The other night my roommate and I were having a conversation and the subject of goals came up. I had been reading about the state of effortless concentration and enjoyment that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has famously termed “flow.” Flow occurs when you’re so absorbed in a task that you lose track of everything else. You fall into the rhythm of your activity so completely that all distractions melt away, and may even lose track of time. I mentioned that having a clearly defined goal is an important component in achieving flow. As Csikszentmihalyi explains it:
Flow tends to occur when a person faces a clear set of goals that require appropriate responses. It is easy to enter flow in games such as chess, tennis, or poker, because they have goals and rules that make it possible for the player to act without questioning what should be done, and how. For the duration of the game the player lives in a self-contained universe where everything is black and white. The same clarity of goals is present if you perform a religious ritual, play a musical piece, weave a rug, write a computer program, climb a mountain, or perform surgery. In contrast to normal life, these "flow activities" allow a person to focus on goals that are clear and compatible, and provide immediate feedback.
But my roommate Josh raised an interesting point. Many Eastern philosophies, he observed, take just the opposite view, and having goals at all is discouraged. After all, goals are a form of desire, and Buddhism, for example, preaches the extinction of desire. True happiness comes not from the pursuit of goals, but from enjoying the process.
“Take the poet Charles Reznikoff,” Josh said. “He was famous for just walking all around the city, aimlessly.”
I took issue with this. “But even if you’re walking around with no particular destination, you still have a goal,” I said. “It’s just that your goal is to unwind, or to get exercise, or whatever.”
“No, it was just aimless,” said Josh. “Or like when I go walking around the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, I don’t have a goal.”
“But isn’t your goal to enjoy nature? Or just like, ‘I need to get out of the house?’ ”
“No,” said Josh. “I’m enjoying the process rather than the goal.”
“Well, isn’t enjoying the process a goal in itself?” I said. I realized this could go on for a while.
“No,” said Josh. “I’m really just walking around.”
“Well then, why do you do it?”
“Part of it is you always discover something new,” said Josh. “Like the other day I was at the Japanese Garden, and I discovered that when the sun hits the water at a particular angle, you can see the coi remarkably well.”
“Well, maybe your goal is to discover those new insights, or to appreciate beauty.”
“No, it’s just pleasurable to go around aimlessly.”
“Well, then is pleasure your goal?”
This he conceded. Mindfulness or detachment, he explained, is the one goal it’s acceptable to have in Buddhism.
“And is pleasure a component of mindfulness?” I asked.
“It can be. But it has to be a detached pleasure. It’s like, Buddhism would probably say that it’s fine to make a lot of money, as long as you don’t care if it all vanishes tomorrow. Just like some people would say that it’s no better to be an ascetic than a materialist, because both people are defining their lives according to money. Like Eric Fromm says, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.”
Psychological research suggests that people are happier when they have goals. Goals enhance productivity, focus, and self-esteem. But at the same time, we always hear that we shouldn’t be too focused on an endpoint, that life is about the journey, that the struggle yields its own rewards.
Part of the answer is that having a goal may actually help you enjoy the process. As Csikszentmihalyi has shown, it’s keeping the goal in mind and always knowing what the next step is—whether it’s the next ledge for a rock climber, the next note for a violinist, the next move for a chess player—that actually makes the process so enjoyable.
So which is it? Is it better to be goal-oriented? Or to just be?
