[Heartlogic-dev] short-term vs long-term goals

[Joshua N Pritikin]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2003 at 03:49:32PM -0600, William L. Jarrold wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Dec 2003 address@hidden wrote:
> > There is a correspondance (to some extent):
> >
> > unfulfilled    fulfilled
> > -----------    --------------
> > goal           happy
> > anti-goal      sad
> > no goal        indifferent
>
> Sure.

Since we seem to be on the same page here, I would like to discuss
another issue which is relevant to goals.

Hopefully there won't be any big surprises here.  I'm just trying
to widen the bridge.

Most people have a long-term goal like: "I want to be successful in my
life." or a long-term no-goal like: "I have no grand plan for what I
want to do with my life."  Can we associate a long-term anti-goal with
a suicidal outlook?  I think so, or at least such a long-term anti-goal
would be highly dysfunctional.

Short-term goals, on the other hand, are more diverse.  For example, I
may have a short-term anti-goal of "study for my chemistry exam"
because I want to achieve a slightly longer-term goal of "getting a
passing score."  I hope this is pretty obvious.

Usually when I talk about goals, I am implicitly talking about
short-term goals.  I usually assume "normal" or common-sense
long-term goals.

-- 
A new cognitive theory of emotion, http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/aleader