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Either explicitly or implicitly, the goal you set is a proxy for an expected-value equation, balancing the benefits that you’re trying to gain against the costs you’ll bear to get them. This is all part of the process of setting the goal. But what happens to that calculus once you’ve set the goal and you’re pursuing it? After we set a goal, it becomes a fixed object. This thing that is a proxy for something else becomes the object itself. The goal is the thing we’re trying to achieve, instead of all the values expressed and balanced when we originally set the goal. The goal becomes fixed even as all the inputs that led to choosing that particular goal evolve. The conditions in the world change. Our knowledge changes. The weights we attach to the benefits and costs change. Our preferences and values change. As these things change, if we were to rerun the cost-benefit analysis, the output would surely be different. But we don’t rerun it. To achieve the things we want to achieve, we have to be responsive to the way the world is changing around us and the way that we ourselves are changing. That would mean unfixing our goals, but we don’t naturally do that. In combination, the pass-fail and fixed nature of goals causes us to just keep on toward the finish line, even when the finish line is no longer what we should be running toward. Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.
When we examine the psychopathology of our daily lives, we find two personal and cultural forms prevailing: addictions and paraphilias. Addictions are found in our reflexive, frequently unconscious anxiety-management behaviors. It is too simple to label the more overt forms of such management strategies, such as drug abuse, as addiction and let it go at that. All of us have daily rituals, the unconscious motive of which is the warding off of some supposed evil. We have television programs, computers, the internet to plug into, reflexively, to assure ourselves that the world of diversions is out there, predictably, and that we are wired to it. We flee solitude, the only serious treatment for loneliness. We avoid dialogue with ourselves, the only person present in all scenes of our drama. We dismiss dreams, the ongoing commentary offered by the Self as to just how things are going and how they might be better. We ignore our history, with its many clues as to the autonomous agents that are making those self-defeating patterns for us.
Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
James Hollis
Apparent from this remarkable study is this fact: when we are cleaved from the innate practice of biphasic sleep, our lives are shortened. It is perhaps unsurprising that in the small enclaves of Greece where siestas still remain intact, such as the island of Ikaria, men are nearly four times as likely to reach the age of ninety as American males. These napping communities have sometimes been described as “the places where people forget to die.” From a prescription written long ago in our ancestral genetic code, the practice of natural biphasic sleep, and a healthy diet, appear to be the keys to a long-sustained life.
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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