Our Unwavering Loyalty to the Wrong Thing
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I love soccer. I've played my entire life. If you asked me at any point why I love soccer, I would have told you something about the game itself: the skill, the feeling of playing well, the rush of scoring. I'm not so sure that's the full picture, though.
For me, I think the point was joy. That was the end. Running without thinking, being so consumed by something that the noise in your head goes quiet, the feeling of playing every single day not because anyone told me to but because I wanted to. Soccer gave me all of that. Not the sport itself, but what the sport produced. And it gave me things I never asked for: health, discipline, friendships, a way to process the world physically instead of just thinking about it. I didn't intentionally choose it for any of those things. They were consequences of doing something I genuinely loved, unintended results of a process I was doing for its own sake.
That's the part that was hard to gain clarity on. Soccer was the "container", and the joy was the thing inside it. But the container felt genuinely valuable too. I loved the process. I loved the everyday act of playing. It didn't feel like a magic potion that gave me joy. And that's because it wasn't just serving one thing. It was serving my well-being through so many channels at once, joy, health, freedom, connection, that the process itself felt like the destination.
I played on a very low level throughout elementary school, middle school, high school even. And as I got better, as I played more competitively, I didn't notice when the joy had disappeared. I wasn't playing for the joy anymore. I was playing for the outcomes. For recognition. For goals scored, for minutes on the field, for the version of me that other people saw and validated (which wasn't very often, albeit). All of the reasons that the people around me and the situations I was in had told me I should be playing. Play to win. It's a very common expression. And along the way, although the activity stayed the same, the sport had gone hollow for me.
I didn't enjoy playing solely to win. I didn't care. I felt frustrated with myself if I played poorly, and then I wouldn't get to play, and that would frustrate me because I was doing my best and I still wasn't able to do better. Everyone around me attached so much value to their identity over this sport. So many people getting social value in middle school, high school even, through winning and being good at it. But soccer never represented that to me, and I kept trying to treat it as though it did, and in doing so, I didn't love what I was doing anymore. I felt stress when I was playing. Pressure.
We give so much credit to pressure because it can bring out the best in people. But what pressure really does is bring out the best in people in a very specific direction. And if that direction is misguided, it leads people very far astray from what they really want. Competition was supposed to sharpen the thing I loved. Instead it replaced the thing I loved. The pressure didn't make me a better soccer player in the way that mattered. It made me better at performing for an audience while the joy slowly drained out. I was constantly being led down this path of trying to push myself to be the best soccer player possible. And I didn't know how to manage the anxiety, the stress, the pressure of those situations, and it led me to giving it up. It led me to walking away from the sport that I loved playing as a kid, that I loved watching. All because I had forgotten the reasons I was playing. That got confused for me. I honestly feel a bit lucky I wasn't good enough at soccer to continue. If I was, maybe I'd keep playing, but being miserable while winning.
That gap, between the thing you're doing and the reason you do it every day, is what I want to talk about: a "means" and an "end".
A means is anything you do in service of something else. It's valuable because of what it produces, not because of what it is. A car is a means. It gets you somewhere. A degree is a means. It opens doors. Money is a means. It buys things that matter to you.
An end is the thing that's valuable on its own. It doesn't need to justify itself by pointing somewhere else. Joy. Being genuinely known by someone. The feeling of creating something. Freedom. These aren't steps toward something further. They're the things that make a life actually worth living. They're the components of flourishing, that are unique to an extent, to each person. And ultimately, flourishing is the end that many of us seek.
The tricky part is that some means feel like ends. Soccer, when I was a kid, felt like the point. The playing itself felt like the destination. But it wasn't the end. The end was my flourishing, my well-being, and soccer was serving it through so many channels at once, joy, health, freedom, connection, that the activity felt inseparable from the life it was building. That's what happens when a means is deeply aligned with your actual ends. It becomes so rich that you stop noticing the distinction. And that richness is so valuable for us as people, but it comes from the alignment, not from the activity having some inherent status as an end.
The moment that alignment breaks, the moment the means stops serving what actually matters and starts serving something else (maybe something that takes away from our true end), the richness disappears even though the activity looks the same on paper. That's what happened when competition replaced joy. Soccer was still soccer. But it was no longer serving my flourishing. It was serving recognition, approval, outcomes that had nothing to do with what made me love it. The means was identical. The end had been swapped. And I couldn't tell the difference from the inside.
There's a quote I keep coming back to: the person who loves to walk will always journey further than the one who wants the finish line. The reason is that the walker's means are so aligned with their ends that every step serves their flourishing. They're not chasing one thing at the end. They're living it the whole way. That's what soccer was for me as a kid. I was the walker. Then competition turned me into someone chasing the finish line, and the walk stopped feeling like anything at all.
Kant had a famous rule about this. He said: never treat a person as a mere means. Don't use someone who matters in their own right as a tool for your purposes. "You're just using me" is something everyone understands. We have language for it, we have social norms around it, we know what it feels like when someone does it to us. That direction of the confusion is well-covered.
But there's a second direction that maybe we don't talk about enough. Instead of taking something that matters and treating it like it doesn't, you take something that serves a purpose and start treating it like it IS the purpose. You confuse the vehicle for the destination. That's what happened with soccer. I took the means, the sport, the competition, and confused it for the end, the joy, the freedom, the feeling of being consumed by something I loved. And once that happened, I was loyal to the wrong thing without knowing it. I was getting better at doing the wrong thing.
When someone treats you as a tool, you can feel it. You can push back. You can say "stop using me." There's friction. The confusion gets surfaced because another person is there to call it out.
But when you confuse a means for an end in your own life, there's nobody to push back. Nobody taps you on the shoulder and says "you've confused soccer for joy." You just keep doing the activity, feeling hollow, and blaming yourself for not loving the thing you're supposed to love. You're the only person who could catch it, and you're the person stuck inside it.
And it doesn't feel like confusion. It just feels like your life.
Now scale that up.
Think about the entire structure of how people are taught to live. Get the degree. Get the job. Get the apartment. Get the relationship. Get the marriage. Every one of those is a means to something. Security. Autonomy. Being known. Purpose. But they're sold as the end itself. Nobody says "get the degree so that you can X." They just say "get the degree."
Or they say: get the degree so you can get a job. But that's a means for another means. And the job is a means for a salary, and the salary is a means for stability, and we keep chaining means to means without ever arriving at the end. Nobody stops to ask: what's the actual thing all of these are supposed to produce? The end falls behind. The means becomes the purpose. And people arrive at each milestone feeling less than they expected because the milestone was never the point.
And here's what makes this worse: when nobody names the end, someone else's approval can fill the gap. If you don't know WHY you're getting the degree, you default to the most available signal that you're doing it right, which is other people telling you that you're doing it right. Parents proud of you. Everyone wanting to hang out with you and be friends with you. Society telling you that you're "successful." Their approval becomes the end. Not because you chose it, but because the real end was never named, and approval is always standing there ready to fill empty space. That's why doing things for other people's opinions is so common and so dangerous. When your actual end is missing or scary or seemingly out of reach, approval is the easiest substitute. It feels like an end. It gives you a hit of confirmation. But it's a means, a signal that was supposed to point you somewhere, and when you treat it as the destination, you end up building a life that looks right to everyone except the person living it.
Money does this too. Money is maybe the purest means there is. It has no inherent value. It only exists to be exchanged for things that do. But people accumulate it past the point where it serves anything. The number becomes the score, and the score becomes the game, and the game replaces whatever the money was supposed to make possible. You need money. The same way you need results to stay in the game. But there's a difference between needing it as a means to keep the thing going and treating it as the end itself. When you treat the money as the end, it stops serving what it was supposed to serve and starts demanding to be served.
This is what it really means to do something for the wrong reasons. Not that the reasons are evil or selfish. Just that the real reason got swapped out for something else, someone else's approval, a society's criteria, a fear of what happens if you stop, and you didn't notice the change. You're still studying, still competing, still acting every single day. But the thing driving it isn't yours anymore. And the worst part is that it still works. You pass the test. You get into the school. You get the offer. People nod approvingly. It produces results that look right and feel hollow, and you can't figure out why because from the outside nothing is wrong. The biggest danger of this is that we can train ourselves so well to silence how we truly feel that even the hollowness goes away until maybe 10, 15, 20 years down the line when we realize we forgot our own ends.
Once you name your actual ends, I've noticed decisions get simpler. Most hard decisions aren't hard because the options are complicated. They're hard because you don't know what you're optimizing for. Should I stay or leave? Depends on what the relationship is for. Should I take the promotion? Depends on what the career is supposed to produce. The ends you assume you're chasing are usually very different from the ones actually driving your decisions. You think you're choosing between two jobs. You're actually choosing between what your parents would be proud of and what makes you feel alive, and you haven't admitted that second one out loud yet. When the end is clear, the means stop competing with each other. They just line up.
These problems aren't just inherently within us as people, either. Everything around us does it too, and they do it at scale.
Much of the time, you assign rules to something, people play to the rules instead of doing what the rules were supposed to encourage. A teacher gives a rubric, and the rubric is a means: it's supposed to help students understand what good thinking looks like. But as soon as the rubric exists, students reverse-engineer it. They figure out exactly what to say to hit the criteria. They stop thinking for themselves and start performing the appearance of thinking. The means (the rubric) absorbed the end (genuine learning), and now the system produces good rubric-followers, not good thinkers.
The job market works the same way. Three hundred people competing for the same position, all doing the same things, all reverse-engineering the process. The application is a means. The job is a means. But both become ends in themselves. People torture themselves to win a competition they never stopped to ask whether they wanted to enter beyond the scope of the job, or even the skill. The interview becomes a performance, and the audience is the hiring manager, and suddenly you're optimizing for their approval instead of asking whether this is even a place you want to be. Or maybe you haven't thought enough about the means it exists for. Maybe you're doing it to start a company, which is just another step to arriving at the same means: money.
Where this gets harder to talk about is relationships.
In my generation, labeling is a big trend I've sort of misunderstood. Exclusive, official, dating but not dating, dating and dating..? I think I'm beginning to understand why. There's something about naming what you have that feels like it makes it real. But I've been thinking about why that impulse is so strong, and I think it's related to this. The label is a means. Being genuinely known by another person is the end. But when uncertainty clouds our thinking, the label starts looking like the destination instead of the vehicle. You'd take a false answer over no answer because at least a false answer has a shape. I don't think I've fully worked this out yet. But I think the desire for the label often comes from wanting to resolve uncertainty, not from wanting what the label actually represents. And that gap is exactly my concern.
That's just one version of it. People enter relationships for real reasons: they don't want to be alone, they've built up an enormous desire to be with someone that's been amplified by every movie and song and friend's relationship they've watched, they're at the age where it feels like they should have this figured out, they just got out of a relationship, they have self-doubt, or something healthy like they want someone who can add something to their life. Those are all real feelings. But they're not always about the actual person in front of you. Not about their character or who they are, just about what being with them solves for you.
If someone's in a relationship because they don't want to be alone, there's a real person on the other side of that. That person thinks they're being chosen. They're filling a slot. They don't know the difference, but they feel it. Something is off and they can't name it. Because the "container" looks right from the outside. You show up, you're present, you say the right things. But the end underneath, the reason you're there, isn't about them. It's about the absence they're solving.
This happens constantly and it's not malicious. Society hands us a catalog of reasons to be with someone, and most of them are about what the relationship solves, not about the person inside it.
And here's the flip side, the part I find most interesting.
When two people's ends actually align, when the reason you're with someone matches the reason they're with you, an enormous amount of noise just disappears.
Think about the last time you overthought a text message. Read it three times, parsed the tone, wondered what they meant by "okay" instead of "ok" or why they took an hour to respond. That overthinking isn't about the message. It's about what the message might reveal about their reasons for being there (even if that has nothing to do with this person). You're scanning for evidence that their ends have shifted. That maybe they're with you for convenience now instead of choice. That the why underneath has changed even though the what looks the same.
When you trust that someone's ends match yours, that they want the same thing from this that you do, a late reply is just a late reply. A short text is just a short text. You stop interpreting because you're not afraid of what interpretation might find. The noise was never about communication style. It was about the fear that you're inside someone else's means and you don't know it.
That fear is everywhere. And it's not irrational. People's ends DO shift. The person who was with you because they genuinely wanted to know you can drift into being with you because it's comfortable, because leaving is harder than staying, because the label is easier than the conversation. That's not betrayal. That's just drift happening to them the same way it happens to you. The means (the relationship) slowly absorbs the identity of the end (the reason for it), and neither of you notices enough to make a change because from the outside nothing changed.
The only thing that resolves it isn't more analysis of your situation. It's honesty. Being willing to say what your ends actually are, and being willing to hear theirs. Not once, but continuously. Because ends drift the same way means do, and through conversation and understanding, we can learn what our true ends are.
Then there's the part that intrigued me the most: maybe there's a major aspect to understanding our ends that affects those around us.
When you don't know why you're somewhere, the people who are there with you can feel it. They can't name what's off, because from the outside you're doing everything right. You're showing up, thinking you're saying the right things, going through the motions. But something underneath doesn't match, and it leaks into everything. People have a sense when they're inside someone else's means. It's just very difficult to put into words.
Your reasons for being somewhere affect everyone who's there with you. That's just how it works.
And it works the other way too. When you actually know what you're doing and why, people feel that. There's something about the way you carry yourself when your reasons are clear, the way you say yes to things, the way you say no. People can feel that just as easily as they can feel the confusion. Clarity carries the same way confusion does.
The hardest part is that this isn't a one-time mistake you catch and fix.
It's drift. You start with the right ordering. You know the means is a means. But through repetition, through the pleasure of the activity, through habit, the means starts absorbing the identity of the end. And because the reversal happens gradually, there's no single moment of recognition. You were doing it right, and then you weren't, and you can't point to when it changed.
That's what happened with soccer. It's what happens when building a company becomes more about making money than the problem it was supposed to solve. It's what happens when therapy becomes more about being good at self-analysis than making the changes the analysis was supposed to produce. It's what happens when any process that feels good in itself slowly replaces the outcome it was designed to create.
The structural prevention is a question you have to keep asking: is the means still serving the end, or has the means become its own reward?
That's what I eventually found again with exercise. When I stopped working out because I was supposed to, because of what it would make me look like or what it would prove, and started working out because I simply wanted to, it was easy. I discovered so much more exercise that I wanted to do because the movement was serving my well-being so directly. Not just a means to a body. A means to capability, clarity, energy, all of it at once. And like soccer when I was a kid, it started producing things I didn't ask for: better sleep, more confidence, a relationship with myself that came from what it could do rather than what it looked like. Unintended results of a means that was deeply aligned with the right ends.
And that's the part that doesn't get talked about enough: when your means are genuinely serving your flourishing, both short and long, the activity produces more than you expected. Those unintended results, the health, the discipline, the friendships, the growth you didn't plan for, they only show up when you're not chasing them. They're consequences of correct alignment. They can't be manufactured by pursuing them directly. Chase the joy and the health follows. Chase the health and the joy never arrives (unless you learn you seriously enjoyed it all along, which can happen). The unintended results are a signal that your ordering is right. Their absence is a signal that something has drifted.
But you have to keep checking. Because "I just love doing it" is also the most convincing thing you can tell yourself when a means has stopped serving your flourishing and you don't want to examine it. Pleasure and alignment are not the same thing. Something can feel good every day and still not be serving what actually matters. The only way to know the difference is to keep asking.
Kant told us not to reduce people to tools. Good advice. Everyone agrees.
Nobody told us not to elevate tools to the thing itself. That one's on us to catch.
I don't have a clean ending for this because I'm still in the middle of it. I'm still catching reversals in my own life, still noticing places where the means absorbed the end without me seeing it happen. I'm concussed and am also noticing how hard it is in this situation to figure this stuff out. The soccer story isn't a past-tense lesson I learned. It's a pattern I keep finding in new shapes: in how I approach relationships, in how I think about work, in the gap between what I say I want and what I'm actually optimizing for.
What I can say is that the only thing that's helped is asking the question. Not answering it, because the answer changes. But asking it: what's the means and what's the end here? Is this still serving what it was supposed to serve? And when the answer is uncomfortable, sitting with that instead of rearranging the logic until I can justify it.
I think that's all any of us can do. Not solve the confusion, because I don't think it gets solved. Just keep looking at it honestly. Keep checking, not obsessively, whether the thing you're doing and the reason you're doing it still point in the same direction. And when they don't, be willing to say so, to yourself and to whoever is standing inside your means with you.
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