Choose Your Goals

In the first article, we established that everything you ever do is a version of improving a misconcept, or implementing one. In the last article, we introduced the finite life resources you draw on whenever you do either of those things. Because they are finite, every decision you make carries an opportunity cost.

But measured against what?

Every time you expend life resources, you are optimising towards something, whether you have consciously defined that something or not. This is why arbitrary life goals are the third high-level misconcept.

Without a clearly defined target, no decision is better or worse than any other. You are just moving, and the compounding is haphazard. Arbitrary life goals are the goalpost against which you can assess every opportunity cost decision.

If you care at all about where you are compounding towards and how quickly, you already have arbitrary life goals. The question is whether they are ones you chose.

Why life goals are arbitrary

At this point, you might be wondering why we call them arbitrary. The word tends to carry a negative connotation, as though your goals are unimportant or lacking deeper purpose. However, it simply acknowledges that your existence has no prescribed purpose and is a result of a blind process of competing alleles, nothing more.

Let's take a moment to contemplate. Why do you exist? Where did the trillions of cells in your body, each with their own set of genetic instructions, come from?

The answer traces back to alleles, replicators at the base unit of life, competing with rival alleles for the same gene position. The important distinguishing factor is that they did so not for the good of the individual nor the survival of the species, but for the alleles' selfish pursuit of out-replicating rivals. Of course, both the competition and selfishness are anthropomorphisms. In reality, there is no pursuit or intent. The alleles that out-replicated others simply spread within the gene pool and were passed on. Your existence is a result of this blind process.

This is not a nihilistic position. The absence of externally prescribed meaning is the starting condition from which something more optimistic follows. Because no goal is cosmically correct, you are free to choose whatever is meaningful to you, change your mind, and iterate toward goals that reflect what you actually value upon pursuing them.

An arbitrary life goal is a conjectured desired state you choose to pursue, tested against reality and updated as you learn.

The goals you inherit

Before we have the tools to question our goals, we inherit the definition of “success” and “a good life” from the people and culture around us. Often, the question of whether we chose these goals only arises after significant life resources have already been invested in pursuing them.

The classic inherited script tends to look something like this: get good grades, go to university, land a respectable or “high-status” job, earn a high income, get promoted, get married, buy a house, have children, buy a bigger house, travel to exotic destinations, retire at sixty-five. There is nothing inherently wrong with any item on that list. The problem is that it was handed to you, and you likely never questioned any of it.

Pursuing someone else's idea of a good life carries three specific costs.

First, you compound in the wrong direction. Every resource invested in a goal that is not actually yours is a resource unavailable for one that is. The longer this continues, the more expensive it becomes to correct.

Second, it limits what you think is possible. Inherited goals cluster around conventional markers of success. When your conception of a good life is bounded by what your environment modelled, you rarely explore possibilities beyond it.

Third, sunk cost. The more you invest in a direction, the harder it becomes to leave. Questioning your goals starts to feel like questioning your identity.

The misalignment tends to surface as confusion, feeling lost, or dissatisfied. This is especially common for people who are externally successful and have achieved everything they set out to do, only to find they are still unfulfilled.

Finding your own goals

Finding your own arbitrary life goals is an iterative process of conjecture, criticism, and error-correction. The metric we use to guide that iteration is our mental resource level in the medium and long term.

Our current conjecture is that internally aligned arbitrary life goals lead to a net positive gain in mental resource across the medium and long term. We use mental resource as our metric because external success cannot resolve internal misalignment. External results can look right while the internal experience tells a different story. That gap, between what you have achieved and what you feel, is the cognitive dissonance of compounding in the wrong direction.

Working toward an internally aligned goal will not always feel energising. Short-term depletion is expected. But the overall trajectory across months and years will trend upward. Working toward an inherited goal that does not fit tends to produce the opposite, even when short-term results look good.

1. Start with a conjecture. Form a working hypothesis about what your goals actually are. Push on the why.
2. Test the conjecture. Begin working toward it. Give it enough time and real effort to generate a genuine signal.
3. Review and error-correct. Is your mental resource trending upward across the medium and long term? If yes, you are on the right path. If not, the conjecture needs updating.
4. Iterate. Repeat as your misconcepts improve and your circumstances shift.

To make this concrete, here is how we arrived at our own current arbitrary life goals using first principles. Our overarching goal is to optimise our life resources. Because life resources are finite, getting the highest return from them is the rational response. Through multiple iterations, we found that pursuing this goal sustains our mental resource over time. From there, three things follow.

Time is finite and constantly depleting, which makes wanting full control over how we spend what remains a logical conclusion. That leads directly to time freedom. Time freedom means our days are spent solving problems we want to solve, which sustains rather than depletes our mental resource over time.

Physical resource determines our ability to interact with the external world. Maximising lifetime biological functioning follows directly. Poor health limits what we can do. It is also a daily source of suffering that erodes our mental resource.

Mental resource determines our capacity to think clearly, creatively, and rationally. A high level improves both our internal experience and external results. Maintaining it is therefore a goal in its own right.

This is our current best conjecture, held the same way we hold any other misconcept, subject to criticism and improvement.

The defaults that push back

As you work through this process, three defaults will push back.

The first is ego. Inherited goals often converge on the default societal definition of success. Letting go of them can feel like a threat to your identity as a “successful person”. A useful reframe is that every resource you continue to invest in the wrong direction is one unavailable for your actual and yet to be discovered arbitrary life goals.

The second is social conformity. We are wired to care what others think, and choosing goals that diverge from those around you can feel like an invitation for judgement. But the reality is that most people are too absorbed in their own lives to pay much attention to yours.

The third is loneliness. As you change, you will outgrow some environments before finding new ones. That gap is uncomfortable, and it is also temporary. It is easier than ever to find people working through the same questions online while you build a new community in person. Misconcepts is building both types of community.

Where this leaves you

We all have arbitrary life goals informing our decisions and actions, whether we realise it or not. They can be inherited or self-defined. You can find your own by assessing whether the pursuit of a goal leads to a net positive gain in your mental resource across the medium and long term. Since you are always optimising towards something, the process of refining your own arbitrary life goals is one of the highest return activities available to you.

In the next article, we turn to opportunity cost, the fourth high-level misconcept, which synthesises misconcepts, life resources, and arbitrary life goals into an actionable framework.