There is no shortage of apps, articles, books, podcasts, self-help gurus, YouTube videos, and so on to help us achieve any number of goals. Not only do we have such convenient access to innumerable techniques and tools, but the very information we need to achieve, well, nearly anything. We can easily learn how to gain muscle, lose fat, start a business, pursue graduate school, write a book, make our own bread, play guitar, etc.
Naturally, having goals that give us a sense of direction and motivation are necessary for our flourishing. In some sense, our very calling as Christians is to be goal-oriented. The last thing the Resurrected Lord did was leave us with a goal: “Go and spread the Gospel to all of creation.” God himself calls us to achieve things, giving us a purpose that, if pursued according to his grace, leads to our happiness. He desires that we achieve many great things with planning, self-sacrifice, and discipline, but always rooted in a dependence on him and genuine love.
We’ve likely heard of the US Navy Admiral William H. McRaven’s advice about the importance of making your bed first thing in the morning. The idea is simple: By completing one minor goal at the start of our day we beget the motivation to complete another, and so on and so forth until, by the end of the day, we have completed—or made progress toward—a number of productive goals. I don’t need to belabor why having goals—why having a specific purpose in one’s life—is important for our flourishing. Suffice it to say, having nothing to strive for every day can severely harm our mental health, self-esteem, and relationships.
But there is the danger of being so hyperfocused on achieving goals that even when we do accomplish them we find that we shouldn’t have pursued them to begin with. There is a type of satisfaction to be had by simply pursuing goals, or feeling productive, and we can seek that feeling at the expense of considering whether a particular goal will actually lead to our flourishing. We can adopt a hyperstrict workout routine and ascetical diet so that we achieve a certain level of fitness, for example. That can be fine. But if doing so prevents us from spending time with our friends and family because we can’t miss a workout or forgoing time developing our spiritual or intellectual lives, then the pursuit of such a goal would be harmful to our entire flourishing because we are the type of beings that require relational, intellectual, and spiritual nourishment in addition to physical.
It’s a terrible thing to spend years climbing up the ladder to find out, once you’ve reached the top, that it’s set against the wrong wall.
It’s easy to see the problem with doggedly pursuing certain goals in films like Wall Street or There Will Be Blood, which feature characters Gordon Gekko and Daniel Plainview, respectively, who commit to and achieve a number of goals, despite these being fueled by an obsessive greed for wealth. The goal-setting of these fictional characters is, of course, easy to identify as problematic because they wade into illegal and immoral territories. They are driven by evil. However, it’s harder to discern when a goal should not be pursued when it’s good in and of itself. I once heard this great (and sobering) word of caution: It’s a terrible thing to spend years climbing up the ladder to find out, once you’ve reached the top, that it’s set against the wrong wall. This is a real danger for a society like ours that values and extols productivity, goal-setting, and accomplishment. If we’re not spending enough time in a contemplative and discerning state to ensure we should pursue certain goals, we are at great risk of pursuing the wrong ones.
One of my favorite short stories of all time is John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” In the story, Ned Merrill, a middle-aged husband and father, decides on a Sunday afternoon that he is going to “swim” his way back home from a neighbor’s backyard. He plans to swim across a network of his neighbors’ pools in his Northeast suburbia, eventually arriving at his own house. He refers to this string of pools as the “Lucinda River” in commemoration of his wife Lucinda, implying that he seeks to accomplish the silly feat for her honor. He sets out, feeling inspired and rejuvenated, on his Odysseyian journey back home.
But as he swims across his neighbors’ pools, he begins having odd encounters with some of his neighbors. In one backyard where a party is occurring, he is treated rudely by a bartender and ignored by the attendees, which he finds strange because, in his estimation, he is a very well-liked member of the community. In another backyard, a woman with whom he once had an affair criticizes him in anger for how he has used her. In yet another backyard, a neighbor tells him he is sorry to hear about Ned’s family troubles. Ned is confused by these comments and behaviors. The weather and season also appear to shift drastically over the course of the afternoon, as the clement, summery sky turns to a chilly, wintery one. He even seems to age, feeling young and strong at the beginning of the story and becoming weak and feeble by the end. What we realize, and what makes the story about this bizarre aquatic expedition so unforgettable, is that Ned’s journey takes place both over a Sunday afternoon and a lifetime.
Exhausted, tired, and cold, Ned finally reaches his house in the story’s concluding paragraph:
The place was dark. Was it so late that they had all gone to bed? Had Lucinda stayed at the Westerhazys’ for supper? Had the girls joined her there or gone someplace else? Hadn’t they agreed, as they usually did on Sunday, to regret all their invitations and stay at home? He tried the garage doors to see what cars were in but the doors were locked and rust came off the handles onto his hands. Going toward the house, he saw that the force of the thunderstorm had knocked one of the rain gutters loose. It hung down over the front door like an umbrella rib, but it could be fixed in the morning. The house was locked, and he thought that the stupid cook or the stupid maid must have locked the place up until he remembered that it had been some time since they had employed a maid or a cook. He shouted, pounded on the door, tried to force it with his shoulder, and then, looking in at the windows, saw that the place was empty.
Ned’s grand and epic tour to accomplish his vain goal results in losing his home and family. Like any good work of literary fiction, it is not merely a cautionary tale, but in part it does illustrate the dangers of pursuing a certain type of life at the expense of what really matters. His swim represents the goals and motivations that consumed his life’s ambitions: pleasure-seeking activities, carousing and drinking, social esteem, vain ambitions, adulterous affairs. And having accomplished these goals—having indeed successfully swum across his neighborhood—he reaps the fruit of his success, which are confusion and alienation. For Ned, success does not equate to happiness.
So too can be our experience, even if in a less tragic way. We can watch a YouTube video of a tech entrepreneur who has had great success and feel inspired to start our own company so we, too, can be wealthy and successful. And maybe God is in fact calling us to such work. But pursuing such a goal should come after discernment through prayer and the seeking of wise counsel. What are our reasons for pursuing this? Material gain and social esteem or to produce some real and tangible good for our families and community overall? Are we realistically equipped with the right skills, talents, and temperament to do so? Will we be imprudently risking the welfare of our families or relationship with God? As best as we can tell, will this lead to our genuine and true happiness and flourishing or a counterfeit stemming from selfishness? There will always be unknown variables and sacrifice in pursuing any goal. More time in prayer is less time with family. More time working out is less time studying for the LSAT. But unless we are regularly discerning the quality and end of our goals through prayer, we risk white-knuckling ourselves toward things that may lead to burnout, restlessness, and unhappiness.
We don’t need to spend as much time discerning whether we should start a new minor exercise routine than we do a new business venture, of course. St. Francis de Sales gives us some good advice in this area:
We usually do not count small change; business would be too troublesome and would consume too much time if we tried to account for every nickel and dime in our pockets. And so we ought not to weigh every petty action to decide whether it deserves more time than something else. . . . [However,] choice of vocation, plans for some affair of great importance, a work requiring a long time or some very great expenditure of money, change of residence, choice of associates and such similar things require that we think seriously as to what best accords with God’s will.
There is something called a rule of life in monastic communities. This “rule” structures their days in specific ways, allowing time for private and liturgical prayer, study, work, relaxation, and so on. These “micro-goals” spread throughout the day are all aimed at achieving one major goal: union with God and others. They offer us a good model for how we can approach our own routines, disciplines, and daily goals, making sure that they aim, ultimately, toward loving God and others better.
As lay people, we may not be called to spend so much time in prayer or contemplation, and, in fact, doing so could harm us: If we are doing so at the neglect of our work or family, for instance, then we can be sure that we’re prioritizing prayer in a way that is not, ultimately, for our genuine flourishing. Like all things in life, prudence and moderation remain necessary virtues for us to thread the needle of a well-ordered life, so to speak. But no matter our state in life or vocation, the end goal of every goal should be the same for all of us: love of God and neighbor. The desires of our hearts provide the fuel and motivation to pursue a number of noble goals to glorify God and experience true happiness. But let us do our best to ensure that the success that comes from achieving our goals is the success God wants for us, which is to say the success that leads to genuine happiness and self-sacrificial love.