Evaluate your goals

“Chill”

I read the above post from Garance Doré first thing this morning and I started thinking: what are my goals and wishes? My real goals? The ones which achieving them would make me really happy? By happy I mean really joyful not just accomplished or relieved. Yes, there is a difference… for an overachiever people-pleasing person who I am, there is a big difference. In my mind there are a few different lists: one is for goals which I have to achieve in order to prove to others that I am good and lovable (yeah, issues! I know!)… Then there is this other list of goals I have to achieve because I think they are worth the effort, or because I want them (?!! I mean maybe I want them, gets confusing sometimes!) and because I think these achievements are making me a better person, improving my life or my mind or my social status, so they are goals I have to achieve because they make my life better but I don’t love them necessarily (like having a job because you have to earn money to live but it’s a job you don’t love and doesn’t make you happy. You know what I mean?). Then there is this third list of thing that makes me really happy. Problem is this list is not very well defined. I’m not always sure what is on it.

It is sad that I am not the only person feeling this way. When talking to a friend few months back, she mentioned feeling like a wormy apple, perfect from the outside but destroyed on the inside. What affected me deeply about her description was how perfectly she captured her life without having an ounce of poetry in her. Considering she is beautiful and healthy, has a high IQ and a PhD in a complex branch of engineering, is a professor and researcher with a lot of publications, have a loving husband and supporting family, is financially secure and professionally respected, and so on. It was sad how apt was her description and how deep it resonated with me.

Today reading Garance’s post, I was apprehensive: Am I focusing too much on what is expected from me socially and not enough on what makes me really happy? Am I confusing the sources of my happiness? What are my real goals? Isn’t to be happy? Will what I am doing and pursuing make me really happy upon achieving it? Or would it be only another item checked from the lists of things I had to do… which brings more relief than happiness… and I have learned time and again, relief is not happiness. Relief doesn’t last.