In Pursuit of What Matters

As the new year approaches, we all feel it. That renewed sense of ambition. That uplifting sense of what the coming year could bring.

The fresh start effect is real, and it’s powerful. The calendar reset invites us to dream about our aspirations, to finally tackle what we’ve been putting off and to become who we’ve always wanted to be.

But before I get swept up in that January energy, I’ve learned to pause and ask: What goals are worth pursuing?

Because the fresh start effect gets you energised, but it doesn’t make you discerning. It doesn’t help you distinguish between the goals you genuinely want and the ones you’ve inherited — absorbed from parents, downloaded from culture, or adopted because they sound like the “right” ambitions to have.

And most of us have been following someone else’s script for so long, we’ve forgotten we could write our own.

Where Your Goals Really Come From

Think about the goals floating around in your mind right now. Where did these goals actually come from?

I’m not suggesting your aspirations aren’t valid. I’m suggesting many of us run towards destinations we never consciously chose, let alone paused to examine. We operate from inherited scripts written by someone else, at some other time, for some other life.

For me, this showed up most clearly around career.
For years, I pursued fancier titles and accumulated credentials — course after course, certificate after certificate — convincing myself this was dedication to continuous improvement. It sounded great on the surface. But the underlying script was clear: climb the ladder, earn more, get the prestigious-sounding role, gain approval.
I knew rationally it wasn’t what I wanted. But knowing and choosing differently are two separate things. The fear of deviating was real, and the pull to conform was strong.

Most people set goals based on one of three patterns:

• What they think they should want (societal expectations) — the career path that sounds respectable, the lifestyle that signals success, the milestones that prove you’re “on track.”
• What sounds impressive (status signaling) — goals that make for good dinner party conversation, that look compelling on social media, that earn approval from people whose opinions you care about (or think you should care about).
• What everyone else is doing (mimetic desire) — when everyone in your circle is buying houses or pursuing certain credentials, those goals start feeling inevitable. Not because they align with your values, but because they’re what “people like us” do.

Notice how all three patterns share a common root: theyoutsourcethe question of what to want. Conformity looks to cultural norms. Status signaling looks to others’ approval. Mimetic desire looks to peers’ choices. None of these patterns ask the question that actually matters: What do I genuinely want for my own life?

Oscar Wilde captured this perfectly: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

Understanding where our goals come from is one thing. Understanding why we accept them without question is another.

Why We Follow Scripts We Never Chose

As social animals, we’ve been programmed by evolution to follow the herd. This served us well when survival depended on tribal cohesion. It serves us less well when we’re trying to build meaningful lives today.

Social influence works through two channels.

The first is informational. When many people do something, their actions suggest what might be best for you to do. This gives rise to mimetic desire — we use others’ choices as shortcuts for our own, assuming that if many people want something, it must be worth wanting.

The second is social. When you care what people think (and most of us do), you’ll go along with the crowd to avoid judgement and make decisions that (you hope) make others think better of you. This leads to conformity bias and status signaling respectively.

We align our beliefs and behaviors with group norms even when those norms don’t serve us. We pursue goals that earn approval because we construct our identity partly through how others perceive us — and we dramatically overestimate how much anyone is actually paying attention.

The result? We converge toward the norm of our social group. We operate on what David Foster Wallace called our “default settings” — unconscious patterns where we automatically follow scripts without examining them. Like fish unaware they’re swimming in water, we often can’t see the cultural assumptions we’re immersed in. And even when we do become aware, the pull to stay submerged remains strong.

But here’s what we forget: just because something is statistically “normal” doesn’t mean it’s right for you. And just because millions of people share the same ambitions doesn’t make those ambitions universally worthwhile.

As Erich Fromm put it: “The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths.”

What You’re Actually Paying

When we accept the default narratives without examination, we risk spending our finite time and energy climbing ladders leant against the wrong walls. We risk reaching destinations only to realise we never actually wanted to arrive there. We risk looking back on years of effort and asking, “What was I doing this for?”

The tragedy isn’t that we fail to achieve our goals. The tragedy is that we succeed at achieving goals that were never truly ours.

Our time, mental resources and physical resources are finite. Every decision to pursue one activity is also a decision to forgo a million others. Every decision is an opportunity cost decision, whether we are making it consciously or not.

When we pursue inherited goals, we do so at the opportunity cost of pursuing what we genuinely want. That is time and energy we can’t get back. Regret accumulates.

You can’t unbuild a life you spent a decade constructing on someone else’s blueprint. You can only start building anew — and the later you start, the heavier the sunk cost feels.

No wonder YouTube is full of videos featuring people in their 40s, 50s or 60s titled something along the lines of “What I wish I knew when I was 20” or some variation of this. A central theme among these videos is the call to live an authentic life, a life true to yourself rather than what others expect of you (or rather what you imagine others expect of you).

Which brings us to the harder question: how do we break free from these inherited scripts?

The Courage to Question

If what’s normal is assumed to be natural, the norm will endure. On the other hand, when suspicions emerge that the way things are may not be how they’re meant to be, that’s when a new normal start to appear — and it begins with the courage to question.

Questioning the default narratives requires courage. It means risking the judgement of people who’ve bought into those same narratives. It means potentially disappointing those close to you and becoming lonely in the process.

But it also means something else: Freedom.

What emerges is freedom—the freedom to discover your actual interests, values and desires while letting go of the heavy burden of “shoulds and oughts.” You give yourself permission to discover your authentic self.

You don’t become a different person. You stop being all the false versions you were performing for others. You start living your own life rather than a reflection of what you imagine others want you to be.

What’s more, you set an example for people who also hold doubts about the default script. Your willingness to question gives others permission to question too, and that’s how change begins.

You might be thinking: “But what if I genuinely want the traditional markers of success? What if I’ve examined them and they’re still what I want?” That’s exactly the point.

When you’ve actually examined your goals and chosen them consciously, they become yours regardless of whether they align with convention or deviate from it. The issue isn’t whether your goals look traditional or unconventional. The issue is whether you’ve chosen them or inherited them.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” — Viktor Frankl

We may not be able to decide what default narratives we inherited about ourselves and how we should live our lives. But we can take responsibility for the narratives we tell ourselves moving forward. We can choose which stories to keep and which to discard.

Questions That Reveal What’s Yours

These are questions I return to often to cut through the noise. You don’t need to answer all of them. Choose the one or two that make you most uncomfortable — that discomfort usually signals an insight worth investigating.

• What would I pursue if no one could ever know? This removes external validation and puts it to the test of intrinsic motivation.
• Who do I secretly envy and what does that reveal about what I truly value? Secret envy is data that shows you what you actually want, beneath the goals you think you should want.
• If I knew I would die in 10 years, what would I do today? Mortality clarifies. It strips away the trivial and reveals what actually matters. Ten years is long enough for meaningful change but close enough to feel urgent.
• If I could redesign my life from scratch, what would I not include? This reveals what you’re tolerating rather than choosing.
• Imagine living your ideal day one year from now. What are you doing, and how does it differ from today? This forces you to picture the actual texture of your life, not just accomplishments. The gap between your ideal day and today reveals where to start.

The Real Opportunity

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” — Howard Thurman

The new year will come whether you examine your goals or not. The fresh start effect will give you energy whether your ambitions are truly yours or not.

But the most meaningful transformations don’t come from chasing inherited ambitions with renewed vigour. They come from aligning your time and energy with goals that resonate with your actual values.

So before you finalise your resolutions for 2026, I invite you to ask yourself: Do I want this goal, or do I just think I should?

Because the real opportunity of the new year isn’t just the energy to pursue goals. It’s the clarity to pursue the right goals. The ones that, when you achieve them, you’ll know were worth the climb.