Goals

Goals. We all have them. While some may seem incredibly stupid, they help keep us from stagnating. The question is how do you put a quantifiable limit on your hopes and desires? I was recently asked to write down my goals for after I graduate from college. Which college? Community college? Under-graduate college? Or maybe Graduate School? That wasn't much of a problem really. The problem was that I felt like I was asked to write down my soul (if there is such a thing) and commit it to paper. Despite what anyone else tells you, you can tell a lot about a person by the goals they want to achieve. People that want to be a doctor, for example, want to make a lot of money and/or want to help people. You get a good feel for personality, but not so much for aptitude.

My problem, though, was that my goals are numerous. And the things you can learn about me from my goals do not speak well to the quality of my character. I want to own my own veterinary practice. You might think that I want to help all the cute fuzzy animals and blah blah blah. This is not the case, though. I want to enter the medical field, like my mother and sister before me. However, I have no desire whatever to help people. In fact, most people I encounter, I don't really like. I want to own my own practice, because I want people to call me 'sir'. I want my employees to know that I hold their livelihoods in my hands, and to be able to hire or fire people. I want minions to do my bidding. And that bidding isn't to help people, but to help the animals our ancestors have domesticated. This is taking responsibility for our actions. Now, anyone reading this might think that I'm an asshole or a bad person, and they're probably right. I'm not really concerned with the opinions of people who don't hold control over my life, though.

Don't get me wrong, I do want to help animals. But not because I want to save Bambi's mom. Mostly, my concern for the Animal Kingdom is because animals don't manifest the sort of behaviors that humans do. Guilt, religion, war, politics, compassion, beauty, fear; all of these are foreign to the rest of the Kingdom in which we belong. Animals eat when they're hungry, they fight to preserve the natural order which keeps them alive, they sleep when they're tired, they fornicate when they're secure enough to raise offspring, they migrate or hibernate when food is scarce. It's all as simple as that. That's not enough for humanity though. Our goal seems to be to find and pursue a higher reason for life.

This is where the joke is on us. Survival, like the pursuit of power, is it's own purpose. It does not need to be justified, because it is the justification which we seek. So we create all these complex concepts, and make a simple reason complicated. We go to war, and we say to ourselves 'These enemies believe something different than us, so we must do honor and praise to our god by destroying and converting our enemies' or 'this country is attacking this other country and that's wrong'. Why not just admit 'We see our enemies as a threat to our continued existence, so we are attacking them' or 'this country has some resource or territory that we need/want for our continued success, so we are going to war with them'? It would certainly be more honest, if not much easier to understand.

The point is, we have a tendency to obfuscate our goals. if not from each other, then definitely from ourselves. If you truly wish to understand yourself, then you must ask yourself why you do what you do. Why do you want what you desire? Then when you discover the answers to those questions, investigate the roots of them. I think most of you will discover those roots to be the desire to live and thrive. Once you've realized that, then you're one step closer to becoming one with the animals from whom we descend.