Once in a Lifetime: Should you plan your life?

Image from Brett Streutker via Flickr

Have you ever met somebody who has it all worked out? Someone who had their life goals identified from a young age and worked their damnedest to achieve them? Someone with tunnel vision and focus? I know I have. I have met people who have known exactly what they want to do and how they want to do it since their early teens. At times I envy them. They have such certainty and conviction. They never seem waver from their plan.

I must say I am cut from a rather different cloth. Looking back over the course of my life, it might be possible to identify some coherent patterns and forward momentum to it all. If you squint and gloss over some of its muddled complexity, it might seem like the product of a careful plan. But it definitely didn’t (and doesn’t) feel like that in the moment. I have never planned my life — to a degree that’s frustrating to people that know me. I have never thought about where I want to be in five months time, let alone five years. If you wanted to sum up my philosophy of life, you could do worse than quote from Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen’:

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life… the most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don't...

I’m closer to 40 than I am to 22, so I’m hoping I’ll still be pretty interesting by then.
All of this makes me suspicious of people who have it all planned out. They seem alien and inhuman to me. How could you have it all planned out? And since I am constantly seeking intellectual confirmation of my own prejudices, I decided to read up about the value of having a life plan. It turns out there is a rich philosophical tradition that favours the idea of having a life plan, but there is also considerable scepticism about the wisdom.

Charles Larmore’s article ‘The Idea of a Life Plan’ is one of the better known contributions to this debate. In it, Larmore argues against the idea of having a life plan, going so far as to suggest that if you live your life according to a plan it will be necessarily impoverished or less ideal. Is he right? I tend to think he is but let’s see what the argument is before passing judgment.


1. The Attraction of a Life Plan
I mentioned above that I find those who plan their lives to be ‘alien’ or ‘inhuman’. This is, as I admitted, a statement of my own prejudice. I just can’t wrap my head around people who plan their lives. The main reason for this is that I can’t ever imagine knowing exactly what I want to do with my life. A life is a branching tree of possibilities. There are many things you could do with your time here on earth. How do you know you are doing the right thing? This is a question I wrestle with constantly. I don’t think it is possible to answer with any degree of certainty and conviction. You can adopt temporary or short term goals, but they must always be open to revision and correction. You could make a choice, find out it was a bad one, and have to change track. The fact that this can happen so often is what makes me suspicious of life plans.

But there are those who think that life plans are integral to the good life. The single clearest expression of this comes from Aristotle:

Everyone who can live according to his own choice should adopt some goal for the good life ..., be it honor or reputation or wealth or culture-a goal that he will keep in view in all his actions. (For not to have ordered one’s life in relation to some end is a sign of extreme folly.) Therefore, before all else, he should settle in his own mind, neither hastily nor carelessly, in which of our concerns living well consists, and what are the things which make it possible for human beings 

(Aristotle Eudemian Ethics 1.2 1214b7-13 - quoted in Larmore 1999)

Look at the language in this passage. Aristotle is telling us that, if we have the freedom to do so, we ought to rationally reflect on what matters to us, fixate upon some goal, and keep that goal front and centre in all our activities. To not have a rationally ordered plan when you have the freedom to create one would be ‘extreme folly’. That seems like a damning indictment of the kind of life I lead.
Larmore suggests that this Aristotelian ideal traces itself back to the Socratic injunction that the “unexamined life is not worth living”. The suggestion in Aristotle, and other philosophers, is that you need to step back from the messy, day-to-day, details of your life — all the in-the-moment choices that you have to make — and look at your life from a more timeless perspective. Life may well be a branching tree of possibilities, but what path through that tree are you going to take? You need to decide that (and decide well) in order to live a good life.

But why? One reason is simply the fear that your life risks aimlessness and purposelessness if you don’t. If you don’t have a clear conception of what your particular good life will consist in, you might get buffeted around by the winds of change. You might not be able to resist the temptation to evil or vice. You may never achieve anything of worth or value. You will be a victim of circumstance not an author of your own destiny.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that planning guarantees success. You may have a carefully mapped out plan of life and fail to live up to it. Indeed, some slippage between the plan and the reality is probably inevitable, given the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future. But at least if you have the plan you have some insulation against temptation and vice. If you work your damnedest to adhere to the plan, you cannot be blamed for not living the best life you possibly could. Indeed, this latter point seems to have been the main reason why John Rawls — one of the giants of 20th century moral and political philosophy — favoured the idea of the life plan. As Larmore notes:

[I]n Rawls’s view prudence [i.e. planning] does ensure that, should we be disappointed by unexpected developments, we still will have nothing to blame ourselves for. We will have done the best we could. 

(Larmore 1999, 105)

This gets very close to the ‘regret minimisation’ ideal of the good life that I discussed in a previous article, i.e. the idea that the good life is the one with the fewest regrets and hence fewest opportunities for self blame. The difference here is that planning is seen as an essential bulwark against regret and self blame.


2. Larmore’s Criticism of the Life Plan
A lot of the foregoing sounds reasonable, so why does Larmore resist it? There are two main reasons, each of which deserves scrutiny. The first is that if you try to plan everything out, you don’t make room for serendipity and surprise:

The Need for Surprise: A good life consists of at least some good surprising experiences, e.g. the lucky break or the unexpected lover. A life plan is incompatible with this.

It is key to Larmore’s argument that you cannot plan for surprise goods, at least not really. You can have relatively loose plans that are open-ended with regard to their specific content. For example, part of your life plan might be to find an intimate partner and settle down with them to start a family. This plan may say nothing about who the intimate partner must be and you could allow for some spontaneity and surprise when it comes to identifying the right person. Larmore accepts that a suitably sophisticated life plan can allow for spontaneity and surprise of this sort.

His argument is simply that planning is the wrong way in which to think about truly surprising goods. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the surprise itself is often part of what makes the experience or outcome good (“I didn’t expect that I would fall in love with you but I’m delighted that I did”). The second, and more important, is that planning for a surprising good gets the order of justification/warrant mixed up. A surprising good is something that disrupts or confounds your expectations. It gets you to reconsider or change path, to alter your purposes or plans to the surprise and not vice versa. You cannot direct your plans toward the surprise: it wouldn’t really be a surprise if you could.

This brings us to Larmore’s second criticism of life plans, which is really just an elaboration of this point. He argues that you should not plan your life because you do not (and really cannot) have the knowledge needed to form a rational life plan at any given moment in time:

The Knowledge Problem: You cannot rationally plan your life at any given time T1 because that assumes you have perfect knowledge of what constitutes the good for you at T1, which is highly unlikely. You gain knowledge of what is good for you through experience and that, necessarily, impacts on your purposes and plans.

This isn’t simply a repeat of the above-mentioned problem that the world is unpredictable and so your plan may fail to be implemented. It is the problem that it is impossible take the ideal timeless perspective on what is good for your life as a whole. You always make plans at a particular moment in time and your conception of what is good for you at that moment in time is always partial and incomplete. You might think that being a neurosurgeon is good for you when you are 12 years old (I did) but then later realise that it would be terrible choice for you since you are squeamish and your hands shake uncontrollably whenever you hold a surgical implement. You might think that someone is the ideal spouse when you first meet them and then later learn that they are anything but.

Our conception of what is good for us is transformed by our experience and is not something that can be easily planned for at a particular moment in time. Indeed, it might be even worse than that: we might actually frequently err in predicting and planning what is good for us, so much so that we should avoid an excess of planning. This is the central thesis in Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness. Larmore doesn’t mention this since his article was published before the book came out but Gilbert claims that people frequently ‘miswant’ things, i.e. they predict that some experience or outcome will make them happy, but when they achieve it they learn that they are wrong. More often than not, people just ‘stumble’ upon happiness. If this is right, then it would seem to cast the wisdom of planning your life into considerable doubt.

To be clear, however, Larmore is not completely averse to the role of plans and purposes in life. He thinks it can be a good idea to adopt short or even reasonably long-term plans. Some focus and sense of direction can be valuable. You just shouldn’t have a single, stable, overarching plan for your life as a whole. Over the course of your life as a whole you need to be looser and maintain some appropriate balance between focus and serendipity.


3. Conclusion: Same as it ever was?
I find myself to be very sympathetic to Larmore’s arguments. But it would be remiss of me not to note some criticisms of them. In a lengthy and patient analysis, Joe Mintoff has defended the idea of a life plan from all the major lines of attack, including those propounded by Larmore. The gist of his position is that Larmore understates the value of planning, overstates the value of surprise, underestimates the coherence of planning for serendipity and ignores various ways in which we can acquire the knowledge needed for planning (e.g. by learning from the example of others).

In the end, however, Mintoff and Larmore’s positions don’t seem to be that different. Mintoff isn’t a doctrinaire and rigid planner. He thinks a life plan has to have some ‘revocable stability’. In other words, he accepts that we may need to revise our goals from time to time. He just doesn’t think this is going to happen as frequently as Larmore seems to suppose. Likewise, Larmore isn’t a fan of chaos and anarchy. He thinks planning has some role in life. Furthermore, and interestingly, both Mintoff and Larmore accept that life tends to be divided into phases of experimentation, when planning is not the ideal thing to do, and phases of focus and determination, when planning becomes more salient. In particular, they both suggest that childhood should be seen as a phase of experimentation and adulthood is a phase of planning and focus, before some tailing off and denouement in old age. Mintoff makes more of this, but it is present in both. Balance seems to be the key; the rest is just a matter of emphasis.

Still, there is one thing that Mintoff says that gives me pause. In response to Larmore’s concern that we cannot fully predict or know what is good for us, Mintoff suggests that we can learn something from the typical life plans of those in our communities. If the typical plan involves education, success in a career, and a rearing a family, then we have lots of case studies from which we can learn whether this is a good fit for us. I think Mintoff sees these typical life plans (let’s call them ‘off the shelf’ life plans) as a boon. But I see them in another light. I think my biggest concern is that if you don’t make a conscious effort to plan your life, then you will simply fall into (or have imposed upon you) one of these off the shelf life plans.

I suspect this is what has happened to me. Through my reluctance to plan out my life, I’ve let other people plan it for me. I now find myself, in my mid-thirties, in a fairly conventional and unexceptional rut. I’m like that character in the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime”:

And you may find yourself 

Behind the wheel of a large automobile 

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house 

With a beautiful wife 

And you may ask yourself, well 

How did I get here?

Maybe I should have planned more carefully?

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