Do we really want to achieve our goals?
I had a conversation with a friend the other day on the subject of New Year’s resolutions. You might already suspect that the implementation rate of NY resolutions is pretty low. In fact, by the end of January, only 75% of those who make New Year's resolutions are successful in keeping them. After 6 months, that number drops to 46%. By the end of the year, only 9% believe they have succeeded in accomplishing their New Year's resolutions. [1] So in that conversation with my friend, I was musing about the reasons we can’t seem to accomplish our goals, no matter how much we say we want them. My proposition was that there are two types of goals: our authentic goals and what I will call “implanted” goals.
Authentic goals are the things people really and truly want deep inside. They want them because they want them. There is nothing else beyond it. I will call these “authentic goals,” “true goals,” or “goals-for-themselves.” Implanted goals are the things people say they want, but when they get them, they don’t achieve the desired satisfaction. In fact, people don’t want these things for themselves; they want them to get something as a result of achieving these goals. Often people don’t even know what that something is, i.e. it is unconscious. I believe these goals are socially determined and driven by social pressure. They could come from your family, friends, social circle, or the culture at large. I propose that at the deepest level, these goals have to do with our desired social role, and we do them for others, or keeping others in mind - essentially to receive social approval.
My friend disagreed that these are two different types of goals. He claimed that because we are social animals by nature and our lives are unimaginable outside of a social context, all our goals are socially determined, everything we do involves other people in some way, so one can say that everything we do is “for'' other people. This includes both goals-for-themselves and goals-for-others so there really is no difference between the two. So if you are doing Action A, which you say is your goal, but what you unconsciously hope to get out of it is Thing B ( someone’s approval, being liked, etc) then your goal is to get Thing B, and you are still doing it for yourself / it can still be said to be your goal.
Let me give a scenario from my own life to clarify what I mean. When I started college, I had a hard time choosing a major. I was hearing two conflicting approaches to choosing what to major in. On the one hand were the people close to me, let’s call them “family and friends”, and on the other hand were college orientation guides and guidance counselors. Family and friends argued for studying something in demand with good salary prospects. College guidance counselors advised to study what you were interested in. They claimed that you can get most jobs with any major so what you study doesn’t have a huge impact on what your profession will be after graduation. And to make this choice easier, they suggested enrolling in thematic “clusters” for freshmen where you sign up for a pre-selected group of classes in a specific area of sciences or humanities to get a good overview of the subject so that by the end of the first year you are able to validate your choice. If you don’t end up liking what you chose, you have another year to decide since the university didn’t require you to declare your major until the end of your sophomore year.
I did sign up for one of these clusters but later changed my mind. I succumbed to the pressure coming from family and friends to study something practical. I dropped the cluster I had chosen and signed up for prerequisites to computer science: chemistry, physics, math… While other freshmen were discovering their interests in general education clusters, I was working or doing homework. I realized that I didn’t like CS and after a period of indecisiveness, declared economics with a minor in accounting (that was my tribute to practicality). I went with my father’s suggestion. He wanted me to study economics and then go on to get an MBA.
So, here is the situation. My true goal was to discover what I like and study that. My implanted goal was to study something that will get me a good job / a job in finance and an MBA. Behind my implanted goal was a wish (or habit?) to be a “good girl” who listens to her father and doesn’t disappoint him. So when I think about the reason I chose to major in what I did, I think that I let myself be convinced to choose it. It wasn’t exactly a free choice.
My friend disagreed. He said that just because there was some pressure, I made a choice and I chose my own goal. My goal was to be a good girl and to not disappoint. And according to him, this goal was just as valid as the one I considered my true goal: to find out what I liked and study that.
Given the situation, what was really the choice I was facing? I thought I was making the choice between studying what I liked and studying economics. However, it seems the actual choice was between studying what I like (A) (and being a deviant (a)) and being a good girl (b) (and studying economics (B)). (A) is my true goal. (a) is the socially determined consequence that my true goal leads to. (B) is the implanted goal but what’s really behind that is my socially determined wish to be a good girl (b). I went for (b) - the good girl.
Now, let me clarify - I didn’t know I was choosing the good girl. I thought I was choosing economics. I wasn’t consciously aware of the good girl. So how did the good girl get there?
Allow me to suggest that the mechanism was similar to what happened in the 5 monkeys experiment. Here is a brief summary if you are not familiar with it:
There is a cage with 5 monkeys. Right below the cage ceiling, there is a bunch of bananas hung up on a rope, and there is a ladder that the monkeys can use to reach the bananas. Obviously, the monkeys try to climb up the ladder to get the bananas. However, each time a monkey attempts to climb the ladder, the experimenter sprayed it with ice cold water from a hose. After a while, monkeys stopped trying to reach the bananas. Then the experimenter substituted one of the trained monkeys for a newcomer. The newcomer saw the bananas and went for the ladder. The experimenter didn’t spay this monkey with cold water. However, the remaining trained monkeys didn’t let the new monkey get the bananas by dragging it down from the ladder and beating it up. Thus the monkey learned that bananas are out of reach. The experimenter continued to replace trained monkeys with new monkeys one by one, until none of the original monkeys remained in the cage. However, the monkeys didn’t go for bananas because each time a newcomer would be added and try to reach for bananas, it would be dragged down and beaten up. So after a while, we had a situation where there are 5 monkeys in a cage who “choose” not to go for bananas, even though the original obstacle to getting the bananas (hose with cold water) is no longer there. They are repeating a behavior but they don’t know why.
To clarify, my proposition is that the good girl is a learned and unconscious behavior, similar to the monkeys’ learned behavior of not touching the bananas. It is “the way things are done around here.”
Consider the four stages of competence:
Unconscious incompetence
The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit. They may deny the usefulness of the skill. The individual must recognize their own incompetence, and the value of the new skill, before moving on to the next stage. The length of time an individual spends in this stage depends on the strength of the stimulus to learn.Conscious incompetence
Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognize the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. The making of mistakes can be integral to the learning process at this stageConscious competence
The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration. It may be broken down into steps, and there is heavy conscious involvement in executing the new skill.Unconscious competence
The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and can be performed easily. As a result, the skill can be performed while executing another task. The individual may be able to teach it to others, depending upon how and when it was learned. [2]
The result of the experiment is Scenario 1 - unconscious incompetence. The monkeys don’t know the true reason they can’t touch the bananas. It’s just the way things are done in the cage microcosm. The monkeys don’t know what they don’t know (that their predecessors were being experimented on, for example). We can’t say they are choosing not to touch the bananas, at least we can’t say they are making a conscious choice.
Now imagine that overnight, magic dust is sprinkled on the cage and the monkeys now become more like humans: they possess human reasoning and decision making abilities. They now reach the conscious incompetence stage. They find out that the obstacle to getting the bananas was artificially created. There is no good reason that in the absence of the experimenter with the hose the monkeys cannot get the bananas. There are now no obstacles and the monkeys are free to climb the ladder and get themselves some bananas to enjoy. What do you think they will do? Will a monkey think “oh, how cool, NOW I can finally get myself some bananas” and enthusiastically go for it? Or is it more likely that the monkey will approach the situation with some caution, and perhaps even disbelief, and start ruminating about whether it really wants a banana, the obstacle really was removed, and do monkeys actually like bananas? I think the latter is more likely.
What does it all have to do with New Year resolutions?
Well, my proposition is that the reason so many people fail to accomplish their NY resolutions is that the goals they set are not really their true goals - they are implanted goals. The ones that they should want, not the ones they truly want. They say they want something, but if you were to get to the bottom of it, they either don’t want it at all or they don’t want it for itself, and in both of these cases, there is some social compulsion behind it that is not seen by the goal-setter. The goal-setter is either unconsciously incompetent or consciously incompetent about her true goal.
You can study all the goal accomplishment techniques you want and write all kinds of lists, but if you don’t know that you really don’t want to accomplish those goals – you are never going to accomplish them. You will create a thousand reasons why you didn’t, but the real reason is: you didn’t want to do it in the first place. Until you know what is really driving you – you will keep wondering why those NY resolutions go unaccomplished. But I also think that eventually you will realize that your true goal is something else, and you will accomplish it – just like I did when I enrolled in a philosophy program and eventually got an M.A. It’s just good if it happens sooner rather than later.
Can you speed up this process of uncovering your true goals? Sure. After making a list of all the things you want, ask yourself about each one: “Why do I want this?” Ask “why?” five times. In my experience, around the fourth or fifth “why”, it becomes clear why you want what you want or what you really want instead.
References:
[1] Discover Happy Habits. 3 Nov. 2021. Web. 22 Jan. 2022 https://discoverhappyhabits.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/
[2] Wikipedia contributors. "Decision theory." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 17 Jan. 2022. Web. 22 Jan. 2022.