Aspirational Priorities

Many of us say we prioritize our health, family, craft, or community, but fail to invest our time, energy, and resources in these things.

It’s fine to aspire to prioritizing our painting practice or playing board games with our kids one night a week—it’s something to look forward to when work isn’t so brutal, perhaps. But by making this part of our identity before we’ve made the proper investment, telling ourselves that we prioritize things we do not, we may feel less incentivized to actually act on that (intended) prioritization, because we’re preemptively enjoying the social and psychological rewards of doing so.

Aspirational priorities can be useful goals, then, but they’re less valuable (and perhaps evening hobbling) as self-applied labels.