If your goals are superficial, your sense of agency is fragile.
You can be jailed. Or bankrupted. Or made redundant by superintelligent AI.
As time elapses, technology moves faster, and the predictability of the world decreases exponentially. At any moment, your goal might be torn from your grasp by factors outside your control.
This leaves us with two contradictory principles:
1) Long-term goals give meaning to life
2) The future is too hectic to plan for (especially nowadays)
How do we rectify these ideas?
After all, the outlook seems pretty bleak.
But not so fast.
What if we aren’t looking deep enough?
What if there were fundamental ideas we could safely orient ourselves toward no matter what?
As far as I can see, the answer has to do with evil.
History is full of terrible acts of cruelty. And they were performed by people no different than you and I.
After the tragedies of the 20th century, the world’s greatest thinkers tried desperately to make sense of what’d happened…
And the most shocking conclusion, in my estimation, came from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
Large-scale moral failure is impossible without moral failure at the level of the individual.
What does this mean?
If we’re all capable of cruelty, and large-scale moral error requires individual shirking of responsibility, then we’re all burdened with an impossible task – act in a way that brings the most benefit, to the most people, on the longest time horizon possible.
Which begs the question: what if this impossible task is the only eternal goal?
In today’s world, the details of your future are blurrier than ever. You might not end up rich, or famous, or happy, or any of those things.
But if Solzhenitsyn is right, you’ll always have the option of turning yourself into a force for fundamental, timeless good.
And I challenge you to come up with a better goal than that.