Don't have goals.

Embracing radical anti-utilitarian thought

One of Martin Heidegger’s insights is that although we derive almost our entire Being from utilitarian interactions with what’s “in the world,” this is the very reason why we must stop thinking like that if we want to get in touch with what’s real about us, with our destiny.

We perceive things in their usefulness to us as we experience our being-in-the-world and its constraints. We shut out what doesn’t serve us, what frightens us, what leads to discomfort. Importantly, we don’t think about death, about the totality of our life path (including the future) - not really. Rather, we dream about imaginary futures that make us feel good, accepting death not as the boundary that transcends the utilitarian life in this world but as this thing that happens to everybody and is therefore unimportant, with the added benefit that we get away from what we fear: not just in the sense of our biologically programmed survival instinct, but precisely for death’s life-transcending qualities. Being in touch with death means escaping the daily treadmill of ever-shifting goals, measures of success and achievement, worries, emotional drama, rules, “shoulds” and “don'ts”.

Try for a moment to not have any goals. To stop thinking about problems to solve, things to do, or where you are relative to what people and society think, or even to what you think yourself. (Especially the latter.) Getting out of this mode of being, which is entirely conditioned by our existence in and experience of the lowest-common-denominator being-in-the-world that applies to all people, if done with patience, can lead to great calmness and clarity: the strange sensation of actually feeling the finer, subtler energies around our life here on earth, what it means for us personally, and where we could go next, if anywhere. It is like learning to experience a subtle invitation, as opposed to a pressure entirely of our own making to do this or that, achieve this or that, or be like this or that.¹

I’m not preaching some sort of shutting out of the world here, obviously. Taken to its extreme, a mindset of radically driving out all utilitarian aspects of life would basically mean ceasing to do anything, and therefore ceasing to exist, really. We do live in a world of goals to be reached, of problems to be solved, of things to be used. Indeed, the inner-worldly aspect of our Being evolved to deal with the inner-worldly aspect of the world, a precondition for us living and experiencing this world at all. Which also means that this inner-worldly aspect isn’t meaningless; otherwise it wouldn’t exist. However, to give in to the powerful tug of goals, worries, problems and the rest means disappearing in a sea of arrows, of vectors and vortexes. Our very attempt to be drivers makes us driven, slaves to external forces that have set up camp within us. Only radical anti-utilitarianism can cut through this maelstrom, landing us on a calm island amidst the storm, a place where we are finally free to regroup, to do things naturally in God’s pace, in touch with the real. We can finally experience our destiny unfolding, instead of fighting it tooth and nail based on goals, rules and measures we think are our own, or even God’s, when they are purely programmed reactions to the vector sea, to vortexland.

Once we have reached the calm island of radical anti-utilitarianism, we’ll get actually good ideas about what to do, where to go, tailored to our unique path. Then we can enter the inner-worldly towahabou and achieve things - not by setting “goals” or measuring ourselves against this or that, but by following a drive that feels entirely natural, unforced and free. Even while doing, achieving, solving problems - while submerged in the sea of vectors - we want to cultivate that small but all-important part of ourselves that is free of all that: no goals, no rules, no shoulds, no don’ts, no success nor failure, no worries for the future, just trust: that we’ll figure everything out eventually, that everything is and will be as it should for us.

1. Needless to say, what I’m getting at here is dangerous: there is a reason why much of the “find your authentic self” trope, often directly inspired by Heidegger, has led to disastrous nihilism and the most absurd ideas, many of which ironically now govern our society, the new regime replacing the traditional rules of society. The truth is that most people are not ready for any of this, and need strict moral rules (“shoulds and don’ts”) to keep them from falling off the cliff. In fact, a phase of following moral rules (provided they are at least somewhat sound) is a necessary precondition to get to a place where we can forget about them. If you’re messed up, messed up energies you’ll invite, which can be worse than no energies at all.