"What are your spiritual goals"?
The way I despise this question 😭
Outside a cult setting, studying to become a doctor or researcher who helps the medical field leap forward and save lives is very much a spiritual goal for many christians because they feel that's where God has called them to live and help.
Same thing with being an educator, maybe working with an NGO and moving to a different country to help the less fortunate, maybe even become a civil servant, and so on and on.
And even back when I was a hardcore JW, these were always my kinds of goals. But of course, there's no such thing as 'my intuition tells me' within the context of the organization. If your calling isn't one that aligns with the very narrow worldview the organization has specifically prescribed, then 'just remember the heart is a great deceiver.' You just have to drone on like all the other worker bees, all your intuition can tell you is where you can serve the Governing Body, never that you can't serve them at all.
It made me start avoiding many JW gatherings even before I stopped the whole JW spiel and routine, because I knew whenever an elder or someone else would bring up that question, I wouldn't be able to truthfully express the ways in which I'd love to help people, which would be as far away from the organization as possible.
And ofc unfortunately when you gave an answer the person asking perceived as 'wrong' or 'subpar,' the subtle look of judgement could pierce through you like a laser. Which leads many to lying. Had many good buddies who had a whole script down, "a few years pioneering, maybe Bethel, then special service, in the end as long as I'm serving Jehovah it doesn't matter where he takes me" and it's like daaawg I know you mean none of that 😂 but we do need that social credit so I get you.
The truth is most people are not pieces of shit. They're decent, and they want to live a life of service. And there's a billion different ways to serve and help better people's lives outside distributing magazines year in year out and telling yourself you're such a great person for that. The GB members' egos are the central problem. They just can't ever teach anything where they make themselves irrelevant to their followers' lives. They have to remain centre-front, screw however else your individual experience and reality tells you to live your life.