…the most striking continuity between the old religion and the new positive thinking lies in their common insistence on work—the constant internal work of self-monitoring.

—Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America¹⁶

EVERY YEAR, MILLIONS of people create New Year's resolutions, set new goals, or dream up intentions for how they'll do things better on their next trip around the sun. And while plenty of people don't actively partake in this ritual, the “New Year, New You” energy is still part of the cultural air we breathe. We can't avoid the recycled headlines about how to finally stick to your resolutions this year or how to make a plan to accomplish your biggest goals. Stores fill their displays with exercise equipment, planners, productivity books, and motivational journals. We are bombarded by the societal imperative to make this year better than last—to reach higher, work harder, and achieve our dreams.

Now, I'm certainly not the first person to question the wisdom of this tsunami of goal-setting advice. But I wanted to go further than questioning. I wanted to know why it seems so difficult to envision a way to live and work outside of this paradigm of continuous improvement. As a former religious studies student, I am trained to examine the underlying beliefs that make up our worldviews. I had a hunch that our obsession with goals and achievement wasn't some fluke of genetic programming. Instead, it might hinge on cultural, political, and religious programming. So maybe more like memetic programming? We think of memes as funny pictures with often nonsensical captions in Impact font overlaid on them. But really, a meme is a small segment of culture—like a gene is a small segment of DNA. The stories we absorb from fiction, history, religion, and family are memetic markers for certain beliefs. The field of memetics applies an evolutionary model to the study of culture.

I uncovered an evolution of cultural DNA that reproduces to consolidate power in a small group of people while convincing everyone else that conforming to those patterns is a moral imperative. What's more, we can see a metanarrative of “overcoming” that links these patterns together to create an almost inescapable sense that we're not enough as we are.

I'll admit that my analysis here is biased toward the culture of the United States, and biased further to the dominant, economically privileged culture here. But, while different cultural patterns may influence this paradigm in other parts of the world or even in different communities within the United States, culture is one of the United States' biggest exports. So the prevailing patterns in the United States become part of the cultural patterns elsewhere and applying this analysis, even in part, will help to better understand our relationship to goal-setting elsewhere. I'll start with the most familiar and modern pattern and then trace its lineage back through our cultural history.

Winners and Losers

I grew up a Trekkie. One of the first movies I can remember going to see in the theater was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. My family anxiously awaited each new episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation while consuming the reruns that aired in the early evening hours. We dove headfirst into Deep Space Nine and Voyager as soon as they came out. I loved the techno-utopian dream of people from different races and even different species all working toward the goal of discovery on equal footing. In Star Trek: First Contact, the Next Generation crew ends up in 2063, over 300 years before the series' main timeline. Captain Picard tries to explain how the 24th-century economy works to one of the refugees they encounter on the surface of Earth. He says, “The acquisition of wealth is no longer a driving force in our lives.” Instead, he says, they're driven by the desire to make themselves better and to make humanity better. That sounded pretty good to me as a 14-year-old. Heck, it sounds pretty good to me as a 40-year-old. You could pursue whatever you want to pursue without having to worry about surviving.

First Contact premiered the same year that the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act passed under the guidance of President Bill Clinton. Clinton, a Democrat, had promised to reform the welfare system, which had seen its rolls increase by a third during the recession of the early 1990s. This act, coming on the heels of Reaganomics and a push to dismantle the legacy of the New Deal, aimed to change the very foundation of welfare benefits in the United States. It was this bill that codified the “welfare to work” philosophy—shifting the core of the American consciousness to expect that government benefits should always be limited and contingent on an effort to get off of benefits. Welfare, and other public assistance programs, politicians argued, should always be a last resort. Politicians and pundits reminded us that if we needed government help to survive, well then our discipline and work ethic were deficient.¹⁷

While this reform passed under Clinton, it was Reagan—along with Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom—who set the ball in motion. Before there could be the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, there had to be the mythic “welfare queen.” In inventing the welfare queen, Reagan made an example of Linda Taylor, a mom from Chicago who had committed welfare fraud repeatedly. As Reagan told the story, Taylor conned the government out of over $150,000 in tax-free benefits in one year. However, in 1974, a grand jury indicted her for just $8,865.67 in fraud. It cost the local government $50,000 to convict her.¹⁸

The story of the welfare queen became a sort of anti-fable, a story designed to shame some people into doing better and convince others of their moral superiority. Reaganomics and Thatcherism convinced us that if we weren't getting by, we hadn't worked hard enough or taken enough responsibility for ourselves. Never mind structural inequality or vastly different access to opportunities, failure to thrive was a moral failing, a personal deficiency. How many nights of sleep have been lost to the fear inspired by this message? I myself have lost plenty! “The fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment,” writes Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism.¹⁹

It's not like Reagan or Thatcher invented this ideology, though. They simply applied it to the world's most powerful democracies. They became figureheads for rhetoric that made it impossible to remember that the United States and the United Kingdom were once invested in extending the public good rather than freeing the marketplace (that impossibility is the “realism” in Fisher's capitalist realism). Neoliberal political and economic philosophy is the evolution of those early Mont Pelerin Society conversations we discuss in Chapter 1. Until the neoliberal movement gained power, the prevailing economic theory was that of John Maynard Keynes—the guy who gave us the prediction we'd only work 15 hours a week by the turn of the 21st century.²⁰ Keynesian economics favored government intervention—the kind that helped see us through the Great Depression, establish workers' rights, and even provide relief during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. While Keynesian economics is still with us in many ways, neoliberalism has taken the reins in terms of political rhetoric and popular understanding of our responsibilities as citizens. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, with their ideas about limiting government and turning over most functions (e.g., the post office and healthcare) to the private sector, won the day at least when it comes to how we think about the role of government in the economy. At least in the United States, it's the air we breathe. Echoing the characterization of Orgad and Gill from Chapter 1, feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser describes this neoliberal capitalism as, “no mere economic system but something larger: an institutionalized social order.”²¹

As you can probably tell, I have strong political beliefs. But my goal here isn't to convince you of a particular political position. My aim is to decode the political philosophy that makes up a huge part of our personal operating systems. I'm a lifelong liberal who is only getting more progressive as I get older. But I still find myself running on the programming of a completely different set of beliefs—like if my iPhone was running Android instead of iOS. It would look like an Apple product, but the way I actually go about running software is entirely informed by a Google system. No matter what your personal political beliefs, there is an excellent chance that you're running this neoliberal, individualist software.

And it's that software we use to program our goals. Journalist George Monbiot explains in an article for The Guardian, “Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers.”²² Goal-setting is one of the ways we manage ourselves—quotas, metrics, milestones. It's how we determine whether we're a winner or a loser. And we're terrified to be among the losers. But neoliberalism is simply the latest iteration of other political and personal philosophies that set the stage for our obsession. Before neoliberalism, there was Herbert Hoover's rugged individualism.

We'd Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover

The decidedly romanticized idea of rugged individualism is perhaps the most influential philosophy of the U.S. social and political systems. Rugged individualism is a doctrine of self-reliance, an ethos that puts the responsibility for health, wealth, and general well-being on individual citizens and removes responsibility from society. This ethos is so engrained in the American mind that it can be difficult to imagine any other way to operate. Even those who vote for the most progressive policies are often pulled back into the spirit of rugged individualism in the way they run their own lives.

This is, of course, in part because the U.S. social and political systems necessitate that position. If you're not self-reliant, these systems will not help you—especially if you're a woman, a person of color, an LGBTQIA+ person, a disabled person, or an immigrant. There is no safety net, no helping hand, and few rules limiting exploitation. While Hayek may argue that individualism doesn't constitute an ethos of selfishness, he does argue that people's concern should be on their own interests, their own “clearly delimited area of responsibility.” We can see the direct impact of this reasoning on public health, tax policy, and funding for public programs. Hayek also asserted that, because “he cannot know more than a tiny part of the whole of society,”²³ he should only concern himself with immediate results of his actions on the tiny part he belongs to. While “eyes on your own paper” is a good rule for taking an exam, is it the rule we want to govern our communities? Hayek didn't preclude collaboration (as long as it doesn't involve “coercing” others), but he doesn't seem to be super interested in lending a hand if it's not in his best interests.

I believe this foundational individualism is a significant contributor to the epidemic of loneliness and disconnection. Late-stage self-reliance silos us off from the rest of the world, cutting off the ability to ask for and receive help from others. Individualism transforms us into hyper-vigilant self-managers when it comes to work, family, and life in general. In other words, the incessant emphasis on personal responsibility and self-reliance turns us into goal-setting machines.

On the surface, this ethos seems logical. If people are taking care of themselves, then everyone is taken care of, right? Except this absolutely does not work practically. In the speech in which soon-to-be President-Elect Herbert Hoover coined the phrase “rugged individualism,” he triumphed the equality of opportunity and individual freedom that (he claimed) made America great. But it doesn't take a historian to realize that there were broad swathes of the U.S. citizenry that did not have equal access to opportunity or even individual freedom. Hoover was elected in the fever of the Jim Crow era and at the trailhead of the Great Depression. Women had gotten the vote just eight years prior. Most of the labor regulations—unequal as they were—and social safety net provisions were still seven years from being passed into law. Even Hoover recognized that rugged individualism shouldn't be an excuse for inequality or exploitation. He didn't want people to think that he was advocating for a “free-for-all and devil-take-the-hindmost” nation. “The very essence of equality of opportunity and of American individualism is that there shall be no domination by any group or [monopoly] in this republic,” said Hoover.²⁴ Bold words from someone leading a nation under the spell of white industrialists, robber barons, and speculators.

The idea that American greatness was rooted in equal opportunity and individual freedom was, at best, laughable in 1928. And yet, it's a story that persists to this day. It's a story that informs the way people vote, the jobs they choose to train for, the way they manage their money, the family relationships they form, and—of course—influences the personal goals that they set. The story of rugged individualism is a fable, a tale that puts moral weight onto its central lesson: self-reliant, rugged, fiercely independent individuals are better people because of their doggedness. We set goals to survive or get ahead in this story—and doing so gives us some confidence in our inherent goodness and worthiness within society. But the moral component of our relationship to goals doesn't stop at the societal level, it continues into the spiritual realm.

Remember, Time Is Money

Before Hoover ever uttered the phrase rugged individualism, the United States was a nation that venerated self-discipline. In case your grasp of early American history has faded since elementary school (mine certainly has), remember that among the first colonists in what would become the United States were Puritans. Most of the people who traveled on the Mayflower and settled Plymouth Plantation were part of the Protestant separatist group seeking to get out from under the thumb of the Church of England. I'm going to get into the weeds of Christian theology a bit here but, as many sociologists have argued, these details are core to how we understand culture and economics in the United States. Bear with me. This is important.

Puritans, who were Calvinists, had some significant disagreements with the Church of England. The establishment of the Church of England as independent from the Roman Catholic Church was more about structures of power than it was theology. But Calvinists, like Lutherans, had a theological bone to pick with what had long been considered settled dogma. For Calvinists, one of the main disagreements was about justification—in other words, how one gets right with God and is ushered into salvation.

The Roman Catholic Church had long leaned on performing certain rituals as the method of justification. Baptism, mass, confession, last rites—these are all examples of sacraments that serve to purify the adherent. Martin Luther reformed this understanding of justification by calling out the ways in which the sacraments had been corrupted and used to exploit adherents throughout church history. Luther taught that God was the only source of justification—the individual's only role was in having faith in the sacrifice of Jesus on their behalf. But John Calvin took a slightly different stance on justification. While agreeing in principle with Luther, Calvin believed that justification took on a different quality among God's chosen people. He reasoned that because God was omnipotent, God already knew who was saved and who was damned. And that foreknowledge amounted to “predestination.” The doctrine of predestination was simply that whether you were saved (a member of the Elect) or damned was determined before you were even born. There was nothing you could do in this life to impact your salvation.

Calvin maintained that one's status as Elect or not couldn't be known in this life. And, of course, that uncertainty was plenty to give believers an existential anxiety attack. So instead of working toward salvation through the sacraments or strengthening the faith by which you'd be saved, Calvinists started to look for evidence that they were among the Elect. One of the chief signs of salvation? Self-discipline. Those who were able to follow the rules, work hard, and improve their lot in life were thought to be the ones who could be confident in their future glory. And here is where we get an even more fundamental moral quality to hard work and self-improvement. Self-discipline, labor in a calling, and being a useful member of the community all served the purpose of glorifying God. Work is worship. Diligence is a ritual of faith. Puritanism was a distinctly individual experience, yet that experience created the foundations of highly structured and productive communities.

Sociologist and political economist Max Weber traced the connection between Protestant work ethic and capitalism in his aptly titled work, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, back in 1904. He showed how anxiety over predestination increasingly became secularized in the form of capitalism. Weber frequently cited the essay in which Benjamin Franklin reminded his nephew, “time is money.” Weber viewed this declaration as a sort of tipping point into a more purely economic construction of the Protestant work ethic. Weber writes: “The earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue and proficiency are, as it is now not difficult to see, the real Alpha and Omega of [Benjamin] Franklin's ethic.”²⁵ Today, we can see how this secularization reversed itself as television evangelists preach the so-called prosperity gospel and religiously conservative politicians preach about the personal failings of the poor.

The legacy of Puritan culture—and other American Protestant sects, including the Anabaptists, Methodists, and Pietists—is the notion that not only are people who work hard, follow the rules, and improve themselves morally good people, they're saved from damnation. Rugged individualism and neoliberalism have translated this model of spiritual salvation into economic salvation. If I'm self-disciplined and, therefore, successful, it's a sign of my inherent goodness and relief from the eternal torture of poverty (or even working class status). Setting goals and New Year's resolutions have become a ritual of the doctrine of self-discipline. We pay penance by demonstrating our ability to control ourselves and delay gratification, proving ourselves worthy of economic and cultural salvation.

You Think You're Better Than Me?

No accounting of neoliberal or American culture in regards to our obsession with goals would be complete without an exploration of supremacy culture. In short, supremacy culture is made up of the norms and mores that result from believing one group is better than another group.²⁶ Multiple forms of supremacy have cropped up over the course of human history: men over women, white over Black, rich over poor, educated over uneducated, Global West over Global East, Global North over Global South, colonist over indigenous person. In the United States, we hear most about white (male) supremacy, but all of those hierarchies are embedded into our culture.

The construct of supremacy is key to our understanding of the role goals play in our lives because supremacy culture is what establishes “the ladder.” The ladder, as writer and activist Sonya Renee Taylor described in an interview with Brené Brown, is the system by which we order who is better and who isn't as good.²⁷ To move up the ladder, you have to take on more traits of the groups who occupy status higher up the ladder. It's nice to think that the ladder is purely meritocratic—yet it's anything but. We don't move up the ladder because our work is better than the next person's or even because we've disciplined ourselves to achieve peak productivity. We move up the ladder because better and more productive are defined through the understanding of supremacy. What is white, Western, male, rich, educated, productive, and straight—or an approximation of those traits—is what moves up.

What that meant for me as a white woman from a working class family was that I needed to seek education, financial prosperity, and male-coded behaviors to move up the ladder. What it means for a mixed race transgender person is that they need to completely deny their identity in order to move up. Climbing the ladder requires self-erasure to one degree or another. The writer and spoken word artist Zuva Seven shared her own confrontation with the ladder in an essay for An Injustice! She wrote that it was her parents, immigrants to Great Britain from Zimbabwe, who made it clear that she needed to conform to succeed. “But success garnered from erasing myself isn't something I want. I don't want that to be what I am known for, nor do I want it to be my legacy,” she wrote. For a time, she erased her own passion for writing, sexuality, and identity as a Black woman, opting to follow the success path her family laid out for her.²⁸

Music, magazines, social media, work, school, family, and social groups can all impart the imperative to deny one's full identity and conform to the construct of supremacy is baked into how we set our goals. In Country Living's list of “Top 10 New Year's Resolutions for 2022 Revealed,” the first three pertain to body conformity, two pertain to financial conformity, and other five could best be described as ways to follow cultural commandments.²⁹ The result is that goals become a sort of technology for self-erasure. We learn to recognize all the ways we don't fit in and the rungs we haven't yet climbed and define our future selves against those traits. We rarely—if ever—stop to think whether the things we're not are actually a core part of who we are. And that's not just a personal problem. It ripples out into our culture and communities, making them more hostile to difference.

Overcoming

Difference is something to be overcome—that's the prevailing message we receive through each of the narratives I've discussed in this chapter. Each presents a list of shoulds and supposed-tos that we can measure ourselves against to make “appropriate” adjustments. Not extroverted enough? Set a goal to become more outgoing. Not thin enough? Set a goal to stop eating sugar. Not rich enough? Set a goal to get started with a side hustle. Not male enough? Set a goal to be more assertive and aggressive. Not white enough? Set a goal to talk and dress the part. But overcoming differences doesn't work—at least not sustainably.

Ironing out your differences in order to conform inevitably leads to burnout or self-alienation, or both. It also takes up precious resources that could be better used on projects infinitely more meaningful to you. What would it take to view the differences we possess not as negative, not even as positive, but as … neutral? Facts rather than qualifiers. Circumstances rather than performance metrics. What works, in my opinion, is when we bring greater awareness to the systems we operate in and debug the code that guides how we think. The beautiful thing is that, as we debug our own code, we find ourselves in community with others, free from the competition and self-judgment we've taken on. And that community can act collectively to change the code at higher and higher levels. It might be an individual action at first, but the results are political and cultural.

What makes our obsession with goals so deeply rooted into our worldview is what also makes it so hard to divorce ourselves from. The goals we set represent a chance at a better life, a less challenging identity, even the hope of a sort of salvation. To give up goal-setting can feel like abandoning an imagined future self that has things a little easier. But at that point, I think we have to start to ask the question that evangelists of individualism, neoliberalism, Puritan work ethic, capitalism, and supremacy culture would rather us not ask: Why do we put up with all of these systems that make life so damn hard in the first place?

Even if we're done putting up with these systems as individuals, it will take time and work to dismantle them at higher levels. We can't stop at acceptance of our own differences. We have a duty to work toward new systems that allow people to accept their own differences—without the fear of harm, poverty, or the potential to become a social pariah. For now, though, we might think differently but we still need to cope with the way things are to a degree. Is there a way to operate within these foundational systems that allows us to get our own needs met while caring for others needs, too? Is there a stance we can take toward goal-setting, accomplishment, or ladder-climbing that doesn't rely on stepping over (or on) others?

My hope is that, through this brief exploration of rugged individualism, the doctrine of personal responsibility, Protestant work ethic, and supremacy culture, you notice the cultural narratives that shape what goals you perceive as worthy of pursuit and why those goals hold such massive influence over you. These narratives are deeply embedded in our worldview—if not your individual worldview, than the societal worldview. They shape our very identities. And so exploring identity is where we must go next.

Reflection:

• Which system is the most dominant in the way you make decisions today? How has that system impacted your goals or decisions?
• What aspects of who you are have you tried to overcome in order to conform to these systems? What was the result?
• What's your own understanding of the “rules” or code that you're supposed to follow? How does it differ from what I've shared here? How is it similar?