The Joy of Being List-less

When goal-setting becomes its own addiction

There’s one TikToker I watch compulsively, with a sordid secrecy I could never quite explain. Let’s call her Sophie from now on. Sophie’s videos rarely get more than a few hundred views, but for the past year and a half, I’ve unfailingly been one of them. She’s approaching 40, recently moved back in with her parents after a bout of burnout, and speaks in the unmistakable cadence of someone imitating an influencer. She can be bitter and sensitive; boring and mundane—and yet, because of one thing me and Sophie have in common, I can’t stop watching.

Above everything else, Sophie is pathologically obsessed with self-improvement. When I first came across her channel, it was through a semi-viral video declaring she was embarking on day one of “changing my life in 365 days.” This quest seemed to revolve largely around writing lists: a This Time Next Year, I Am… list, a list of short-term goals, long-term goals, a bucket list, a summer bucket list, and her most comprehensive list to date—the Glow Up Before 40 list. Each list spawns smaller, equally earnest ones. Midway through her 365-day glow-up, she unveiled her Summer Bucket List. One goal, “watch more movies,” led to her tackling the IMDb Top 250, which naturally became a new series (abandoned at number 3—Good Will Hunting). Along the way, we’ve seen Sophie embark on “The Pantry Challenge,” “No Spend September,” and “30 Days of Telling the World Why You’re Remarkable.”

You can imagine my shock when 10 months into watching Sophie, I opened TikTok to her placidly smiling at the camera, greeting me with “Hi. This is day one of changing my life in 365 days”. Day One?! It felt like blinking awake from an extremely long and mundane dream—my own parasocial Groundhog Day. Sophie was pretending the past ten months of life audits, lists, and goals never happened, starting it all again from scratch. It hit me then that I wasn’t following someone changing their life. What I was really watching was a woman in active addiction. Sophie, like any other addict, was trying to numb out the present, and her drug of choice was Glow-Up culture.

I am well-versed in taking refuge in a mythical future self. Already an avid dreamer, the introduction to bullet journaling was an intoxicating entryway into a world of tracking routines, setting goals, and generally developing master plans to completely overhaul who I was as a person. I became a slave to atomic habits and momentum—things only seemed worth doing if I could do them every day and put a little cross on some kind of chart I had lovingly drawn while I was supposed to be doing my actual job.

The problem is that the path to goal setting is paved with good intentions. You start reasonable: 1. Apply to a job a week. 2. Write morning pages every day. 3. Deep clean the kitchen once a month. But as the dopamine rush of writing these things hits, you start to spin out of control. It’s intoxicating because, in that moment, you don’t have to actually do any of the things you’re writing down—you just get to imagine yourself as the kind of person who does them. The floodgates open, and suddenly you’ve set yourself the task of meditating every morning, completing your untitled personal memoir, and achieving a fitness goal that will rechart the course of your twenties for good.

In Pascal’s Pensées, he writes “And how shall [man] be happy? By finding something to occupy him, that shall divert him, and prevent him from seeing himself what he is. For if he saw himself as he is, he would be miserable indeed.” My compulsive planning was a way to obscure the truth of who I was. I got to live as a clean, disciplined future version of myself who didn’t have to face the messy, inevitable reality of my own inadequacies. I lived inside a set of goals to escape the immeasurable pain of not feeling good enough as I was.

All of this gets more acute and weird as you go deeper into the online world of self-actualisation. “I’m about to start the second week of living as my higher self” a girl says as she does normal, nice stuff as her current self. Manifesting coaches tell you to speak to the universe in present tense: I am in a healthy relationship. I am financially stable. I am someone who speaks Spanish. How intoxicating to write these things down and experience a fraction of your hopes and dreams coming true. How devastating to look up from the page and be met with who you actually are.

How, then, can we reconcile the fact that feeling inadequate is famously an amazing motivator? Identifying what you want in life isn’t inherently bad, and striving for things you don’t have is typically what brings newer and richer experiences. As Kira Stachowitsch writes in INDIE 62, “The absence of wanting can be summed up in one devastating word: hopelessness”. Maybe the TikTok productivity version of that devastating word is “complacency”. There’s also no doubt that good, consistently held habits make us happier, so I wonder why watching Sophie makes me so depressed. I suppose I see myself in her obsessive desire to change everything in one go. It feels like there will always be an irreconcilable gap between how she wants things to be and how they actually are.

When I think of people I know who have really great lives, the actions that led them there are hard to plan and even harder to measure: taking risks, working hard, being kind, remaining curious. Since I began writing this, Sophie has started a new series: Changing My Life in 2025. I admire her dedication and the courageousness it takes to admit that you want things, and even more to put your hopes and dreams online—a place where they can be pulled apart by strangers like me.

I sincerely hope mine and everyone else’s dreams come true!!

Lots of love,

Zoe

xxxx