I noticed this article yesterday in the New York Times about marquee marathons that are in danger of becoming too popular. Funny:
“You are a victim of what you accomplish,” Morse said. “We want to be as big as we can be without compromising the integrity of the event. There’s a breaking point, and you may not know what that is until you get there. We don’t want to find out.”
I wonder if the growing popularity of marathons is symptomatic of something more general — like the importance of being ’goal-driven’ and conceiving one’s life as a series of accomplishments.
I wonder how many people will read ”conceiving one’s life as a series of accomplishments” and wonder, How could there be any other kind of life? The goal-driven life is such an essential characteristic of our age that we assume it could never have been otherwise – but who the hell had ’goals’ two or three generations ago?
Sure, people in past ages wanted to accomplish things, but they weren’t doing it as intensely as we do today — saturated in sports metaphors and the need to make job applications keyword-friendly for recruiting bots.
To go to an extreme example, Alexander the Great wanted to conquer the world but that desire was absolutely integral to his entire being. He didn’t think about it and discuss it down with his parents and his guidance counsellor, read a couple of books about it, consider alternatives and do an internship. There was never a decision. Alexander’s ambition was simply the expression of his natural character. He simply couldn’t conceive any other ambition.
Now, instead of conquering being the goal, it’s the goal itself that must be conquered.
While there are plenty of people who run marathons that simply must run marathons — long distance running is just the expression of their natural character — there are also people for whom running a marathon is merely on a list of things they want to accomplish and experience (along with, perhaps, earning a master’s degree, learning to play guitar, seeing the pyramids, climbing a mountain, writing a book, retiring early) at some point.
Robin Hanson recently wrote about wanting to want — for example, wanting to be attracted to intelligence, talking about being attracted to intelligence, but actually being attracted to looks:
And serving your interests, evolution may well have arranged your mind to fool others into thinking that you put more weight on smarts than you actually do. And this I suggest is the usual source of the conflict between what we want, and what we want to want. We want what is useful to us, but we want to want what makes us look good to others. We often fool ourselves into thinking that what we want to want is what we do want, and thereby also often fool others into thinking well of us.
What most people actually want are ambiguous qualities like respect, belonging, and security. It’s difficult for each of us to know what our true ambition is. It’s so deep that we may not be able to see or articulate it. Running marathons, earning degrees, and writing books tend to be ways in which we try to understand our true ambition.
Thinking about this some more, these goals aren’t about wanting to want, they’re about having to want – people have to want accomplishments in order to build a successful career and enjoy a fulfilling life.
‘Science’ is full of people chasing after grants and publication credits (not to mention patents) rather than insights and solutions to problems. Meanwhile millions of young people are obliged to get bachelor’s degrees they don’t actually want nor theoretically need.
Likewise, finance has (until very recently) focussed on meeting goals for the sake of meeting goals. The stuff that’s purportedly being ‘financed’ has become secondary. Then there is the associated assumption that people should want to be wealthy, or at least make all of their decisions based on making and not-losing money.
Similarly, in politics and public administration, the people who rise to the top are the people who accomplish the most. The people who distinguish themselves by accomplishing the most get the most power. To stay in power, those people need to continue accomplishing things. Jurisdictions follow each other with the ‘most aggressive’ initiatives (cell phone bans come to mind) to maintain the flow of accomplishments, whether those really improve the lives of citizens or not.
I don’t hesitate to suggest that this goal-driven attitude could cause a lot of irreversible damage — like the New York Times article on marathons:
“You are a victim of what you accomplish…”
An easy retort might be to cite research showing that goals tend to make people happier, more successful, more gratified, etc. Sure, but people also have to live within a society, and if the society fails, most of the people in the society are not going to be happy or successful at all.
What if the aggregate effect of so much ‘accomplishment’ (and I’m also going to include the cult of efficiency in this critique because it uses the same goal-orientation that values results-on-paper over real merit and growth) is wrecking our society by channelling too many people towards accomplishments they don’t really want to want?
I’m just riffing here but I suspect the problem might come down to something like Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice: with too much to chose from, we can’t effectively choose at all — or at least we won’t be satisfied for very long.
No matter what we choose, almost everyone we meet will have something better. So we tend to follow the crowd — rushing from bubble-to-bubble looking for the trophies (and the more people there are trying to get a trophy, the more valuable it will be).
Call it a superbubble — the Goal Bubble.
Our society has spent more time and energy on trophies that are totally dependent on demand than on stuff that generates and sustains value independently. The financial devastation we’ve witnessed is nothing compared to the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral devastation that might yet occur.
To understand what I mean, consider this from George Jonas (not a financial authority but I like the way he expressed this) in the National Post:
What makes 3,000 square feet of empty space encased in a few tons of bricks-and-glass worth $200,000? An offer of $200,000. What’s the offer of $200,000 based on? An idea that the next offer will be $250,000. Of course, any mortgage larger than the best offer makes any asset a liability.
Reality is other people’s dreams.
The time and energy we spend earning degrees, training for marathons, writing novels, learning to speak Japanese, promoting blogs, or whatever, is time and energy not spent on something else. It’s a kind of mortgage we make against our future — a long-term liability.
The most important question when it comes to deciding where to invest this energy is, In what ways will my investment remain an asset if demand hypothetically disappears? What if recruiters don’t care about my MBA? What if people think marathons are dumb and all the honour goes to people in mixed martial arts or Guitar Hero XXVI? What if Japanese people all start speaking Spanish instead?
There is certainly a lot of value to be gained from any of those accomplishments — in the form of social capital, self-mastery, learned optimism, physical fitness, mental toughness, adaptability, ‘learning how to learn’ (though merely signing up to be taught something can detract from learning how to learn), and much more — even if they become unsellable.
But, as always, it depends on who and where and when.
The big problems emerge when people start doing things like going back to school for a PhD in a subject they don’t especially care about in order to jump up into a higher pay grade in an organization that makes them miserable.
One might argue that that’s reality — that’s the way things are done, that’s what career is all about… And that’s precisely the problem. It’s the attitude that inflates the superbubble of wanting to want.
Wanting to want is profitable only as long as everyone else wants to want too. If people start figuring out that their life isn’t really improved by the endless race for ever-greater accomplishments (or rather, improvements offer ever-diminshing returns until they aren’t worth the effort), and people start looking for qualitative value and meaning, turning away from objective trophies, then our whole framework of assumptions about ‘success’ and ‘career’ based on other people’s dreams could start to collapse.
And what would you have left?
Hint: this is an optimistic essay, not cynical.
Update Nov. 2: Bob Sutton has a very relevant post today about money as a “perverse incentive.”
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