With 2023 right around the corner, I am hesitantly eyeing the annual process of summarizing, evaluating and sweeping the old year out the door, and setting some sort of goals (or "hopes," at the very least) for the coming year.
I generally don't "do" New Year's Resolutions, and I don't set "hard" goals... I'm more inclined to stick to some fairly loose "it would be nice IF" sort of guidelines that I may or may not reach, but it's not life-or-death if I don't.
In case that comes across as really wishy-washy... it IS!
The problem I generally encounter with goal setting and projections is the dependency clause "as long as."
As in, "The following goals are what I aspire to AS LONG AS some 10,000lb ACME Safe doesn't drop out of the sky and destroy everything."
Our Increasingly Changeable World
In our familiar territory around here, that might amount to a stated goal about my crypto holdings by the end of 2023 being something along the lines of... "this figure AS LONG AS Binance and Coinbase don't go belly up, and various governments don't legislate crypto into total fringe dwelling, and Valdimir Putin doesn't start throwing nuclear bombs around."
What I find so challenging about goal setting these days is that the extent to which these "contingencies" interfere with — and affect — the scope of our goals seems to have moved from the realm of "REMOTE possibilities" to somewhere in the range of "not entirely unlikely."
Essentially, the flock of "10,000lb ACME safes" floating around the sky has proliferated to the point where goal setting truly becomes little more than a guessing game.
Side note: If you didn't grow up with old Saturday/Sunday morning cartoons on TV, the notion of a "10,000lb ACME Safe" originates with the classic Looney Tunes cartoons featuring the Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote... with the heavy cartoon safe being one of the many things that drop from the sky to thwart the coyote's efforts to catch the roadrunner.
Onwards!
Whereas life always will have its share of unknown variables, the world does seem to also move through meta-cycles of greater and lesser uncertainty and turbulence. For example, if you subscribe to Strauss-Howe Generations Theory we're allegedly nearing the invariable "explosive end" end of an 80-year cycle (last explosive ending being marked by the rise of the 3rd Reich, WWII and the atomic bomb) so it makes sense that uncertainty and unknowns are currently tending towards a maximum.
Point being... goal setting is extremely difficult and at times feels futile when it seems like the likelihood that "something unforeseen" happening is almost a given, rather than an exception.
Of course, I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't set goals... but sometimes I feel like I'd be just as well off calling a local Psychic as I would be to just use some form of common sense!
Oh well. I've got about a week to figure it out!
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the final week of 2022!
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Created at 20221226 16:02 PDT
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