Common Aspirations

This is a full chapter from the book I wrote in 2010. You can buy it on Amazon or read the rest via the table of contents in the sidebar.

In August 2007 the financial world began a period of decline from which it has yet to pull out of. According to economic indicators there has been recent growth, but culturally and intellectually the industry continues to be afflicted by distrust. Prominent economists call it a crisis of understanding.¹ Basic assumptions are just beginning to change. There’s no reason to believe the root causes have been addressed, and people know it.

In the U.S., trust in the system is diminishing from both the right and the left. There has reportedly been a spike in sales of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a book depicting widespread withdrawal from society by the most productive citizens in response to excessive central control. It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to be reminded of the anti-tax Tea Party protests. As with the anti-prorogation rallies held across Canada, the way in which they were loosely organized across the new media landscape with relatively little planning and control is almost as fascinating — and maybe more demonstrative — than their espoused message.

To me the financial crisis hasn’t merely been a problem in itself but rather a symptom of an inadequate understanding of human nature and the thin system of values that goes with it. It’s time to update that. The old ideas worked well enough in a more industrialized society, but that kind of society and the ideas that came with it evolved to address the challenges and opportunities of a different age. Industrialism has created another whole set of challenges and opportunities in its wake; we need to imagine new conceptual frameworks for addressing them — just as people once imagined the frameworks we’ve used until now.

Think of two general patterns of change occurring. One is that we’ve been shifting from an economy defined in terms of scarcity to an economy defined in terms of abundance. The other pattern is that we’re shifting from a society organized around authority to a society organized around individual autonomy. These don’t apply to every aspect of life, but they are having a profound affect on how we work, learn, and live.

But abundance and autonomy can’t be taken for granted. They aren’t simply given to us; we actively generate and sustain them. It requires effort and ingenuity. It’s a big, social learning experience, which we have to keep re-investing our attention and energy back into. With the wrong cultural mindset, we might repeatedly gravitate back to authoritarianism and scarcity. This book is an effort to reconceive assumptions that might threaten to turn progress into regression, or worse. Specifically, this book focuses on personal autonomy (others can focus on abundance).

People have probably never had as much freedom to decide what to do with each moment of our lives as we do now,² but we’re still using assumptions and conventions inherited from closed societies in which occupations were far more limited, far more determined. In other words, we haven’t learned how to use our freedom. Our decisions are mostly made by necessity or by authority — or the authority of popularity. We’ve earned autonomy but we haven’t learned autonomy yet; we only know how to follow. Even most of our leaders tend to follow conventions and mere whims of the group.

It’s especially important that we learn because we’ve also become interconnected in more complex ways, and we’re leaving lasting digital impressions through our choices. Our decisions have immediate effects we may not be aware of. Look at how memes spread online; look at how our choices are framed by whatever has been most popular in the past — whatever induced the most people to click, whatever fits the user profile you conditioned through previous behaviours, purchases, remarks, etc.

It isn’t just about choices we make online. Look at market rallies and panics that are affected more by what everyone else is doing than any objective, non-psychological factors.

Our thinking in too many areas has become untethered from all sense of objective value other than that of money. In the past, decisions were largely guided by necessity, habit, and authority. People did things because they had to, or they were told to, or because they couldn’t imagine any alternatives.

Religion provided the conceptual frameworks for most societies in the past. Regardless of whether there was a formal distinction between church and state a century ago, individual decisions were more likely to have been affected by principles and values associated with religious belief — shared, enduring principles and values — rather than just the unstable cross-currents of high-turnover social trends, a prevalent attitude of personal entitlement,³ and endless desire.

What we need are better ways to frame opportunities and direct our own will, our own attention, our own sense of autonomy, our own decisions, so the risks are more apparent, and so more of us can get better at making these frames by asking better questions and approaching decisions as learning experiences.

To me it seems like the shift in mindset reaches all the way to the attitude we have towards achievement. This notion registered with me after I read an interesting article about the risk marathons run of being ruined by their own success. A few decades ago marathon running was an obscure activity, now marathons are astonishingly popular, and potentially face the problem of too many people wanting to participate.⁴

It made me wonder if that’s maybe representative of more general hazards we risk running into by promoting the importance of being so aggressively “goal-driven” and conceiving one’s life as a series of competitive accomplishments.

Some people might 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 had time for so many “goals” two or three generations ago?

Sure, people in past generations and ages certainly wanted to accomplish things, they had aims and ambitions, but they weren’t going after them as deliberately (or arbitrarily), or with such variety as we do today — and they didn’t have as many alternatives either.

While there are plenty of people who run marathons who simply must run marathons, there are also people for whom running a marathon is on a list of a whole bunch of things they want to accomplish at some point (along with perhaps, getting a graduate degree, learning to play guitar, seeing the pyramids, climbing a mountain, writing a book, retiring early, learning another language).

While I was writing this I found an interesting blog post by Robin Hanson about “wanting to want” — for example, wanting to be attracted to intelligence, talking about being attracted to intelligence, but actually being attracted to looks: “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.”⁵

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. Maybe running marathons, earning degrees, and writing books tend to be ways in which we try to understand, define, and express our true ambition through trial and error. In this sense, goals are reference points⁶ — the means by which we assess our own aspirations; trying to achieve a goal is the way to find out how worth-while it is — and a way to learn how to choose the next set of goals.

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 successful careers and enjoy fulfilling lives. Pursuing goals as a lifestyle is no less (or more) valid than my lifestyle of pursuing truth.

The achievement-centric society has accomplished a lot of great things (and for a lot of people, pursuing goals is as much like breathing as pursuing knowledge is for me), but I worry that we might be reaching a point not just of diminishing returns, but irreparable damage — like bodybuilders pumping themeless with steroids or financial engineers pumping their companies with sophisticated instruments. My worry is that this achievement-centric culture has taken over a lot of areas that were once largely occupied by people who took genuine pride in doing a job well for its own sake, and now we’re losing a lot of the quality and generative, sustainable, socially shared value that came from that.⁷

Higher education is full of people who are obliged to get bachelor’s degrees they don’t actually want or theoretically need. It has more to do with administrative expedience and accountability than learning: enough people have degrees that hiring managers can make it a minimum requirement, and as it becomes a requirement for more jobs, more people get degrees, and on it goes.

At an even higher level, I take it that it isn’t sufficient that university professors be excellent teachers, passionate about their subject; one must maintain a steady cadence of published articles, grants, patents, etc — accomplishments — I fear at the expense of more generative kinds of work, more open-ended research, and more effective teaching.

An easy response to my complaints 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, happiness and success will be harder for everyone to find.

What if the aggregate effect of so much “accomplishment” is that we wreck our society by channelling too many people towards accomplishments they didn’t really want or need? Maybe the problem comes down to a “paradox of choice”: with too much to choose from, we can’t effectively choose at all — or at least we won’t be satisfied by any particular choice for very long.⁸ 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 most sought-after trophies.

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.

It’s wasteful if people do things like going back to school for a graduate degree 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. Not everybody wants a PhD, but a lot of people want to be perceived as the type of person who does, or the type of person who can accomplish that. A lot of people run marathons because they want to be perceived as someone who wants that accomplishment. Maybe everyone really wants something else, but everyone’s been so preoccupied trying to play the market.

Not only does this potentially burden the individual overachiever’s future by placing them on a treadmill of desired accomplishments, but at some point it starts to diminish the value in those experiences for the people who genuinely need to run marathons or need to be involved in research. They start to find there are too many elbows in the way, too many people competing for these accomplishments, and the field begins to favour those who approach it as a game — something to be won and marked as an accomplishment before moving on to the next on the list.

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. Once everyone else in the market starts figuring out that their life isn’t really improved by the endless race for ever-greater accomplishments, and people start looking for qualitative value and meaning by turning away from objective trophies, then our whole framework of assumptions about career and “success” based on other people’s dreams could start to collapse.

Again, this cultural attitude has accomplished a lot, but I interpret events like the financial crisis and its related symptoms (the flood of talent into financial fields⁹ and astronomical pay for the few highest performers — which isn’t connected to their firm’s long-term performance — and “ordinary people” taking on too much risk in the hope of financial freedom) as signs that there is a point at which it can’t progress without a fundamental reset.¹⁰

For me the recovery won’t occur until we’ve mastered new ideas and practices for exercising personal autonomy — beginning with our conceptions of motivation.

For decades, our education system and institutions have assumed that goals and incentives are the only way to motivate and reward people. From the first day of school people are taught one thing above all: how to learn by being taught rather than taking the initiative and learning for one’s self.

Until we start educating people to make their own decisions, to recognize problems and opportunities that emerge from outside (or in between, or up from below) existing institutional frameworks — i.e. caring about more than “what’s on the test” or what achievements time-constrained recruiters are looking for than genuine learning — then we won’t begin to address the root human conditions at the core of the global economic crisis.

In other words, we need to start loving learning and making things because it’s rewarding in itself — not instead of being goal-driven, but as well as being goal-driven. It isn’t about one approach or the other, it’s about finding and regulating a sustainable balance.

We can still have goals, we can still run marathons (maybe I will some day), we can still compete vigourously for promotions — and I certainly appreciate there are people for whom goals and accomplishments are as essential as discovery and innovation are to me — but we need to appreciate that the goals aren’t inherently good, it’s the process of attaining them that we find so gratifying.

And with that understanding we can talk about the kinds of nonrivalrous accomplishments that scale and can be shared in common possessions like knowledge, by which we can enable rather than exclude others — and with those, we improve our ability to identify and define goals that are better, more generative investments for us over the long term.

1“A Crisis of Understanding” by Robert Shiller at project-syndicate.org (March 12, 2010).

2See Clay Shirky’s talk on “Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus”: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/shirky08/shirky08_index.html

3Jean Twenge’s Generation Me (2006) is a good place to start, and Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979) is a good reminder that Generation Y didn’t invent self-absorption.

4“Big Marathons, Already Packed, May Still Grow,” by Juliet Macur for the New York Times (October 28, 2008):

5Robin Hanson, “Wanting to Want,” overcomingbias.com (October 28, 2008).

6Background via Chip Heath, Richard Larrick & George Wu, “Goals as Reference Points,” Cognitive Psychology, 38 (1999): p. 79 – 109.

7On this point, Richard Sennett’s Culture of the New Capitalism (2006) and Charles Taylor’s Malaise of Modernity (1991) are especially poignant.

8Barry Schwartz, Paradox of Choice (2004).

9“Flocking to Finance,” Harvard Crimson (May-June 2008).

10As far as I know, the “reset” concept started with Jeffrey Immelt at the Business for Social Responsibility Conference in New York (November 6, 2008). Kurt Anderson and Richard Florida have written books on the theme: Reset (2009) and The Great Reset (2010) respectively.