Wants change and this is not a betrayal of your past self

The person who set the goal is not necessarily the person who has to keep it.

People carry old wants long past their expiry because dropping them feels like a failure of character. The plan was made at twenty five by someone with different information, different capacities and a different life, and yet it retains a strange authority over the person who exists now. There is a sense that abandoning it would be letting that earlier person down. But the earlier person was not making a promise. They were making a best guess with the materials available, and they would almost certainly revise it themselves if they had access to what you know now.

The difficulty is telling a want that has genuinely faded from one you are avoiding out of discouragement, and the two do feel similar from inside. A rough distinction that often works: a faded want produces indifference when you imagine getting it, while an avoided one produces something sharper, a flinch or a pang. Indifference at the finish line is usually reliable information. Discomfort at the starting line is usually not, since almost everything worthwhile is uncomfortable at the start and always has been.

Letting go of an outdated want tends to free up more than expected, because such wants do not sit quietly. They generate a persistent low level sense of being behind, of owing something to a plan you no longer hold. Retiring one properly, rather than merely neglecting it, closes an open loop. What remains afterwards is a smaller and more accurate set of things you actually want, which is easier to act on than a large inherited list you have been carrying half consciously for years.