Episode 59: Goal Posts on a Treadmill

Transcript

in case anyone ever was wondering whether or not i drank coffee while recording this show
the answer is sometimes not always depends on what time i'm recording and what's going on or
whatever but today happens to be one of those days it's actually late i'm sorry early afternoon
not late morning at the moment i went to the gym this morning came home want to be productive
throughout the course of the the afternoon a little burst of energy plus just nice to sit down and
and have a cup of coffee this is follow-up to last episode where i was talking about
you know i'll link to it but the overall thrust of things was really around
how we tend to move the goalposts on ourselves and also not just the idea of sort of this endless
moving of goalposts trying to stride to the next goal but also trying to look at some of the
pros and cons to that approach as i said last time that there are some pros to having a constant
thing to strive for it gives you something to shoot for you never become complacent in that way i suppose
but there are cons where you never feel quite satisfied you never you know you kind of feel
like you arrive and then you it doesn't matter because you have the next thing to go for
and it it's sort of this almost like a scaling issue you know i talked about it for instance in
terms of salaries or something where you know first you want to make 50k then 60 then 70 then 100 then
200 then and and somehow the more money you make you're not really any better off because in a lot of
ways your your lifestyle has probably changed as well along the way so you're always pushing for
the next thing and that just being one example but anyway the point of this episode what i did in that
episode was sort of pose this as a question or a thought experiment and then what i wanted to do
for this episode was i went and i plugged in essentially the transcript that came out of that episode
i plugged it into in this case chat gpt
turned on like the deep research mode
and then had it just kind of go to town and there's a few interesting things here
first of all and this is just you know purely kind of
logistical chat gpt
itself kind of thing
but interestingly when you i hadn't really used
much with the deep research mode before when you have it do that
it it spits out what essentially is attempting to be
a research paper i know that sounds like silly that i should be surprised
i mean the mode is called deep research i just didn't expect it to literally spit out a thing that
had you know like an abstract and
all these citations and like it just it sort of looks like a research paper
now to what extent there is more research on these other some of this seems maybe a little shallow
to me i don't know but then again my my topic was pretty broad
so you know i did i wasn't trying to ask it and i didn't spend a lot of time prompting it either
i didn't spend a lot of time telling it to like dive into a specific thing so it gave kind of an
interesting and i'm going to post this with this episode so you should be able to find that when
this episode goes live at lmc.fm so i'll post this and you can you know read it along but it gives
kind of a spattering an interesting an interesting series of perspectives and summaries around this
topic ranging from kind of psychology perspectives to kind of stoicism perspectives um existential
perspectives it talks about certain related topics but one of the first things that i noticed about
this so so the main thing that it really dove into was that it identified what i was talking about
in that episode as being sort of a combination topic of what you might call the the hedonic treadmill
and also a rival fallacy now it's interesting because i've heard these terms before like i'm not
unfamiliar with them conceptually but it's not how i was thinking about it in my head but i think it
actually kind of correctly identified this pretty well i was thinking about this in terms of a more
active procedure right where we are almost consciously constantly moving the goalposts on ourselves
and what that means but the next question then logically and that's quite that's that that narrow
perspective is really what i was thinking about when i recorded the last episode but the next question
would be why do we move the goalposts on ourselves i was spending a lot of time examining the pros and
cons of moving the goalposts like whether that's a net positive or a negative for a person the next
question would be why are you moving the goalposts and a very reasonable answer to that is because of
things like arrival fallacy and hedonic adaptation so these concepts if you're not familiar um hedonic
adaptation is the idea that uh that psychologically speaking at we will adapt to things and they become
the new normal and this often gets referred to as the hedonic treadmill so the idea is let's say you reach
some level of success and you're there for a little bit you will psychologically adapt
and now that is your new normal and therefore if you are kind of an ambitious person you are likely
to then set yourself a new goal which is then further away because the thing you reached is now
just normal that's sort of the idea and where it becomes like sort of the the metaphor become a
treadmill is that particularly in at least american type culture
we do this where like it's a never-ending thing right and the idea of a treadmill is that of course
you don't you never go anywhere you're just kind of walking or running in place because you're just
always moving the goal but never actually getting anywhere because when you get there you just move
it again and that's sort of the the idea so it was interesting i thought that it identified that
as what i was talking about because it's it was almost like the next question down it's not exactly
what i was getting at i was trying to examine the pros and cons of the mindset itself this was answering
the question of why might this be happening but very interesting it also talks a bit through
like stoic and buddhist type of perspectives on this buddhism like many things that it really the
overall idea comes down that you know ambition towards external goals tends to result in ongoing
suffering right and stoicism is similar where from that viewpoint it's not that success is necessarily
good or bad it's fine to become successful but it shouldn't necessarily be the thing you're
shooting for the success should be an out an outcome outside and around what the actual goals are
so for instance you may be um a good goal is to create something noble and if you are successful in
that endeavor great but if you fail in that endeavor that's also okay because you are pushing towards
that noble goal whatever it is buddhism is similar um in terms of its perspective around this and and it
does kind of come back again to this idea of an arrival fallacy where
if all you're doing is focusing on the goal itself or all you're doing is focusing on
the success itself i should say then when you get there you are likely to be disappointed you may
you may arrive at momentary happiness but if the things it took to become successful
were not virtuous and noble and worthwhile in their own right then the success itself will be short-lived
is sort of the idea that's a more philosophical standpoint the other thing that was identified in here
that very much struck home for me
is that it's called out you know in this research that the the people who have the most
happiness or the most satisfaction with their path in life
they could be you know societally successful or unsuccessful but it's the it's the people who have used
their path to grow and learn and that's a researched thing with several citations and i found that
really hit home for me around this whole thing so the idea being again it's fine to be successful
but when you look back on things or even while you're doing it and some of this is about sort of
the enjoy the journey you know it's about the journey at the destination kind of thing
the people who are most satisfied are the ones who can recognize in the moment that what they should
be focusing on is making the most of the process and helping it help and having that process help them
grow and learn over time because and it makes sense because even when you get there because
a success like let's let's talk about again professional kind of stuff something like a promotion
can be taken from you just as easily as it can be given to you or earned however what can't be taken
from you is what you learned in order to earn that promotion so even if the promotion is gone you have still
learned all the things and maybe this is hitting maybe maybe i'm reading too much into this but
you know i i've been applying around for for positions recently um i am starting to get toward
i believe the end phases of one or two of these opportunities
what i've noticed so so you know i i don't talk about it too much on this show but i was a cio
by the time i was done that time i was exceptionally burnt out so it took me a little bit time just to
like take a beat for myself you know charge back up a little bit now that i've been back on sort of
the job hunt so to speak what i what has what i've really noticed is that when you put me in a room
with people where you know they're asking questions that i have relevant experience to
it's amazing to me how much i learned and retained and how much of those conversations to me come so
naturally and it's a great feeling because it's a reminder that i really did do this work and i did it
well because because i hit some of this right some of this like arrival fallacy stuff along the way
where i arrived at a certain point i was boosted in my career pretty success pretty um uh significantly
and that gave me a temporary sense of arrival but then the real work began and i did kind of normalize
around that and and you know became just um not complacent but like that was my new normal was that
now i was this was my role so it wasn't exceptional anymore but now looking back and being able to
discuss and utilize that information and not just you said realize utilize it but also just how naturally
i'm able to speak on very complicated topics because i i did it i did these things and i learned from
them and i absorbed them and and now in many ways i am an expert on them and in retrospect that has been
a wonderful way to offset some of these things that can lead to more as the buddhist would say suffering
right because i it's not that i just arrived and stopped it's that i arrived and learned and grew
and maybe toward the end of that journey i was a little too burnt out at that time to realize how
much i had learned and grown so i needed like a minute to you know kind of recharge but now that i
i have it really it's been very gratifying to realize that it's not just that i left a job
it's all the stuff that was just one moment it's all the stuff i learned along the way that was
really worthwhile and at the end of it all that was the satisfying part
so anyway if you're interested in this stuff um like i said i'm going to post this thing
that chat gpt spit out it is kind of an issue it's a fairly easy read it's not super super long
it's only like nine pages um and it's pretty skimmable um but check it out if you have a
minute uh feel free to download it it's just what this is what chat gpt spit out for me using deep
research um after the last episode and essentially putting the transcript through enjoy