small steps

It's not a terrible summation of depression that it starts from seeing no way to achieve your goals.

Sometimes that's because it's literally impossible, as in depression from grief. If your spouse dies, your goal of growing old with them is never going to be achieved. Here the only fix is to slowly, painfully, grieve and give up on that goal, while focusing towards new goals you might be able to pursue. There are other people you can help, other lives you can enliven.

But sometimes depression comes from a setback. You have a breakup, or you miss a career opportunity, or you fail at something important to you. And you decide that your goals are too far away and you no longer see a way to get to them.

The problem is that big goals require many small steps, not one big step. The goal of doing world-changing research isn't something you solve in a night. Even writing something that people read, or building something that people use, or closer to home -- finding a relationship that you really value with someone you love -- aren't going to be achieved in any single step. They take many small steps, and work, and luck.

Depression comes because you don't see any steps that will lead to the goal. There are small steps, but they don't get you to the goal -- it's not even clear whether they lead in the right direction.

Even worse is if you (naturally) step back and ask about the meta-goal. goals are arbitrary -- they're determined by individual circumstances, many people end up with goals that work at cross-purposes, and it's hard to know if any particular goal is the 'right one' (it's actually philosophically impossible: you could only make this decision by appealing to some higher goal, but how would you knwo that goal is the right one? this is vs ought dichotomy strikes). So you think the meta-goal is just to have a goal. You see that people who have goals and execute on them are happy -- they live purposeful lives, they can achieve satisfaction, they have something driving them to get out of bed in the morning. But 'have a goal' isn't a useful goal: it's too vague, too meta. Following that path won't lead you to an actual meaningful goal; there's no underlying motivation for the goal. If the goal you pursue feels arbitrary, it's hard to convince yourself it's a valuable goal.

So what do you do? Think about big goals, and identify small steps. Those small steps might have even smaller steps. For example, the big goal might be 'get in a good relationship'. The steps might be 'get in shape' and 'go on dates'. the smaller steps might be 'go to the gym, once', and 'write an online dating profile'. The smaller steps aren't enough by themselves. they might not, in the end, even be necessary for the goal (maybe the relationship will just fall into your lap). but they're steps worth taking nonetheless. They're things you can do to feel like you have actionable control over your life and your world. If you can't do them, make them smaller until you can.

This advice seems obvious, but it's almost impossible to say it too often. Our brains aren't designed to keep breaking down goals into subgoals. It's easy to spend months, years, an entire life wandering around aimlessly, pursuing no particular goal. I've heard this advice a million times and it's not novel to me. But thinking about big goals, defining subgoals, and taking steps feels powerful to me even as I write it now.

What kinds of goals are 'okay' to have? If you don't have a lot of experience in the area you're working in, it's hard to know even how to formulate goals. For example, part of learning intellectual subjects and getting up to the research frontier is learning what the open questions in the field even are. And some goals are just more achievable than others: if your goal is 'revolutionize a scientific field through brilliant, iconoclastic research', by definition that's going to be hard to achieve and not a lot of people are going to be able to help you with it. Still, I like to think that there's no bad goal: even having a goal that's poorly defined can still cause you to take instrumentally useful steps. The important thing is that you are open to revising your goals: 'strong opinion weakly held'. If you don't see a way to achieve your goals, define smaller steps. Those steps will add up to something, and taking them will feel good.

As much as possible, take steps that are in your control. The step can't be 'get someone to love me' or 'win a fellowship' or 'get a job'. Those can fail for reasons outside your control. The step should be 'start a conversation', 'outline a research statement', 'fill out an application'.