Do You Know What You Want?

Despoina Apostolidou

 Your wants were learned from other people. 

Some of them can still become yours.

It sounds like the easiest thing in the world. 

You are the one doing the wanting, so who could know better? 

But wanting something and knowing why you want it are two different things, and the second is rare. Plenty of people spend ten years chasing a goal and only find out at the end that it was never really theirs.

The reason is simple. 

Wants arrive long before we are able to choose anything. 

As children we learn what to want the same way we learn to talk, by copying the people around us. 

We see what our parents praise. 

We see what gets applause at school, who is respected on our street, and what makes our friends jealous. 

By the time we sit down at eighteen to decide what we want from life, a lot of the deciding has already been done.

You can test this on yourself. 

Take the thing you are working hardest for right now, and ask whether you would still want it if nobody could ever know you had it. 

No photos, no telling anyone, no change in how people look at you. 

 

Some wants pass that test easily. 

Others go strangely quiet, and then you have to ask what you were really wishing for.

This is how a person ends up with one of the saddest experiences adult life has to offer. 

You work for years toward something, you get it, and then you stand inside it with a thought you can’t say out loud.

“This is what I always wanted. 

So why doesn’t it feel like mine?”

The usual advice is to forget what others expect and find out what you really want, deep down. 

The trouble is that there is no “deep down” of the kind this advice imagines. 

If you took away everything you learned from other people, your language, your taste, your sense of right and wrong, your idea of a good life, nothing would be left to do the wanting. 

There is no untouched version of you underneath, waiting to be found.

So we seem to be stuck. 

Our wants came from outside, and there is no pure inside to go back to. 

If that is true, how can any want be your own? 

And how can you be responsible for wants you never chose?

The Stoics worked on questions very close to this problem more than two thousand years ago, and their answer is more practical than anything I have found in modern advice.

in, Stoic Wisdom

Fortify yourself with contentment. 

It is an impregnable fortress. 

— Epictetus, Fragments, 138

We need very little to be happy

We don’t need much to lead a happy life. 

Whether a house is big or small, whether a car is luxurious or not, whether clothes are ordinary or expensive, they serve the basic purposes equally well. 

As Marcus Aurelius reminds us,

You need very few things to be happy. 

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.67

Look at what you have, not what you lack

We are unhappy not because we have too little, but because someone else has more. 

We are happy with our salary — unless we find out our peers are paid more. 

We are happy with the house we live in — until we visit a house that is much better than ours. 

We may have everything we always wanted. 

We may be perfectly happy with what we have. 

But then we come across someone who has more. 

Suddenly, what made us happy yesterday, makes us unhappy today. 

Yet, nothing has really changed. 

Epicurus warns us,

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for. 

— Epicurus

We don’t pay attention to what we have. 

We ignore all the good things we have and long for things we don’t have.

Don’t dream about things you don’t have. Instead, think about the best things you now have and how much you would crave them if you didn’t have them.

 — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7.27.

When we are unhappy that we don’t have the latest of … (cars, smartphones, clothes, computers…), think of a third of humanity for whom having enough to eat today is their greatest joy.

Separate natural desires and desires of opinion

We need food and water to survive. We need shelter and clothing to protect us from the elements. When we desire these things, we are dealing with natural desires or desires of need. These needs are easy to satisfy. But there are desires that arise because we want these things, not that we need them. 

These are desires of opinion or desires of want. 

We falsely assume that we need them for our happiness. 

They are not always easy to satisfy.

Natural desires are limited, but those which spring from false opinion can have no stopping-point. The false has no limits. When you are traveling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless. 

— Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, 16

 

Fix a limit on your desires

Consider your needs, not wants. 

Once you have done so, you know you have all that you need. 

There is no harm in having more, but there is harm in believing your wants are your needs. 

You probably have most of the things you hoped for when you were young. 

If you are still not happy, it is because your desires are a moving target. 

Every time you near the goalpost, it moves further.

Fix a limit which you will not even desire to pass, should you have the power. 

At last, then, away with all these treacherous goods! They look better to those who hope for them than to those who have attained them. If there were anything substantial in them, they would sooner or later satisfy you; as it is, they merely rouse the drinkers’ thirst.

 — Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, 15

1. Your desires seem attractive before you achieve them but lose their attraction once you do? 
2. Do things you bought last year thinking they would make you happy, make you as happy now as when you bought them? Or, are you thinking of something else that will make you happy now? 

Drinking doesn’t satisfy the drinker’s thirst. It only increases it.

The only way to be content is not to crave for more and more and more but to look at what you have and limit your desires.

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants. 

— Epictetus

Epicurus, often (mistakenly) associated with advocating fleeting pleasures, has this to say:

Anyone who does not think that what they have is more than ample is an unhappy person, even if they are master of the whole world. 

— Epicurus

Chuck Chakrapani