals?

Can you stand a fourth theory? While I was meditating this evening I remembered something that happened years ago, after Wife and I left graduate school. Some time in the couple of years thereafter -- when I was no longer a scholar but just had a job (and a pretty dumb job, at that) -- I realized that I could afford to let go of the anxiety I had been nursing about leaving school. That is to say, ever since leaving school I had been fretting about the time I was losing ... fretting that I was "really supposed to be" doing something other than what I was doing ... fretting that there was some kind of program or destiny for my life that I was deviating from, and that it was going to get really bad if I didn't get back on track "in time". And then I thought,

What do I mean by in time? What do I mean by really supposed to? Says who? I had to worry about all that bullshit while I was in school, because it was my whole job to please my teachers ... to remake myself into whoever they wanted me to be. But I don't have to do that any more, because I'm not in school. I don't have to stick to somebody else's timetable, and I don't have to be what somebody else wants me to be. I don't have to do anything any more! Oh sure, I have to obey the law. And I have to get along with my wife. And I have to do basic things to ensure I'm not an asshole at work or at home. There's always that kind of thing. But I don't have to squeeze into somebody else's categories or schedule. I don't have to fret about this stupid-assed job I'm in, because I can afford not to worry that I "should be doing something better instead". Maybe this is where I belong. Maybe this is the right job for me. And some day I'll have a different job doing something else, and that's fine too. But who's to say that I belong on some other kind of track, and there's something wrong with me for having abandoned it? Who the fuck says? I don't have to do anything for anybody any more. Maybe this is what being a grown-up is all about, in which case Hallelujah!

You know, it's interesting. A few years before, when I was still in college and having trouble figuring out what I was going to do next, my father wrote me a letter about the difference between a career and a job. A career, he said, is a glorified form of slavery; you're tied to a treadmill with the promise that if you work really hard you can rise in time all the way up to ... Head Slave. But a job means freedom: you put in your eight hours, they pay you, and then you can go do whatever you like afterwards.

Considering that in one of my posts (I no longer remember which) I conclude that failure means freedom, it's possible that all I have been doing for the last thirty-five years is to circle around that one letter of his.

It's also true that the third and fourth theories above complement but do not contradict each other. (That fourth theory sounds a little bit like the one my dad expounded in this post here, and which I gave short shrift at the time. So maybe it's bullshit. But this time around it looks interesting.)