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If only it were that easy.

Life goals and dreams are hard because of their innate complexity to achieve them. It's easy to state "I want to start a family" or "I want to become a business owner" or "I want to climb Everest". It's the execution which is hard because that relies on so many variables most of which you don't really control.

Social background, economic background, your health, your personality, your skills and abilities, your awareness of opportunities or lack thereof, ingrained beliefs and biases, education level, culture, current events, family dynamics, upbringing,...

The notion that you're in control of what happens in your life is a convenient belief, not a hard fact. It's only when that belief is shattered by hard reality that you start to understand that life doesn't necessarily follow the script you had in mind when you're young.

The kicker then is understanding that happiness isn't to be found only when you reach the end of the rainbow, when you finally achieve the dream. It's there along the road, between the rubble and troubles that life throws at you. It's found in what you make out of each day you're given in good health.

I'm young and that's probably the reason why I'm less cynical. Hurdles can't be a reason not to run the race. For me it's like project management: you're 100% sure that nothing is going to go according to the plan, and that you'll end up far from the target, but still, planning is better than not planning. And adapting the plan along the way is best.

Absolutely! There's value in planning for your life and at least trying to act on your plan. Even so, learning when and how to adapt or abandon your plans, well, that's an art form which takes a lifetime to perfect.

Then there are things in life you can't really prepare yourself for because they are, well, life altering. For instance, when you marry, there's only so much you can do to prepare for the probability of losing your partner through death and divorce. The practicalities, such as notary's and testaments, are fairly trivial to deal with. Living through the experience and confronting yourself with reality as it happens? That's a wholly different ball game.

While I agree that there are a lot of factors we don't control, we can put that into perspective for evaluating how feasible a "life goal" is.

There's a culture that pushes us to "dream big" (e.g. build a unicorn startup, become a billionaire). That's usually awfully ambitious, and as feasible as winning the lottery for most of us.

We should be pragmatic about our life goals. They should be ambitious, but achieavable.

Even if we don't control a lot of factors in our lives we at least have the power to influence them, most of the time it comes in the form of "trade-offs". So you've got to be prepared to make some sacrifices in the present for making progress towards a future goal.

I also acknowledge that some of us have a head start due to our social/economical background, and we should be grateful for that.

I have been listening to the ancients and have become suspect of ambition.

It is not like if you see ambition as something less than a moral good you will no longer get anything done. You will just turn off this useless modeling of future events in your head.

I suspect in our culture, ambition causes nothing but useless pain and is counter productive at the average as people model their future life up to these highly improbable lottery winning situations.

Climbing Mount Everest is really the best metaphor. Massive risk for basically no reward. The whole idea is objectively stupid but seen as some great accomplishment in our culture.

It's a choice. If that makes you happy then follow it.

Let's face facts. If our ancestors never had any ambition we would still be hunter-gatherers. We would probably have the same level of happiness and sadness since we would never know anything different. Flowing through life is a choice that works for some.

You still have some amount of control.

As a 30-something, it has recently become apparent to me that it is very easy to live a life you don't really care about. You start a job because it's the thing people expect you to do with your degree, chase some promotions because it feels nice to improve your status and win more money and without really paying attention you end up doing a job you rescent to keep living a life you dislike.

> You start a job because it's the thing people expect you to do with your degree

I obtained a job so that I could start a family and keep food on the table. I guess what you’re saying would make sense if you already had a retirement-level amount of money to begin with at age 18.

There's a school of thought among physicists/philosophers called "eternalism" (also goes by "block universe") that posits that all the future is already "laid out," so to speak, and that free will is an illusion. The idea is that the current state of the universe (and mind in our case) dictates the next state (deterministic or stochastic) and we really have to control over the process. Many physicists subscribe to this view (Albert Einstein is supposed to have been a proponent), and I'm increasingly becoming a believer myself. The upshot is that we should never regret/second-guess the past or worry about the future because we really have no control.

That paints a veneer of effortlessness over everything that I don't much care for. Sure, we could in theory trace back our every impulse to some preceding energy or interaction, but it doesn't much help in the moment when you're trying to push hard to get done that last mile of your run. Even if the universe already knows if you're going to fail or not by the end of the run doesn't mean you do nor should you accept the easy result in the moment.

The universe knew you were going to think that and push yourself hard for the last mile

The future has zero mass, thus has zero energy, thus most likely doesn't exist yet. It's a really long gamble to say that it does.

Can't the same argument be made about the past? The measurement of mass and energy is very much a measure of the present.

Of course, if we really have no control then we also can't control whether we regret the past or worry about the future, so why bother telling anyone that they should not do it?

But of course you had no control over whether you would tell anyone that, so I shouldn't question your decision.

The whole notion of 'should' is absurd under such a philosophy.

There's also determinism. I know that when I kick a ball it will go on a direction I want. Not always but most of the time and the more I do it the better I get. If it's an illusion, thats ok. I will live with it the rest of my life. It works for me.

Oops, should have written free-will not determinism.

You can't control the hand youre dealt.

You control how you play the hand

And you control at how you take joy in the game.

True, it's not easy. But if you never start and try, I guarantee that it's even more unlikely to happen.

It's said that it's the journey not the goal so make the journey fun. If there are ever a set of people that can figure out how to solve a problem, HN has them. So,figure out how to solve your dream problem.

True, doing nothing is so much easier but I don't recommend it since you won't like the result.

I don't think unrealistic dreams have to lead to regrets. I have a dream home, and I don't think I'll ever build it, and that's fine. I like occasionally thinking of my dream home, it makes me happy, and I don't need to actually have it become a real home.

Since it's just a dream, I don't have to worry about where to build it, or if the things I dream about are practical, and I don't have to worry about any trade-offs, since it's just a dream.

Even if I had a million dollars, and I could afford to build it, who knows if it would even work? There's a reason why real life houses don't look like my dream home, and I assume it's because of some things that I'm not thinking about when fantasising about my dream house.

So, I'm perfectly happy with having unfulfilled dreams.

You're aware that one of the most common regrets in the article is to have laboured too much? Not sure if thats your intention bit it really reads like in the face of that youre reaction is "work(labour) harder" to get fullfillment.

>People should note that having dreams without figuring out how to get them accomplished is a sure way to have regrets.

Disagree. My dream is to revolutionize my field of science. This is practically unattainable, but that doesn't I'll regret being a scientist and solving smaller problems.

I.e. It's not the destination, but the road traveled.

I buy lottery tickets because it's fun (for me) to pretend that I will win. It's playing as in "lets pretend" and "dressing up". I know that it's 1:14,000,000 against and I know how big a 1,000,000 is.

Dreaming in the longer run is good, and goals can provide meaning and structure in what is essentially a meaningless and chaotic world. Living in the moment is also good, playing is good.

Sure, but you can also direct all that time, money and energy towards something much more rewarding, with real and very probable chances of succeeding, instead of string of little failures to win for rest of your life.

For example I have a long term dream of being self-sufficient paraglider, Icarus dream and all that. I live in a country where its hard to have full course (2 weeks minimum) unless you speak fluent french, which I don't yet. I have 2 tiny little small kids. I have had some recent injuries which delay/block similar efforts. But I didn't give up, waited patiently till suddenly I had a window for the course. Did it, and now looking for spring to continue the momentum, whenever family situation allows it.

Some other activities would be much easier (and cheaper) to get into. But somehow I knew and felt that this will be very rewarding for me, combining hiking up and flying down the mountains.

I don't call them dreams - those are rather impossible situations like me free floating on ISS looking a dark space around Earth, stars, moon and milky way. Or winning lottery. Goals is much better term for me, there are clear actionable steps to get there. Compared to this dream, paragliding is peanuts to achieve.

> Sure, but you can also direct all that time, money and energy towards something much more rewarding

It takes 0.1 units of time and energy to buy a lottery ticket, you just add one to your things at checkout. Sure, you could put that $1 per week towards your investment portfolio but hey, maybe?

It becomes an issue when people are addicted to it or are harboring false hopes and spend considerable money on lotteries, but as OP was describing, it doesn't seem to be a problem.

> I buy lottery tickets because it's fun (for me) to pretend that I will win.

Can't you pretend you will win without buying the tickets?

Yes.

Well, sure. But in one case you have a chance of winning (although vanishingly small), and in the other you don’t. So it’s much less entertaining.

You could find a winning lottery ticket, so without buying you do still have an (even smaller) chance. While one is sufficiently likely that it'll happen to someone and the other probably won't ever, neither will happen to you.

I think the bigger difference is probably the prop and the immediacy of the experience.

I can pretend I'm shooting monsters in my head too, but it's more enjoyable when playing Doom. Though admittedly this metaphor would probably have a sudden drop in happiness the closer to real it got.

I buy lottery tickets because I like the privilege of not being poor enough for the purchase to be a tax on me, lottery tickets are often called a tax on the stupid or a tax on the poor, both are said. why not just entertainment?

so I just like to think “l.o.l, privilege” when I buy

one of the $595 hourly rates from cpa and legal beats my lottery ticket purchases any year, shrug

I’ve traded options with a greater negative expected value than powerball

I buy lottery tickets when the prize is really large. My four best friends and I will chip in and we'll buy a few tickets. Then we'll spend the next week or two on our whatsapp group having fun about what dumb s*t each one will do with the money, what kinds of pranks we'll be able to lay on each other, etc. It's lots of fun and for about ten bucks, it's money very well spent. It wouldn't be this fun if we were just pretending to have bought tickets.

I believe that majority of people don't have a dream.

I disagree.

I believe a majority of people have a dream. Source: my decades in higher education working with families and students - literally everyone has a dream about their future.

What they don't have is a plan.

Well, for one thing, most people don't go through higher education.

Also, I did a Bs+Ms in CS and never had a plan along the way. I just wanted to have fun before I have to go work at some job that I'm probably not going to be too happy about. I'd say majority of people I studied with were like that.

Actively still has a dream, or had a dream when they were in higher education?

I would say actively have a dream. I'm talking about the parents of students and prospective students as well as parents and family of kids who had no intention of going into higher education at all.

All of the parents, once you got them to open up, had dreams about how their life would/could turn out.

Very few ever had a plan on how to make that, but more of a hopeful 'one day' sort of attitude.

or support/supportive people around them - at best.

Instead, there are a lot of people who dont want to see others do better than them. From personal experience, directly & indirectly, some of the closest people that we are taught to trust are the very people who shut those dreams down, or at the very least, give support as long as it doesnt help raise anyone 'above' themselves. How many accept that and regret it at the end of life when those people have long since disappeared. Stepping outsides the norms of ones social bubble/society is far more risky than conforming to ones 'place' in the pecking order.

> So keep in mind that most dreams are achievable you just have to work towards them by setting up a life plan.

No, no they aren't, especially if you haven't already won the birth lottery. We're coming in an era of decreasing social mobility, where the majority will drown in poverty.

Have capital

Dont not have capital

Why you should give up on your dreams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4ZnfCmTJMY

That one is really good.