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How to Escape a Life Without Goals — Heidegger, the Greatest Philosopher of the 20th Century
The short answer: Having no goals is not a defect. Read through Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), it is something closer to a diagnosis: none of "everyone's goals" moves you anymore — and that is an unusually honest place to be. What you need is not a better way to find goals, but a different way of seeing what a goal is. This article walks that path, following the original analysis.
Where "I have no goals" actually hurts
You have been told to set goals all your life — by school, by job interviews, by every self-help book on the shelf. And still nothing arrives. Everyone around you seems to be moving toward something. Social media supplies a fresh parade of certifications, promotions, and launches every morning. The anxiety compounds, until one night you type "life without goals" into a search box —
The first thing you should hear is this: that state is not an illness to be cured. It is a sign that you are beginning to notice something important. A philosopher thought this through to the very bottom, a hundred years ago.
Why ask Heidegger, of all people
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Born in a village of two thousand people, to a father who worked as a church sexton and cooper, he rose from there to be called the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology and a formidable mind himself, was captivated by his talent. When Being and Time appeared in 1927, its success was electric — the book is said to have redrawn the map of twentieth-century philosophy. His collected works run to 102 volumes; his influence, from Sartre's existentialism onward, is hard to overstate.
What matters here is that Heidegger is not a success guru with a system for "achieving your goals." His single question was what it means for a human being to exist at all. That is why his analysis reaches below the question "what goals should I set?" — down to the prior question: why does having no goals make us anxious in the first place? That is the depth at which this particular ache can actually be treated.
The diagnosis — whose goals were they?
Start with the goals you feel you ought to have. A stable job. A recognizable company. Credentials. A salary figure. Marriage, a house, follower counts. Now ask one question: who wrote that list?
In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that in everyday life we exist as what he calls das Man — often rendered "the They." The They is no particular person. It is the subject of sentences like "that's what everyone thinks" and "that's what one does": everybody, and therefore nobody. By Heidegger's analysis, the They governs our daily life in three ways:
- Distantiality — ceaselessly measuring the gap between yourself and others: ahead or behind?
- Averageness — a quiet suppression of anything that stands out, a settling into "about right"
- Levelling down — the exceptional and the original get flattened to the common denominator
And the They pays a seductive wage: exemption from responsibility. As long as you choose what "everyone" chooses, you never have to decide anything yourself — and if it fails, it was never really your failure. Social media may be the most powerful amplifier this structure has ever had: it renders your distance from others visible around the clock, and supplies an infinite catalog of "normal."
Now the diagnosis can be stated. It is not that you lack goals. It is that none of the goals on the They's list moves you anymore. That is not a broken sensor. It is the dawning recognition that ready-made goals do not fit your one life — which is not a defect but, in Heidegger's vocabulary, the doorstep of an authentic existence.
* The analysis of das Man is in Division One, Chapter 4 of Being and Time. Our sister archive reads the original section by section (in Japanese): An Easy Reading of "Being and Time".
The turn — goals are not found, they emerge
So what do you do? Heidegger's answer is not a better goal-finding technique. The direction is exactly reversed.
At the core of Being and Time stands the idea of mineness: my life is mine in the sense that no one can live it in my place. Ordinarily we forget this, dissolved in the They. And there is exactly one place where the impossibility of substitution shows itself without disguise: death. However deep you hide in "everyone," dying is the one thing no one can do for you.
Heidegger saw a peculiar freedom here. In facing your own finitude squarely — not as a statistic but as mine — the grip of the They loosens. Taken seriously, "my time is finite" drains the power from everyone's goals at a stroke. What remains standing afterward is only this: the things that will never appear in your lifetime unless you do them.
A goal, then, is not something you go out and find. It emerges from what remains. The way out of a life without goals is not to acquire a goal — it is to set down, once, the They's measuring stick.
* This "existential" way of reading Heidegger is the approach our top-ranked introduction takes — see Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction.
Three practices you can start today
1. Interrogate each goal's origin
Write down the goals you feel you should have, and ask of each one: whose goal is this? Cross out the ones that came from "that's what one does" or "I don't want to fall behind." Whatever refuses to be crossed out is your lead. If everything gets crossed out, that is also a finding: the list was borrowed all along — not empty.
2. Ask "if I had ten years"
Not an actuarial question — a way of taking your finitude seriously at a concrete scale. If ten years were what remained, what would you keep doing? Notice that what gets decided first is usually what to quit. That is the normal order: most of the They's goals need an infinite calendar to stay plausible.
3. Once this week, step half a pace off the average
The They rules through the sum of small daily choices, so resistance can start small. Choose one book without asking whether it is useful. Decline one gathering you never wanted to attend. The faint discomfort of that half-step off "everyone" is the first felt evidence of mineness.
Not a goal, but a star
If you still find yourself wanting something like a great aim, Heidegger's own life offers a figure for it. His gravestone bears not a cross but a star — he had written, in his lifetime, of heading toward a star, that alone.
A goal ends the moment it is achieved, and the emptiness resumes. A star is different: you never reach it, and it gives every night a direction anyway. Heidegger himself walked a single line — the question of Being — from a cooper's house in a small village to his death at 86. At his funeral, five poems by Hölderlin, the poet he loved, are said to have been read aloud by his son.
To escape a life without goals is, in the end, to trade the ready-made article for a star of your own. The fastest way to find it, this editorial room believes, is to read Heidegger himself.
Books to go deeper
Being and Time has a reputation for defeating readers — but there is an order that works. The full roadmap is on our reading-order guide. Here are the four books that fit this article's question. Prices and stock: see each Amazon product page.
One hour for the whole picture — the graphic guide
Das Man and being-toward-death — this article's core — in visual, narrative form. Our review.
The map, and the existential reading — two introductions
Inwood's Very Short Introduction gives you the whole terrain in a pocket volume. Polt's Heidegger: An Introduction — our #1 pick — reads Being and Time as a book about how to live, the same line this article has taken.
Then the original
Das Man, being-toward-death — eventually you will want to see them with your own eyes. Start with the Macquarrie & Robinson translation; our review explains the translation choices.