Intention Is What's Missing

One day, I was having lunch with my boss. I described to him a problem I have of being too critical of people.

He asked, “So, what do you think they’re missing?”

I thought for a moment and said, “Intention.”

Cults and Self-Help Movements

Here is the age-old question: Why are people drawn to cults, collectives, and self-help movements?

There are, of course, many reasons, like sense of belonging, commitment, and so on. What I would like to focus on is the human desire for intention.

Let’s take, for example, the minimalist movement, which died down as quickly as it came into public consciousness. There are many good videos discussing the fate of the minimalist movement, which essentially boil down to the fact that people’s obsessions over getting rid of things became too great. Pressured by social media to stand out, content creators felt like they had to have even less stuff to impress their followers with their extremism. What started out as a movement of getting rid of things with intention and forethought turned into a competition to see who can live with the least number of things. That is not intention.

I was never really a minimalist myself, or never considered myself one. This video made me consider myself a “maximalist”, in the sense that I try to maximize the utility of objects I own. Instead of minimalism or maximalism, which are two sides of the same coin, we need “intentional-ism.”

How Does a Lack of Intention Manifest?

If society lacks intention, what characteristics could we use to spot its lack (i.e. apathy)?

• General aimlessness/going along with established agendas because “that’s how the world works.”
• Not having long-term desires/goals and/or not considering the long-term consequences of one’s current trajectory.
• Being a slave to one’s surroundings and/or conditioning.

Apathy and Social Ills

Here’s one example of a social ill that goes by largely untreated due to mass apathy – mass surveillance. It happens passively, and as long as it takes place in the background, the people don’t feel affected or like it’s a pressing issue. Out of sight, out of mind.

One can exploit people to a great degree as long as it happens automatically or outside of the exploitee’s awareness. The exploitation is then something to get accustomed to, and not something to inflict on oneself intentionally.

On the flipside, there are a lot more things to be concerned about in modern society, to the point where one can’t “max out” their concern for all of them. That is, campaigning for animal rights, environmentalism, income equality, etc. would be stretching oneself too thin.

The real paradox of making change in the world is people have to act as a collective, which in turn is composed of individuals. Individual people tend to be pessimistic about their potential impact, so they don’t concern themselves with activism. Yet, if all of them believed, the impact would be monumental.

Instead of action, it is easier to employ coping mechanisms like believing that one doesn’t care about what’s going on, that it doesn’t affect them, that this is the way things have always been, and so on. Intention in this case is much harder, as it pushes one to confront what they endure passively.

Becoming More Intentional

The biggest driver of “the world” is the global economy. Spending money boosts the economy, which in turn influences all the world’s decisions. Hence, the purchases we make dictate the success of various institutions and the outcomes of market research on which the world is built.

We are all susceptible to the drug of advertising, which we are constantly being pumped full of, whether we realize it or not. Keep that in mind when trying to be more intentional with your purchases. Despite the monumental social pressures working to erode intention, we still have some degree of free will.

Next time you catch yourself running on autopilot, pause and reevaluate your intentions.