Vladisvok Destino's thoughts: Goals

We're not talking about football or anything like that, we're talking about goals that people may have in life. It seems that your world is defined very much by the goals/targets/achievements that individuals and companies wish to strive towards and some of the possible results.

It seems now that in every walk of life you will end up working towards one of the above, even computers games now have "unlock this achievement by doing this particular trick during this particular level" and that people are so desperate to get these achievements that on youtube and alike you have guides for "easy way to get x achievement, easy way to complete y objective", surely this defeats the object of the exercise if you're simply looking for a quick and easy way to get the achievements without putting in the work to really earn them?

Governments and alike are no better, they feel the only way that they can improve themselves and the departments they run is to set "goals" or "targets" which have to be met or else the department is considered a failure. Again the result here is simply that the department will focus only on the targets they have been given, rather than looking and seeing what is really important within their field of influence. Now this is not something that you can blame the individuals for, their jobs have been defined by targets set way above them in offices they will never see, it is only natural that they wish to keep their jobs and so focus on what they have been told to focus on, but it is a depressing state of affairs when you see services falling apart and yet they are hailed as a success because they've met some poorly thought out target.

Of course there are also the targets or goals that an individual may set themselves in life and you will find that many people live their lives in pursuit of these goals, but this presents with itself it's own set of problems. There are in theory an infinite amount of goals that an individual may have (go into space, win an election, win the lottery, perform at the Albert Hall, etc, etc) and so it makes sense that to accomplish infinite goals you would need infinite time in which to do it, since you do not have infinite time on this planet you will therefore (theoretically) never run out of goals in life, right? Wrong.
When you look at an individual, you will find that while there are a theoretical infinite amount of goals that person may have, you must eliminate some. First remove any that the person realistically is never going to achieve, either through physical, mental, financial or practical considerations. This now means you have a limited number of goals for the person to achieve, given enough time therefore, the person will run out of goals, however at this stage it is still reasonable to assume that there will be sufficient goals for the life-span of a human (if it would take you 500 years to achieve all the goals you would set for yourself, you're probably never going to run out.)



Now remove any goals that, while possible for the person to achieve, the person has no interest in achieving (it may be possible for the person to win a "insert game here" tournament, but if the person has no interest in playing that game, then the goal is meaningless to them.) This now gives you an even more limited number of goals for the person to achieve, how much it is limited varies depending on how wide the persons interests are, if the person has a lot of interests and ambition then they will more than likely have a significantly higher number of goals than a person with few interests.

This therefore raises the possibility that the number of goals that an individual has in life CAN be achieved in less than their expected lifespan, which brings us to the point here. If a person has achieved all that they wish to in life, has fulfilled all their goals, their dreams, their desires, what is then left for them in this world? When a person has nothing left to aspire to, nothing left to achieve, nothing left to say "I want to do that", then what does life offer them? What does your world offer them?

Perhaps right now this is not a problem that many will come across, but as life expectancy increases among your species this is a situation that you will have to consider and find solutions to, are the number of goals available to the average person increasing at a rate to match the increase in life expectancy? Is there enough in your world to keep people interested in it for their whole life? Or are you simply setting yourself up for a rather bleak existance in your later years?

Quote of the day
Todays QoTD brought to you by Friedrich Neitzsche:
It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night.


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