Dead Man Goals

No dead man goal is worth purusing.

You may have goals that will include never participating in a behavior but it cannot encapsulate the goal.

So saying something like, “I will never drink alcohol,” “I will never look at porn,” “I will never eat bonbons,” or “I will never think of pink elephants” is at best incomplete and at worst will get you the opposite of what you want.

Let’s take bonbons.

If you’ve identified that bonbons are currently contributing to 60% of your calories, it may be worth considering taking htem out of your diet, but that is in service of a different goal. If you cut bonbons and replace them with tablespoons of butter, you aren’t going to be any better off.

If you ediced to stop drinking but it isn’t a part of somethign greater, then yuou will replace it with other behaviors or substances, mayeb worse one.s. You’ll be able to say “I’m not an alcoholic,” but yo uwill have done yourself almsot no good.

A dead man goal is something you can do if you died.

A perfect example is not arguing with your spouse. You don’t actually want that. You want to be intimate, you want closensess, you want peace. Peace and lack of fighting aren’t the same. Ask Rome’s enemies.

I was a part of a group that made a Big Decision, “I’m never going to participate in X and I’ll never change my mind.”

And at some level you do have to decide that you won’t do “X” again, but the actual decision is “I want Y, so I won’t do X.”

I want to be healthy, I won’t have seconds.

I love my wife and my marriage, so I won’t look at porn.

I am more intereseted in progress in the world I live in than in playing video games, so I wont.

With “never do” lists and even what I’ve laid out here, there’s an implicit “I won’t do a behavior” because I can’t control myself in a way that’s health, so I opt out.

Opting out of certain behaviors or activities is a legitimate way to practice self control, but don’t pretend that when others participate that they have the same baggage as you.

The Pharisee’s did this, and I wager most religious people today.

Righteousness is not the abstinence of anything.

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A final wrinkle to all of this for religious people, or Christians, is what about all of the “thou shall nots” – don’t drink or gamble or go with girls who do, kind of thing.

Is righteousness, that we are dcommanded to do a list of do nots? It kind of seems like it in the first testament, but things that we could do if we were all dead. Wouldn’t it then be better if we just all died? Job and David have written about that.