“To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!” –Marcel Proust
The Question That Changes Everything
I’ve spent years chasing things I never truly wanted.
Not consciously, anyway. I’d wake up pursuing goals that sounded impressive at dinner parties, relationships that looked good on paper, achievements that made my LinkedIn profile shine. But somewhere beneath the surface, a quiet voice kept asking: Is this actually what I want? Or is this what I think I’m supposed to want?
This is the question that terrifies us most. Not “What do I want?” but “What do I want to want?”
The distinction seems subtle, almost philosophical. Yet it contains the difference between a life lived authentically and one spent as a passenger in your own story.
Why We’re All Chasing the Wrong Things
The Trap of Default Desires
Here’s what I’ve learned about desire: most of what we want, we never chose.
We absorb our wants like we absorb language as children—unconsciously, automatically, without questioning where they came from. The algorithm feeds us images of perfect bodies, perfect homes, perfect careers. Our peers chase promotions and we feel the pull. Someone achieves something and suddenly we want it too, though we’d never thought about it before.
Seneca, writing two thousand years ago in a similarly fragmented time, observed people who “wander around aimlessly looking for employment, and they do not what they intended but what they happen to run across.” He called it “busy idleness.”
I call it modern life.
We’re the rats in the experiment, pressing the lever for the dopamine hit, never stopping to ask: Who designed this cage? Who programmed these rewards?
The Deepest Fear
My biggest fear isn’t failure. It’s arriving at the end and realizing I won Proust’s tragic lottery—that I spent my life devoted to something that was never truly mine. That I optimized for a game I never agreed to play.
La Rochefoucauld understood this centuries ago: “We go to far less trouble about making ourselves happy than about appearing to be so.”
Appearance. Performance. The eternal audience we imagine watching our lives, judging whether we’re winning.
But winning at what?
The Philosophy of Wanting
You Are What You Want
This isn’t motivational rhetoric. It’s ontological truth.
Your desires create channels through your inner landscape. Like water carving canyons over millennia, your wants shape the terrain of your life. They determine your path of least resistance—what feels natural versus what requires exhausting willpower.
When Jack London sailed into dangerous waters, friends called him reckless. But he wrote: “The ultimate word is I Like. It lies beneath philosophy… When philosophy has maundered ponderously for a month, telling the individual what he must do, the individual says, in an instant, ‘I Like,’ and does something else.”
For London, adventure was the path of least resistance. He’d programmed his defaults.
Most of us haven’t. We’re running someone else’s operating system, wondering why we feel like strangers in our own lives.
The Possibility of Reprogramming
Here’s the good news that ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience agree on: your desires are not fixed.
The Confucians understood this as a lifelong project. Confucius measured his own transformation in decades: at fifteen, he set his mind on learning. At thirty, he took his place. At forty, doubt fell away. At fifty, he understood his purpose. At sixty, his perception aligned. At seventy, he could follow his heart’s desires without transgressing proper boundaries.
Seventy years to reach wu-wei—effortless action flowing from authentic desire.
We probably won’t achieve what Confucius did. But we can move in that direction. We can begin the work of wanting what we want to want.
How to Discover What You Actually Want: The Path of Direct Experience
Why Your Imagination Is Lying to You
I used to spend hours imagining different futures. What if I became a writer? What if I moved to another city? What if I left my career?
Research on happiness reveals a humbling truth: our imagination is nearly useless at predicting what will make us happy. We’re excellent at envisioning outcomes but terrible at anticipating how we’ll actually feel living them.
The actor imagines the applause but not the hundredth rejection letter. The entrepreneur envisions the exit but not the sleepless nights wondering how to make payroll. The traveler pictures the sunset but not the lonely hotel rooms.
This is why I’ve developed what I call a bias toward action and experimentation.
Stop imagining. Start trying.
The Laboratory of Your Life
Every life is a series of experiments if you approach it that way.
Wondering if you want to write? Write every day for thirty days and notice what you actually feel—not what you think you should feel, but the raw sensation of sitting with the blank page.
Curious about minimalism? Give away half your possessions and live with the space for three months.
Considering a relationship? Spend time together in stress, in boredom, in crisis—not just in the honeymoon glow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson knew this: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
Not thought experiments. Actual experiments. With your actual life.
The Practice of Paying Attention
Here’s what I’ve noticed: when I pay attention to my direct experience rather than my stories about my experience, everything changes.
The career that looked glamorous from outside reveals its texture—the actual feeling of the work, the quality of the days, the energy I have at sunset.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote about his friend Guillaumet, famous for courage in life-threatening adventures. When people praised his bravery, Guillaumet would shrug. Saint-Exupéry explains why:
“He knows that once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men. But once a man has faced the unknown, that terror becomes the known.”
The unknown exists only in imagination. In direct experience, there is only this moment, this sensation, this reality.
And reality, when we finally meet it, is rarely as dramatic as imagination painted it.
The Internal Scorecard: Measuring What Matters
Warren Buffett asks a question that cuts through all pretense:
Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst? Or be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the greatest?
Your answer reveals everything about whether you’re living by an internal or external scorecard.
I spent years confused about this. I’d achieve something and feel empty. The promotion, the praise, the external markers of success—they felt hollow. Because I was playing to the wrong scorecard.
External scorecards measure:
- What others think
- Social status markers
- Comparative rankings
- Public recognition
Internal scorecards measure:
- Am I growing?
- Am I aligned with my values?
- Are my relationships deepening?
- Am I contributing something real?
The shift from external to internal is not about ignoring others. It’s about reclaiming authority over what success means in your life.
The Power of Community: Choosing Your Influences
Mimetic Desire and Social Contagion
Here’s a truth I resisted for years: we want things because other people want them.
It’s called mimetic desire, and it shapes us more than we’d like to admit. Someone becomes attractive because others find them attractive. A career becomes appealing because our peers pursue it. Even our sense of what’s important absorbs from those around us.
I used to think this was weakness—that authentic desire meant wanting things in isolation, uninfluenced by others.
I was wrong.
The question isn’t whether we’ll be influenced. We will be. The question is: who will we choose to be influenced by?
Conscious Community Selection
The CrossFit phenomenon taught me something profound about human motivation. People don’t just want fitness. They want to belong to a tribe that shares their values, celebrates the same achievements, and provides clear standards of excellence.
At CrossFit, you know how to gain respect: show up, work hard, improve your time, support your teammates. Simple. Clear. Tribal.
You can apply this principle anywhere.
Want to prioritize creativity? Surround yourself with makers, attend workshops, join artist communities.
Want financial independence? Connect with people living deliberately below their means, reading financial philosophy, building toward freedom rather than consumption.
Want depth over breadth? Find people who read slowly, think carefully, and value wisdom over information.
The Amish understand this completely. William Irvine notes: “One of the primary concerns of the Amish is to keep their social desires in check… They don’t dress to impress, they dress to conform… no one wants a buggy that stands out.”
We might want different things than the Amish, but their intentionality about community is worth emulating.
The Disease of Wrong Company
Seneca, ever practical, compared bad influences to infectious disease:
“Just as at a time of epidemic disease we must take care not to sit beside people whose bodies are infected… so in choosing our friends for their characters we shall take care to find those who are the least corrupted: mixing the sound with the sick is how disease starts.”
This isn’t about judgment or superiority. It’s about protection. When you’re trying to reprogram your defaults, spending time with people who reinforce the old patterns makes the work exponentially harder.
I’m not suggesting you cut off everyone imperfect. As Seneca adds: “Where will you find [the perfectly wise]? In place of the ideal we must put up with the least bad.”
But there’s a difference between imperfect and toxic. Between friends who challenge you to grow and those who pull you toward your worst impulses.
Choose carefully. Your desires are contagious.
Practical Experiments: Reprogramming Your Defaults
Experiments in Direct Experience
These are practices I’ve found transformative in my own journey toward authentic desire:
Act before you feel like acting. Commit to behaviors aligned with what you want to want, even when motivation is absent. I started writing before I wanted to write. The wanting followed the doing, not the other way around.
String actions into chains. It takes twenty cold showers before you might start to enjoy them. The first ones are discipline. Later ones become preference. This is neural rewiring in action.
Meditate to create space. Between the urge and the action, meditation creates a gap. In that gap lives choice. Without it, you’re just reacting.
Seek flow states. When you’re completely absorbed in challenging activity, you’re experiencing direct contact with reality. No stories, no performance, no audience. Just you and the work.
Practice strategic deprivation. I went months without coffee, sugar, social media—not as punishment but as experiment. What I learned: my wants are far more malleable than I believed. The pleasure of self-control can exceed the pleasure of indulgence.
Invoke the observer. Sometimes I imagine someone I deeply respect watching me—a grandparent, a historical figure, a version of my future self. It focuses attention remarkably.
Write without stopping. Twenty minutes of stream-of-consciousness journaling externalizes thoughts, making visible the patterns I couldn’t see while trapped inside them.
Experiments in Community
Audit your tribes. I listed five communities I’m part of and five desires each cultivates in members. The results surprised me. Some communities were pulling me toward wants I’d consciously rejected.
Date for alignment. Your romantic partner shapes your desires more than any other relationship. Choose someone who wants what you want to want, or whose wants complement yours beautifully.
Explore spiritual community. Even as a skeptic, I found value in religious community—not for doctrine, but for shared values, rituals that slow modern life, and intergenerational wisdom.
Form intentional brotherhoods. Small groups explicitly committed to mutual growth and honest accountability have changed the trajectory of my life more than any book or course.
Prune toxic connections. Some relationships consistently pull you toward unwanted desires. It’s not cruel to create distance. It’s self-preservation.
Build a cognitive cabinet. Through biography and deep reading, I’ve assembled historical mentors—a cabinet of invisible counselors whose wisdom I can access through their words.
Living With Intention in a World of Distraction
The Modern Crisis: Anomie and Normlessness
We live in what sociologists call an anomic age—a time without clear norms, standards, or values. Everything is in flux. Every choice is available. Every lifestyle is valid.
Sounds liberating, right?
In practice, it’s paralyzing.
Jonathan Haidt describes anomie as “the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of value. In an anomic society, people can do as they please; but without any clear standards… it is harder for people to find things they want to do. Anomie breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety.”
This was the Roman world when Stoicism emerged. A time when traditional structures for earning honor and respect had collapsed. When nobody knew what mattered anymore.
Sound familiar?
Swimming Upstream Without Leaving the Stream
I’ve met people who respond to modern chaos by complete withdrawal—off-grid living, rejecting all technology, dropping out entirely.
I understand the impulse. But for most of us, that’s not the answer.
As Pope Francis suggests: “Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way.”
You can maintain authentic desires while engaging society. You can swim against the current without climbing out of the stream.
This requires:
Understanding without adopting. I can see why people chase status, wealth, and fame without needing to chase them myself.
Compassion for those trapped. Most people in the rat race are exhausted, scared, and doing their best. As Bob Dylan wrote: “I mean no harm nor put fault / On anyone that lives in a vault.”
Patience with yourself. You’ll have days where you can’t swim upstream. Where you default to old patterns. This is human. Notice it without judgment and begin again.
Finding your slipstream. The right community makes authentic living easier. You’re not fighting alone against the entire current.
The Bus Parable: Opening the Shades
Anthony de Mello offers an image that haunts me:
“A group of tourists sits in a bus that is passing through gorgeously beautiful country; lakes and mountains and green fields and rivers. But the shades of the bus are pulled down. They do not have the slightest idea of what lies beyond the windows of the bus. And all the time of their journey is spent squabbling over who will have the seat of honor in the bus, who will be applauded, who will be well considered. And so they remain till the journey’s end.”
Most of us spend our entire lives on that bus, fighting over seats, never opening the shades.
The work of discovering what you want to want is the work of opening those shades.
Of noticing that while you’ve been arguing about status and position, the most beautiful landscape imaginable has been passing by outside.
Questions Worth Sitting With
How do I know if a desire is truly mine?
Sit with this: Does the desire energize you during the actual doing, or only in the imagining of having done it? Authentic desires feel alive in the process. False desires feel alive only in the fantasy of completion.
What if my authentic desires conflict with practical needs?
Start small. Keep your job while experimenting on the side. Most authentic desires can be integrated with practical life through creativity and patience. The point isn’t reckless abandonment of responsibility—it’s gradual alignment.
Isn’t focusing on what I want selfish?
The opposite is true. People living from authentic desire are more generous, more present, more able to contribute meaningfully. People living from false desires are depleted, resentful, and have little to give.
How long does this take?
Confucius measured it in decades. Small shifts happen quickly—weeks or months. Deep rewiring of habitual desires takes years. But every step brings immediate peace.
What if I discover I’ve been chasing the wrong things for years?
Welcome to the club. This realization isn’t tragedy—it’s liberation. As Solon said, “Count no man happy until the end is known.” You have time. You can change course. The past doesn’t determine the future.
How do I handle people who don’t support my authentic desires?
You don’t need everyone’s support. You need the right few people’s support. Find your tribe. Sometimes your transformation inspires others to question their own defaults. Sometimes it doesn’t. That’s their journey, not yours.
The Journey Begins With a Question
I keep coming back to that original question: What do you want to want?
Not: What do you want?
Not: What should you want?
But: What do you want to want?
This question assumes agency. It assumes your desires aren’t fixed. It assumes you can, with intention and work, reprogram your defaults.
This isn’t easy work. The channels are deep. The cultural programming is strong. The biological urges are ancient.
But it’s possible.
And it’s the most important work you’ll ever do.
Because at the end—and Solon’s reminder that we can’t judge a life until it’s complete echoes here—what matters isn’t whether you achieved society’s definition of success.
What matters is whether you opened the shades.
Whether you stopped squabbling over seats on the bus long enough to witness the beautiful country passing by.
Whether you lived the life you chose, or the life that was chosen for you.
The ancient Stoics, facing their own crisis of meaning, discovered this truth: the path to freedom runs through the territory of desire. If you can’t choose what you want, you’re not free—you’re just a sophisticated slave.
But if you can learn to want what you want to want, if you can reprogram those deep channels, if you can align your spontaneous impulses with your considered values…
Then you’ve achieved something rare in any era.
You’ve become free.
Your First Step
Don’t overthink this. Start with twenty minutes and a blank page.
Write this at the top: “What do I want to want?”
Then write whatever comes. Don’t edit. Don’t judge. Just notice what emerges.
That’s the beginning.
The rest is experiment, community, attention, and time.
But it begins with that question.
What do you want to want?
For those ready to go deeper into this work, the journey continues through consistent practice, honest community, and the courage to keep asking uncomfortable questions. The rewards aren’t status or wealth or fame. The reward is becoming fully alive to your one irreplaceable life.
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