I know – or have heard of – families who organise their lives along corporate, bordering on military, lines. They have timetables, structures, house rules; all designed, presumably, to give them the illusion of control. Most signally, and disturbingly, they have imposed or mutually agreed “goals” that they are determined to achieve.

I am slightly at odds with my wife over this matter. She wants to have goals for us as a family. It might mean one day moving to a different country, or living in a farmhouse and raising chickens, or having a second home by the sea. But I don’t have any goals at all. This, she finds perplexing and frustrating.

Goals, to me – whether it is a matter of getting your children into a Russell Group university or building that kitchen extension or achieving the perfect fat-to-muscle ratio – are all what you might call fuel for the fantasy machine. The fantasy is that this or that will make you, or your children, happy.

I don’t believe this to be true. I am an improviser/bodger/hoper. My motto is “man proposes, God disposes”. Life is too unpredictable to make plans beyond this year’s holiday, and even that’s a bit of a stretch. I have general intentions – but I don’t have goals. In fact, I find goals oppressive – and bewildering. For if I were to imagine myself into the mind of a “goalist”, I am puzzled by which kind of family goals I would try to aim for.

The most common goals that families tend to aim for are so vague that they are essentially meaningless. These are ambitions such as happiness, success, harmony and general wellbeing. One can very well nominate these as goals, but they are highly dependent on luck, circumstance and personality traits. To have a goal of happiness is to miss the point of happiness entirely and to, at the same time, virtually guarantee that you’ll never get there.

More specific are the practical goals – to plan for a country retreat or for retirement or to make sure your children reach a certain level of expertise at the piano, kazoo or castanets. I have no objection to these sorts of goals. I just think that the current vogue for setting them is reaching neurotic proportions.

We live in a goal-directed society, which I always think of as being a relatively recent American import – when I was growing up, we were a much more laid-back, take-it-as-it-comes society. But to be overly goal-oriented, to my mind, is a mistake, because it means always focusing on the future. Life doesn’t happen in the future; it happens now.

Such an attitude goes way beyond the popular vogue for “mindfulness training”. It is about trust – trust, above all, in what is to come. Because you can only see so far. It is rather like driving with the headlights on – visibility is limited to what’s just in front of you, but you get there in the end.

I am not saying, of course, that one should just drift along hoping for the best. In work and study, goals are essential. But to me the family should represent a respite from such goals, not a continuation of them. The more we live our lives in the future, the less we live our lives in the present. Using powers of foresight and planning is an excellent thing. But there’s no point in getting anywhere if when you get there, you’re just thinking about getting somewhere else.

If you don’t believe me, ask any child. Because no child has a goal – until a parent gives them one. Then they are stuck on the hamster wheel for life. The only thing we can do then is to remind them of what we’re all too ready to forget – that the wheel exists purely in our imaginations. That means we can step off if we choose – because it doesn’t exist in the first place.

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