Always have a destination
In Ticket to Ride and in life, it’s not enough to fulfill one purpose and relax, riding the train of past success. We need something else to strive for.
I’d like to welcome the new subscribers who came to Idea Link after Nir Eyal republished one of my articles and I joined his podcast for an episode. Idea Link is all about connecting ideas to learn something new. This post continues my series about distraction and meaning in life, and while I have a few topics in development, I’d love to hear from you. What kinds of ideas would you like for me to connect? Let me know in the comments or send me an email.
Now, on to the show.
The first time I played the board game Ticket to Ride, I lost by a landslide. So when my wife suggested that game at a recent game night with friends, I was cautiously optimistic about trying again.
If only I could remember exactly why I’d lost so badly the first time.
In Ticket to Ride, you build railroad routes across a map to connect cities listed on your two “destination tickets.” If you connect your assigned cities, you get the points listed on the ticket. If you fail, you lose double those points. You can draw extra destination tickets, but you’re running the risk of a big loss.
In this particular game, I had to connect Oklahoma City to Sault Ste. Marie, and Little Rock to Winnipeg. I made those connections quickly and then I worked on extending my routes in either direction, comfortable in having earned my points and avoided a loss. Meanwhile, the other players drew more destination cards, and I braced myself to see their points deficits.
But when we tallied points at the end, I had only 71 points — 40 points behind the next-lowest player. The winner had more than double my score.
Bewildered, I asked one friend how he’d scored so high.
He showed me the stack of destination cards he’d drawn throughout the game. “I got 43 points just from these,” he said.
That’s when I remembered why I lost Ticket to Ride by a landslide the first time I played. It was the same reason that I lost again.
It turns out that in Ticket to Ride and in life, it’s not enough to fulfill one purpose and relax, riding the train of past success. We need something else to strive for.
We need a ‘next mission’
David French recently wrote about a similar topic for the New York Times. “An overwhelming amount of evidence — from suicide, to drug overdoses, to education achievement gaps — indicates that millions of men are in crisis,” and he pins this crisis on a lack of purpose.
As a veteran, French wrote about how returning from his deployment in Iraq challenged his sense of purpose. “After almost a full year of having a very clear, decisive and delineated mission…I was returning to a more complicated, confusing reality of often conflicting responsibilities.”
As he pointed out in his article, multiple organizations and efforts are designed to help veterans discover their “next mission,” whether it is renovating houses, starting a business or volunteering in schools. French writes that he found renewed purpose in his legal career defending civil liberties in court. He went on to become president of FIRE, an editor, writer, and podcaster for The Dispatch, and now a columnist for the Times.
He found his “next mission.” When playing Ticket to Ride, I did not.
Purpose in unemployment
Having a goal that we work toward in a structured way boosts our
mental health and our sense of purpose.
While only a fraction of the U.S. population serves in the military, many more of us experience periods of unemployment — being suddenly left without a job. This can often lead to despair and a lack of purpose. In a study of people who lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pew Research Center found that more than half felt like they had lost a piece of their identity.
This tracks with what research shows about mental health during unemployment. More than an income source, a job fulfills psychological needs. As two Belgian psychologists explained a decade ago, “Having a job imposes a structure in people's life… A job also creates the opportunity to be active and to achieve collective and personal goals.”
The Belgian psychologists studied a group of Flemish unemployed people and found that people who held on to time structure — such as keeping a routine and organizing their time effectively and purposefully — had higher psychological well-being than those who let their schedules drift. They suggested that intervention programs should help unemployed people fill their time with purposeful activities.
This shows that even between jobs, when we don’t have a job demanding that we clock in and get things done, having a goal that we work toward in a structured way boosts our mental health and our sense of purpose.
Retirement that’s more than R&R
This holds true in retirement, too. For some, retirement is a time of decline and winding down. For others, it’s a vibrant life.
“Those who retire are at risk of steeper cognitive declines” in part because “some individuals struggle to replace mentally stimulating work activities once they retire,” several psychologists wrote in a 2020 study. They found that a key factor may be “goal disengagement,” a tendency to “reduce goal-directed effort, lower aspirations, and decrease commitment to personal objectives.”
This means that if we treat retirement as an opportunity to relax and not strive for anything — to “disengage from difficult tasks and goals” — we may end up short-circuiting retirement by giving up some of the cognitive strength we build up during careers. Researchers have called this a "use-it-or-lose-it" effect.
Those who stay connected to goals and activities have the opposite experience. But this doesn’t mean that retirees must launch a new career or volunteer constantly. Another study published in 2020 found that retirees “reported higher sense of purpose on occasions when they engaged more in leisure activities, and more active participants exhibited less decline in purpose over time.” Even fun activities can create meaning and purpose in life.
The Villages, a Florida retirement hub with endless activities, is a textbook example of this. There is always something to do there: Pickleball, tennis, exercise classes, biking, breezy golf cart rides, late-night dances with live bands at towncenters, a woodworkers club that makes toys for children at Christmas, and more.
I heard of a doctor in The Villages who was surprised by his patients’ eagerness to stay active. In previous cities where he had worked, his older patients recovered at a snail’s pace after an injury or surgery. Or they declined. But in The Villages, his patients ask, “When can I play Pickleball again? When can I get back on my bike?” They have a purpose to fulfill, and they recover quickly.
If we treat retirement as an opportunity to relax and not strive for anything we may end up short-circuiting retirement by giving up some of the cognitive strength we build up during careers.
Always have a destination
When I packed up Ticket to Ride a couple of weeks ago, I made a deal with myself: Next time I play the game, I’m going to pick additional destination cards as soon as I finish my first routes. That would give purpose to the rest of the game play.
Likewise, we need to always have a destination in life, even if it’s a destination we won’t reach. The research and experiences I’ve examined here show that there is value in the journey as well as in the destination. Having a destination — a long-term vision and values that guide our daily schedule and life goals — will help us create meaning from one moment to the next.
Just like Ticket to Ride, life awards points for that.