Are Your Goals Arbitrary? Ali Abdaal Thinks So

There's a specific kind of person who optimizes their video game playthrough. They Google the fastest route through the main storyline. They look up which side quests are "worth it" before doing them. They play on the difficulty setting that maximizes XP per hour.

I say this without judgment. I've worked alongside people who ate lunch at their desks because eating elsewhere was "inefficient." The optimization instinct runs deep, and it doesn't respect context. It will colonize your leisure time just as happily as your workday, if you let it.

Ali Abdaal—productivity YouTuber, NYT bestselling author of Feel-Good Productivity, and physician-turned-content-creator—ran into his own version of this while playing God of War on the PS5. He found himself at a literal fork in the river: go left to advance the main story, or go right for an interesting side quest that didn't "progress" anything meaningful. His gut said left. Then he caught himself.

"Why do I feel the need to play it efficiently?" he asks in his recent video. "Why does my first thought go to what's the fastest way to progress the game?"

It's a small moment, but the question underneath it isn't small at all.

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The Cosmic Insignificance Argument

Abdaal's reframe goes somewhere most productivity discourse refuses to go: outward into the void. He argues that his app, his work, his goals—all of it—has zero cosmic significance. "A few more decades from now, me and our entire team will be dead, and no one will particularly care about this random app that we spent a few years building on planet Earth."

That's not cynicism. That's a pretty defensible read of the universe.

The move he's making is essentially Stoic—zoom out until the thing that's stressing you shrinks to its actual proportions—but he applies it in an interesting direction. Most people use this kind of "memento mori" thinking to motivate urgency. You're going to die, so stop wasting time. Abdaal flips it: you're going to die, so stop treating arbitrary tasks like they're life or death.

The distinction matters. One version of existential awareness produces grinding anxiety with philosophical garnish. The other produces something closer to ease.

After catching himself in frantic-mode while working on his app designs one morning, he reports asking the God of War question again: what's actually the point of building this? His answer: "The point is primarily to enjoy the experience of building the thing."

And then—and this is the part worth sitting with—he says it worked. Spotify on, coffee breaks taken, relaxed posture adopted. "While approaching it in this relaxed fashion, I make a lot of progress and I come up with a bunch of cool new ideas and I have a pretty good time."

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What's Actually Being Claimed Here

It's worth being precise about what Abdaal is and isn't arguing, because the framing is easy to misread in either direction.

He's not saying nothing matters. He's not arguing for passivity or "quiet quitting" or abandoning ambition. The app still gets worked on. The goals still exist. He's arguing about the texture of how you pursue them—frantic and pressured versus relaxed and curious.

This is a meaningful distinction that gets collapsed a lot in productivity discourse, which tends to treat the state of mind you work in as irrelevant to the quality of the output. Just do the work. Feelings are noise.

There's a substantial research base suggesting that's wrong. The relationship between psychological safety, creative thinking, and performance is well-documented enough at this point that Abdaal isn't exactly going out on a limb here. The broader claim—that play-mode produces better work than anxiety-mode—has more empirical backing than most of what gets published in the productivity genre.

What's harder to verify is whether the "cosmic insignificance" framing is the right lever to pull, or just the lever that happened to work for Abdaal in that moment. There's a gap between "this reframe helped me relax one Tuesday morning" and "treat every goal in your life as an arbitrary video game." One is an anecdote. The other is a philosophy.

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The Tension He Admits

Here's the part of the video I found most interesting, maybe because it's the most honest: Abdaal acknowledges that even writing a whole book about playful work didn't actually wire playfulness into his defaults.

"Even though I've written that chapter and I've seen firsthand the benefits of taking a more playful approach to work, I still find myself defaulting to the mode of this is a serious thing that needs to be done quickly and productively and efficiently."

That's not a small admission for someone whose entire brand is built on having cracked the productivity code. It suggests the gap between knowing something intellectually and embodying it is wider than we usually admit—and that no amount of content consumption closes it automatically. (A point that's somewhat awkward for a platform built on content consumption, but there it is.)

The practical implication is real: if Abdaal, who wrote the book literally, still has to actively catch himself and shift modes, then this isn't a mindset you install once. It's a practice. A deliberate, repeated interruption of your own defaults.

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Where the Analogy Gets Slippery

The video game metaphor is elegant and genuinely illuminating. But it has edges worth examining.

Video games are designed for enjoyment. The friction is calibrated by game designers to feel satisfying rather than defeating. The stakes are consequence-free. When you die, you respawn. When you miss a quest, there's another one.

Work isn't quite like that. A failed product launch has real consequences for real people. A missed deadline affects colleagues who were counting on you. The arbitrariness Abdaal describes—"an arbitrary goal with an arbitrary level of difficulty"—is genuinely true at the cosmic scale, but at the human scale, consequences are asymmetrically distributed. Whether they land on you, your team, or nobody depends on a lot of structural factors the metaphor smooths over.

None of that invalidates the core insight about frantic energy being counterproductive. But "treat this like a video game" lands differently for someone with job security and ownership of their time than it does for someone in a precarious role where the margin for appearing relaxed is approximately zero.

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What Remains

Abdaal ends the video self-deprecatingly: "And after all that, we've landed on a classic cliche." He's right. The journey is the destination is as old as philosophy gets.

But clichés tend to become clichés because they're pointing at something real. The question isn't whether the idea is original—it isn't—it's whether the framing he's found makes it usable in a moment when your nervous system has decided everything is on fire.

A video game controller in your hands is a surprisingly effective prop for remembering that. Whether a productivity app design session can actually feel like one is a test each person runs on their own.

—Vanessa Torres