With access to the internet, and the apparent time to use it, how are you goal poor?
Easy. I am not given many duties. More below.
There are endless opportunities for improved health, fitness, and well being, at a time in history when radical life extension is a possibility. Or do those not count as big wins?
No. I don't know how to explain it. I was not... raised... to live a self-centered life focusing on happiness. I feels wrong. My ingrained attitude is more like do the duties you are given. Fight the honorable fight of trying to provide your family a middle-class existence (my dad was born dirt poor, and not very first-worldy circumstances) and at 60 when your kids graudated college you may as well die as there are not many more duties to discharge. Perhaps, leave the wife a comfortable estate. (Dad died at 63, doing that.)
But I was not raised to be very altruistic either. I mean if I just wanted to overlook myself and work on improving humankind I could find many goals. But in my background it was more like focus on your immediate family, kin, blood.
At this point I don't really care about living long or well-being. As my child came late, I am 37 and she is 1, I do need to fight on for 20-25 years, so I made some changes, stopped getting drunk daily (this is was too normal in my background, father-in-law still does it at 58), got into regular sports, made some diet changes, but I don't know if I care much about well-being.
Besides, I had enough Buddhist / stoic influence to know chasing happiness or well-being is a losing race, as your desires always expand, it is better to desire less and be content with less rather than to get more. And it is easier and lazier.
Life extension scares me. I hardly have enough duties to fill out the 20-25 years I need to stay alive for the sake of my family, I don't know how I would deal with having to make 70 or 80 with reduced mobility and things like that, a life where you cannot even get some minimal amount of tedium-reducing excitement from something like a boxing sparring because you are 75 scares me. While I love my family, part of me regrets the decision a bit, because if I stayed single then I would just need to pull on as long as my parents live, and I could be completely free and no duties owed afterwards, free to end it or to make dangerous, "bad" decisions like trying drugs or signing up to be a mercenary in a bush war or any of those kinds of deadly dangerous but definitely boredom-killing adventures.
Maybe things would be better if I would change careers, currently I am stuck in boring ERP software jobs (similar to SAP or Oracle, although not them), but I make more money than any of my relatives and I owe that kind of financial security for my family. But I never had a dream job and never understood why people can have passions for jobs, in my family job was just "travaille", torture, something you must teeth-grindingly endure to be allowed to make a living by the Higher Ups which means bosses and politicians and generally Big People In Suits. So I don't think I could fix anything by changing careers except endangering our safety.
Well, maybe it sounds depressing. I have no idea, since I never really raised to expect that kind of happiness where people run around smiling and enjoying jobs, I cannot really tell the difference between normalcy and functional depression. I don't see that on my coworkers either, they come to the office because the bills won't pay themselves but don't look very overjoyed by it.
How does this work for you? Life extension, for example, how do you expect to fill out a day at 60 or 70? My mother got widowed at 60 and know she is trying to clean the house really slow so that she can pull it out for the whole day, to have something to do. Then repeats the next day. It is not easy. Since she has enough money that survival reflexes don't motivate her and just like me chasing happiness is not on the table, what could she do? Same problem as me except that having a job and a child to raise makes me more occupied.
1. Ignoring goals, tabooing / identifying with methods - the opposite of Beeminder, even the opposite of SMART
Suppose I want to lose weight. Have a general idea of how much and how fast, and decide on the method. Then I ignore the goal and focus on the method. I ignore both the long-term and short-term goal (no Beeminder), ignore the measurement (SMART), ignore all the common wisdom here. The reason I ignore them that I want to avoid constantly haggling with myself, using the soda example, "Surely this one glass will not set me back much?" and instead I identify with the method, such as, simply shaping my identity as a person who does not drink soda, period. Instead of being conscious of the goal, just focus on this new identity. Without a goal in mind, there is nothing to haggle about and that makes it work. So there is not that kind of "Perhaps, this is a special case because X so half a glass should be allowed..." instead, it is just taboo, because it violates my new sense of self of a person who just does not do that. The beauty of this solution that there is nothing to haggle about. It is a harnessing of the cognitive dissonance and protect-your-identity mechanisms, if the new self is the sort of person who just does not drink soda then the only way to not get dissonant and to preserve the identity is to not do so. This, so far, seems to be surprisingly easy for me. It is similar to religious taboos, like people who don't eat X because then they could no longer consider themselves a pious follower of religion Y and it would shake their identity. You could say it is a custom-made nanoreligion each time. Being pious by not violating self-made taboos, preserving the identity of the pious person, without having keep the goal in consciousness.
2. Don't fight The Boss
Someone casually dropped on stopdrinking.reddit.com "It is not about fighting your urges, it is about stopping to fight your better judgement." Precisely. There is a Higher Self (say, Superego) telling me to live healthy and a Lower Self (Ego, Id) telling me to indulge in urges and cravings. Identify with Higher Self, and it is a constant fight with the Lower Self. Identify with the Lower Self and all I need to do is to surrender to the commands of the Higher Self. It does not feel good, but in this case it is okay to not feel good. I call the Higher Self The Bos. It is like "I really want to do X but The Boss does not let me do so. It makes me feel depressed. It is okay. Just accept the feeling and don't fight The Boss. You can never beat The Boss. Just surrender and accept your fate." It is also a nano, well, in this case a microreligion because it is more consistent than the one-off taboos of nanoreligions. Identifying with Lower Self is a bit of an "I am a sinner" thing, and this surrender to The Boss feels a bit religious, a bit close to the AA and 12-step methods.