Deeper Goals

When you consume alcohol, there’s a good chance your prime goal is not to consume alcohol: you’re looking to socialize, you’re interested in feeling altered, you’re maybe just parched and want something to drink.

The same is true of many activities we engage in regularly; the act itself may be just one possible means of achieving an actual, deeper goal.

In such cases, there may be other, superior (for our purposes) means of accomplishing the same outcomes: you could pop around a party with a sparkling water in your hand instead of a beer, for instance, or take mushrooms (or meditate, or work out) instead of trying to adjust your mindset with booze.

In some cases, our default approaches to achieving certain outcomes are our defaults because we’ve tried a bunch of other options and landed on one that serves us best, most of the time.

In other cases, though, we do things the way we do them because of habit, happenstance, received wisdom, or laziness.

I might grab a beer when relaxing with friends because I’ve always grabbed a beer in such circumstances, but I might also do it because someone typically hands me a beer when I’m out with a group, because my parents (or other childhood influences) grabbed beers while socializing, or because that’s what’s easily accessible and I can’t be bothered to consider alternatives (or to even wonder if there are viable alternatives).

There’s an element of what’s called “first principles thinking” here: we may believe we want to design a new car, but what we really want is a plane, a teleportation device, or a means of communicating with other people at a distance (all of which may help us accomplish a more fundamental goal—engaging with other people who are far away—though possibly in ways that violate our initial assumptions about what it is we’re trying to accomplish).

This variation on that concept, though, relies heavily on self-knowledge and the capacity to analyze one’s own intentions and influences so that we might better understand which outcomes are the vital ones and which are assumed to be vital, but not necessarily even relevant.

It can be difficult to determine whether our beer-bias is optimal, accidental, or incidental, much less if there might be other options that are more ideal for our true goals.

And this is especially true if we aren’t accustomed to taking a step back and assessing our behaviors, perspectives, assumptions, and objectives from a standpoint that allows for high-resolution, honest, and judgement-free consideration.

If you found some value in this essay, consider buying me a coffee :)





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