Goals (and Not Having Them)

I seem to be developing a zoo of slightly different psychological concepts.

• Wanting

  • Literally just the experience of feeling like you “want” something

  • Wishing, yearning, craving

  • Doesn’t necessarily motivate action to seek what you “want”

• Motivation

  • An urge or drive or impulse or inclination to do a particular thing

  • Might also correspond to the “ghost movement” or “readiness potential”, a mental simulation of action or preparation to act

• Choosing

  • The actual decision that immediately precedes action

  • After one imagines taking an action but before one initiates a physical motion, one can choose to follow through on the imagined motion or “veto” it.

• Liking

  • Feelings of pleasure or absence of pain; subjectively positive experience

• Caring or Agency

  • You “care” about achieving an outcome insofar as you are willing to change your behavior to get more of it.

  • Same concept as “being agentic”, “pursuing a goal”, “being intentional” — you have some aim you’re pursuing, and you’re willing to alter your means to pursue it more effectively.

  • Agency is less extreme than “optimization” (doing whatever gets you the most of a given target) but similar. If you care about a goal, you’re willing to do some range of things differently than your default, in order to get more of it.

Motivation is required for choosing to act, but you don’t choose to act on every motivation.

Motivation and choice are both required for caring/agency; you can’t be “willing” to do a thing, in the sense I mean, unless you actually do it.

Revealed Preferences?

“Revealed preference” is kind of a confused concept, in this framework.

The notion of a “revealed preference” is that what people actually do implicitly indicates what they most prefer to do.

This originated as an economic concept, which assumes that the goods a consumer actually purchases are the goods he most prefers.

More generally, it’s used to suggest something like:

Talk is cheap. What you really want to do, is what you actually are doing, not what you say you want to do. What you really value in life is what you actually seek out.

One’s observed actions can be used to derive one’s underlying preferences.

I think this is kind of an awkward and unpsychological way to think about it.

Why are we assuming that “preferences” actually exist for everyone, all the time?

A “preference” is an abstraction. How do we know that it’s a good abstraction, that actually describes reality?

A “preference” that is revealed by one’s actions is (in my framework) a goal that one cares about. But steering towards a goal is a special kind of cognitive-behavioral pattern; I simply don’t think it’s true that people are always steering towards some goal.

If you assert by fiat “everyone always has a goal that their actions are trying to achieve,” you force yourself into weird convoluted mental gymnastics as you try to explain subconscious goals, paradoxical goals, inconsistent goals, etc. It’s simpler just to say sometimes people don’t have goals.

And introspectively, it’s pretty clear, if you ask yourself: “Right now, do I have a goal?” the answer is sometimes just no.

“What am I doing here?”

• “I dunno, I just…wound up here.”

“Why is what I’m doing a good idea?”

• “um…it isn’t?”

“What outcome am I hoping to achieve with this?”

• “um…outcome? achieve? that’s not even a thing in my head rn”

“If I didn’t just happen to be here right now, doing this, would I actively go looking to do this more?”

• “lol. no. never.”

“Do I expect to like the consequences of doing this?”

• “hahahahaha. no.”

You always have motives, towards doing whatever it is you are doing, but it’s quite possible to act without goals, without steering towards an outcome.

The whole reason it even makes sense to exhort someone to “be agentic”, to “focus on what you want to see more of”, is that it isn’t automatic and universal already.

You don’t, I think, have an invisible implicit “revealed preference” to do whatever you’re currently doing.

You do, however, lack a “real” goal of doing something else. (Otherwise you’d be doing it.)

Illustration: Succession

If you watch the show Succession, the Roy children don’t really have goals or preferences.

Connor, who’s dumber but healthier than the others, comes the closest to having “preferences” — he always wants to be married to Willa, and he does get that in the end.

But if you look at his “goal” of running for President, it’s not really a goal.

First of all, he knows he’s not going to win. He says the goal is to “send a message”, but if that were true he’d focus on the message, or on building an audience for his real career as a writer or media personality, and that’s not what he does. He obsesses about polls, the way a major presidential candidate would. He’s playing the role of someone running for President; he is not sincerely seeking any real thing that he really thinks he can get.

And indeed he bails on his Presidential dream as soon as he’s offered the ambassadorship to Oman for conceding.

It’s a characteristic Roy-heir maneuver: you can see him talking himself into viewing his choice as a “win.” But it’s kind of floating and arbitrary. Does he want to be ambassador to Oman? He has no idea. He starts thinking out loud, tries framing it as a good thing, “the poor man’s Dubai”. And if that sounds ok, if he can get on a roll with that, then suddenly he’s pitching it to everyone around him as a great option.

This is how the Roy kids decide everything.

Do they want to do the deal with Mattson? Yes, while that feels like a “strong” move, something a winner would do. No, if it feels “stronger” and more badass to reject it. They psych themselves and each other up, talk themselves into making bold moves…and then just as “boldly” reverse them.

Because none of them actually has an underlying goal at all. Not to be personally rich (they already are, and they make financially irrational moves constantly); not to be CEO (they all go back and forth on that); not to shape ATN or Waystar into great companies (they don’t care at all); not even to get revenge or punish their enemies. They just kinda…react to situations.

Does Shiv want to be married to Tom or not? The question has no answer. She’s sad and angry and she doesn’t like losing individual social interactions, but she does like playing games with him when it’s fun or letting him comfort her. And that’s really all there is. There is no “goal” of being with Tom or not being with Tom.

It seems complicated, but it’s not.

Tom has goals: he wants to be a top corporate executive and he wants Shiv. He wants those things consistently and he actually pursues them.

Logan Roy has goals to an exceptional degree; he’s a prototypical empire builder. And his story is a very familiar kind of tragedy — the Machiavellian man of ambition, who pursues power and achieves it, but when he gets it, he doesn’t find it fulfilling.

But the kids illustrate a very different kind of tragedy: they have no idea what they want.

They clearly have underlying emotional cravings that motivate them — they want love, autonomy, self-respect — but they deny all that vehemently, and think they want whatever particular thing they’ve decided they need today, which they’ll throw away tomorrow.

There’s no steering, no progress towards any of the things they “want”, either their transient verbalized wants (“be CEO of Waystar”) or their more persistent subconscious wants (“get my dad to love me.”)

There’s no part of them that’s going “hey is this working? in real life? let’s try to get it to work better.”

In my taxonomy: they have wants, they have motivations, they sometimes like things, but they cannot care.