Aiming at Something You'll Never Reach

You can't not have ideals. That's the trap nobody tells you about.

Lower your expectations, worship practicality, abandon the vision of what things should be, and you don't find peace. You find yourself unmoored. Adrift. You lose your direction because you've lost the star you were navigating by.

So you have to aim at something. But you also have to recognize you're never going to get there.

That tension, the one between holding ideals and metabolizing the inevitable disappointment when reality crashes into them, is something I've been thinking about for years. Not as an abstract philosophical puzzle, but as the lived experience of watching people fall short, watching institutions fall short, watching myself fall short, over and over again.

The Gap Between What People Say and What They Do

I've been dealing with a situation at church recently. The leadership, without throwing anyone under the bus, has demonstrated a significant gap between their stated values and their actual behavior.

I did what I thought was the right thing. I went to one of the leaders one-on-one. Laid out my concerns. Offered some suggestions for how they could address the issues, avoid hypocrisy, sidestep the appearance of impropriety.

What I got back was handling. The kind of smooth pastoral management that sounds like engagement but isn't. "We understand your concerns. We're working through it. No decisions have been made."

Come to find out, they didn't take any of my advice. The decisions had already been made. In fact, they went in the exact opposite direction.

Years ago, that would have wrecked me. There was a project I worked on, maybe a year in, where I'd built up real human capital. I'd earned trust, delivered results, proven I knew what I was talking about. The company had this sharp, likable guy who had positioned himself as a total bottleneck. Everything had to flow through him because he was so embedded in the infrastructure that nobody else had access.

I spent six months working on the leadership. Here's the problem. Here's how we could fix it. Here's a plan. Here's a guy who could shadow him and start distributing the load. Let's avoid the single point of failure.

All talk. They recognized the problem. They just weren't willing to experience the pain of fixing it.

When I realized I'd been handled again, that they wanted my output but had no intention of taking my input, it broke my heart. I told them to give me a list of what I needed to finish to get off the project, and I got out.

What Drifting Actually Looks Like

There's a version of this story where you respond to that kind of disappointment by abandoning ideals altogether. By deciding that since people never live up to what they say, you'll stop expecting anything from anyone.

I've done that. Not with work, but with relationships.

Especially when I was younger, I had an idea about who I wanted to be with. But that idea slowly morphed under the pressure of rejection and loneliness into a different question: who's available?

That's what drifting looks like in practice. You end up in a port you never intended to reach. And then you stay there way longer than you should.

I found myself in relationships with genuinely great women who just weren't right for me. I'd minimize the incompatibilities, accentuate the things that worked, present a version of myself that fit better with who they were. Not a fake version exactly, but not fully myself either.

The problem is you can't keep that up forever. You can't be on guard 24/7. Eventually things slip.

There was this one girl, Natalie. A sweetheart. Really beautiful. This was during a brutal stretch of my life, around when my mom was dying. I was busy with work, emotionally depleted, barely holding things together.

One day I realized I hadn't talked to her in a few days. Then she texted: "Hey, I haven't really heard from you. Do you want to just break up?"

I texted back: "Yeah, okay. That's fine."

That's what it looks like when you can't keep it up anymore. When you've been pretending you have bandwidth you don't have, that circumstances aren't affecting you when they are, that you're available for something you're not actually available for.

The Authenticity Crisis

This is connected to something bigger happening right now. Social media has created a standardization of experience where everyone is curating their lives for consumption at scale. The perfect vacation. The perfect relationship. The perfect body. The perfect ideas.

The question people ask is how do you distinguish between standards you've genuinely chosen versus ones handed to you by family, culture, algorithms?

There's no clean distinction. The real question is: where do you choose to get your ideals from?

You can get them from your family. Your traditions. Your faith. Your relationship with God.

Or you can get them from an algorithm designed by people with an agenda. Part of that agenda is just attention capture, ad revenue, engagement metrics. But there's a deeper element, a tacit worldview about what we can and can't talk about, what's acceptable to believe, what success and meaning look like.

Everything is getting shallower and more constrained at the same time. That's creating an authenticity crisis where everybody seems to be posing constantly.

I'm posing right now. I have a point of view. This is a version of myself rather than a completely fabricated persona. Me from a certain angle. But that's still a kind of curation.

The difference, I hope, is knowing you're doing it and not being disingenuous about it.

How to Keep Trying

The hardest part of aiming at something unreachable is the repeated disappointment. Miss the mark enough times and cynicism starts looking like wisdom. Numbness starts feeling like peace.

Here's what's helped me: St. Gregory of Nyssa's discussion of how virtue is infinite.

Yes, you keep falling short. But the shift is to stop measuring how far you are from the destination and start measuring how close you got compared to last time.

Am I getting closer? Am I going in the right direction?

When you realize it's not a destination but a journey, the disappointment changes character. You're aiming at the right thing. You have the right star. The point isn't arriving. The point is that you're moving toward it, getting closer all the time.

Fitness is a concrete example. I've been working out seriously for three or four months now, semi-seriously for about a year before that. I'm not where I want to be. I still have the dad belly I can't seem to get rid of. I want abs. Being an old man, I'm not sure I'll ever achieve them.

But I'm getting healthier. I'm seeing other benefits. I'm gaining muscle, getting stronger. There's progress.

Ask any bodybuilder if they're exactly where they want to be. Almost none of them will say yes. There's always a next step. The ideal shifts: physical goals give way to other related goals, which give way to maintenance, which give way to new challenges.

There is no such thing as the perfect body. We live in a fallen world. Everyone has room for improvement. The question is whether you're moving in the right direction.

The Man Who Met the Standard

There was a moment that crystallized all of this for me.

I was going through a hard season. Working through the inevitability of separation from my co-parent, understanding that I couldn't keep up what it would take to stay together, that she wasn't willing to make changes, that I was reaching the end of my ability to cope.

During that stretch, I watched a talk by Jonathan Pageau about the inevitability of disillusionment.

Everything will let you down, he said. Your wife. Your children. Your church. Your job. Your car. Your house. Yourself. Everything.

Because nothing in this world, except for one man one time, was able to meet the ideal. To act in that ideal way.

That man was Jesus.

What struck me wasn't just that he met the standard. It was how he handled having met it. He didn't turn around and condemn anyone. Didn't look down on people. Didn't lord it over everybody that he'd done what no one else could do.

He gave grace. He taught. He healed. He reached backward to help people move toward what he was showing them.

That's completely different from what you'd expect. It's different from what you see today when someone is closer to some ideal, smarter or richer or faster or stronger. Usually that's not accompanied by humility and grace. Usually it comes with a posture of superiority.

Having Jesus as the standard makes all the difference. It's what makes it possible to keep trying despite never being able to arrive. And it changes how you relate to everyone else who's falling short right alongside you.

Trusting People the Appropriate Amount

After the work project disappointment years ago, I was angry. I got off the project as fast as I could. I didn't handle it gracefully.

The church situation now? It didn't really hurt my feelings that much.

Some of that is growth. I'm more laid back now. I give people more grace.

But I also trust leaders less. Or maybe "trust less" is the wrong framing. It's more like understanding people more. Recognizing the inability of most people to go against their nature and their comfort except by the grace of God. And giving them grace when they can't make that transition.

Most people in leadership positions, when practical discomfort comes into tension with an ideal, aren't going to stand up for the ideal. It depends on severity: minor discomfort, maybe the ideal wins. Significant or major discomfort? The comfort is going to win out almost every time.

Understanding that doesn't make me cynical. It lets me trust people the appropriate amount for their nature. It lets me anticipate the disappointing outcome without being destroyed by it.

The church leadership went in the exact opposite direction from what I suggested. They fell short of their own stated ideals. That's grieving in its own way, not because anyone failed me specifically, but because you go into every situation not knowing how it's going to disappoint you yet. Then you find out. Oh. There it is.

So I give them grace. I'm not a perfect church member either. I have flaws and make mistakes. Hopefully they'll give me some grace and I'll give them some grace and we'll keep inching toward the ideal together.

And insofar as they want to keep going in the wrong direction? I pray for them. I pray the Lord opens their eyes.

What I'm Aiming At

As a father, the ideal is God the Father. Pouring everything out for your children. Being completely altruistic. Not just being a buddy, not just giving them what they want, but making the hard decisions. Telling them things they don't want to hear but need to hear.

It's harder now than when I was a kid. The social pressure has flipped. Back then, parents seemed unified in keeping everybody's kids on the straight and narrow. Now, anyone disciplining their kids in public gets critical looks from other parents. Permissive parenting is the path of least resistance.

I fall short of the ideal constantly. I have selfish moments all the time. But it's what I'm aiming at.

When I'm married again, the ideal is Christ and the Church. Sacrificing everything for your bride. Making sure the relationship right below God is the relationship with your wife, even above yourself, even above the children. Because a healthy marriage models good behavior for kids in a way nothing else can.

One of my huge regrets about co-parenting is not being able to provide that model. It is what it is. You work with what you have.

That's the thing about aiming at something you'll never reach. You're going to fall short. You're going to disappoint yourself and others. You're going to watch people and institutions you believed in fall short of what they claimed to be.

None of that means you stop aiming.

It means you measure progress, not distance from the destination. It means you give grace because you need grace. It means you keep your eyes on the one man who actually made it and notice that his response to everyone who couldn't was to reach back and help them forward.

That's the only way I know to hold ideals without being destroyed by them.