An adventure is not a mission is not a positive vision of the future

Goal, trajectory, adventure, mission, and positive vision of the future are three close but importantly different ideas. It is so easy to confuse them that in writing about them I've found myself clumping them all together like cat litter. I want to try and sort out the boundaries between them.

This table's my attempt to sort them out.

I include goals mostly for contrast to the others. I find them relatively well-defined, whereas the others are slipperier, and some of them involve goals. A pretty recognizable future state might be, for example, "being CEO of the Kellogg Company." If you want to become Kellogg CEO and act to achieve it then it's a goal for you: "I want to become Kellogg Company CEO." Note that goals may be ongoing rather than something you can check off as done once and for all — for example, "meet with a friend in person once a week" with no defined end-point. This gestures at desire state but it's one that's maintained over time rather than ever being checked off as Done like becoming CEO might be.

Trajectories are interesting in the sense that there is no well-defined end-point at which "ah, we are done." A lot of things we want seem like this. Sometimes we define goals but the goals are not the trajectory — the goals are powered by desire but they are not the desire.

Adventure corresponds roughly with doing from Di Marsico's idea of happiness. It is being happy and doing what one knows is never necessary to be done. That brings with it ease and delight and the "magic," the sense of adventure, that Zan and Jordan seem to be advocating for.

Deida's idea of mission or purpose seems a bit more stoic and heavy. Per my recollection, his idea of mission/purpose includes both goals and values ("justice," "responsibility," "generosity," "kindness," "honesty," "honest work"). I mean goals in the sense defined in table. Arguably a value in the context of Deida's idea of mission is just a trajectory.

Deida might also think goals or values have to be "higher" to count as mission or purpose. I think "higher" is poorly defined but more than that I think, fuck David Deida, they're my goals and they can be (must be) what I want.

(Incidentally, Zan and Jordan as well as Deida are writing for straight men. They each add similar caveats. For Zan, that's to argue that your girl doesn't want to be the adventure, she wants to be on an adventure with you. He takes this position indirectly but in more detail in his book The Alabaster Girl (reviewed here). Deida's idea of mission is different but he similarly writes in The Way of the Superior Man that one has to have a purpose outside of and prior to one's partner — he literally titled chapter 7, "YOUR PURPOSE MUST COME BEFORE YOUR RELATIONSHIP." So if you get an offer to become CEO of Kellogg but you have to move to another city, and your girlfriend doesn't want to leave, you better not chicken out, you better pick Kellogg — if you stay she won't respect you. Or something like that. Don't ask me, I'm not Deida — and glad not to be.)

David Chapman's idea of a positive vision of the future is as yet vague and seems more grand in scope. It doesn't sound like it's supposed to be an individual project. I read his writing as an invitation to participate thoughtfully in our future by describing a future we would like. We participate (or don't) as individuals in what is a collective project. These goals are trans-personal.

The goals we express are trans-personal in the sense that they require the participation of other people — either pragmatically or intrinsically. Pragmatically, no one person can, as of writing, build a 480-foot-tall pyramid on their own. Intrinsically, "solving loneliness" means getting the people who are experiencing "loneliness" (for some definition thereof) into different individually-desirable circumstances such that they no longer experience "loneliness." Many goals or positive visions we may have for the future are a mix of pragmatically and intrinsically trans-personal. We need to cooperate with other people to build things we want and no one person can decide what future we want.

Some thoughts on how these relate:

1. Goals need not be achievable in the sense that you can reach the desired state, recognize it is the desired state, and then check the goal off as Done.
2. Many trajectories are, ideally, symbiotic with goals.
   1. Things break down when one pursues goals and forgets the underlying desire (trajectory), possibly because of declaring it now achieved and implicitly not requiring maintenance, or when one stops writing down goals and so fails to move toward anything in particular.
   2. Some trajectories aren't very amenable to becoming goals. For example, living with, or understanding: ease and delight [2], love [3], appreciation [4], curiosity [5], attention [6], gratitude [7], or whatever the hell this thing is.
3. Having a mission is independent of having a positive vision of the future. Mission need not have such a large scope as a positive vision of the future. Having a positive vision of the future does not mean having a mission.
4. In theory, having a mission is independent of adventure, however, in practice, needing to have a life mission is opposed to adventure.
   1. That's because believing one needs anything for happiness is exactly what causes unhappiness. Happiness, in Di Marsico's definition and in my understanding, is knowing that nothing could cause unhappiness.
   2. I hate how Deida uses the words mission and purpose. It sounds so serious and weighty. He binds them up so closely with the idea of life purpose, as if lives can have purposes. This is serious! People get worked up and struggle and suffer and feel unhappy about whether they are doing their life's purpose or whether their life has purpose. I have been people! It fucking sucks! But lives don't have purposes. A person in a particular situation doing a particular activity has a purpose — but their life doesn't have a singular purpose. A purpose is not the kind of thing a person's life can have. </rant>
   3. If you think you need to have a life mission or purpose, I suggest curiosity. I suggest thinking about whether you really believe that. Maybe there have been times in your life that you have been happy and did not know what your purpose in life was? You may or may not find Bruce Di Marsico's work on happiness persuasive. Meaningness covers related ground; you may or may not find that persuasive.
   4. I say, better dispense with any idea of life mission or purpose. I rather say purposes are something I affirm or have in a moment, and might not have later, and losing old purposes is just fine, actually.
5. Maybe "high" goals need not be heavy?
   1. I'm reminded of the idea that the bodhisattva always maintains a light heart. The "bodhisattva ideal" is in my experience a whole different can of worms with its own potential heaviness — but maybe it doesn't have to be felt as heavy.
6. Adventure is independent of having a positive vision of the future. One can have a positive vision of the future and be miserable in the present because one is pursuing a Serious Mission. On the other hand, one can have a positive vision of the future while also enjoying present moment adventures.
7. When one is happy, any goal or trajectory/value that one pursues is done from that happiness, i.e. one is doing what one knows is never necessary to be done. Because nothing is ever necessary to be done in order to be happy. There is no (final, ultimate) purpose. Does it therefore follow that those goals function as adventures? I think it does.
8. If one had a positive vision of the future that would spring from what one values and could be a source of goals.
9. One could have goals related to developing or sharing a positive vision of the future.
   1. For example: Posting a blog post or micro-blog thread describing one's positive vision of the future.
   2. Another example: Posting a follow-up blog post or thread that describes some part of one's vision in more detail, or something about how we get there.
   3. Third example: Publishing a book about one's positive vision of the future. Like: Malcolm Ocean's How We Get There.