recently, too many people have been asking me "what is your goal in life?" and, for a question that gets thrown around so often, i've never seemed to have a good answer.
looking at the people around me, there seem to be plenty of answers. some people want to hillclimb on everything they do, some want to have the most fun possible, some want to escape the permanent underclass, et cetera.
i think these all roughly point towards the same goal:
to live the best life possible
people just have different ideas of what makes a life good, and different measures to help define it.
however, maximising individual metrics like happiness or material wealth to measure the quality of life doesn't necessarily get you there; it's eventually counter-productive, often not reflecting what you really care about (Goodhart's Law).
following that train of thought, it makes sense that at each point in life you have a varied set of priorities but a finite amount of resources to allocate to each priority. how much each priority adds to your life depends on how much you put into it, what you’re giving up, and how it affects everything else.
therefore, assuming that you have a perfect model of your current state of life, one that accurately depicts the relationships between priorities, perhaps you could identify the Pareto frontier of possible resource allocations: the allocations where improving one priority would mean sacrificing another. each allocation would bring a different combination of benefits to your life, and by weighting each priority by how much it matters to you, you could decide which combination you'd prefer.
perhaps the best life would reveal itself somewhere in that process.
however, this assumes you can meaningfully anticipate what you will value, how your choices will affect it, and that you are able to weigh your present priorities against your future ones.
how can you build that model when part of living itself is discovering what you want?
maybe, it's okay to leave this question unanswered.