One Thought

In a previous essay I described my ideal person.  Such a person is fully-realized: she knows what she wants and is pursuing it, she knows who she is and is happy being that way.  Being fully-realized isn’t easy: I’m not fully-realized yet, but I’m working on it.

In this essay, I’m going to address one part of being fully-realized: knowing what you want.  Knowing what you want is both trivially simple and profoundly complex.  The answer lies within us, but it’s often difficult to find.

The answer is important.  If you don’t know what you want, it’s hard to pursue any path with vigor.  A person who doesn’t know what she wants may lead a pleasant life, but she’s unlikely to lead a fulfilling one.

What We Want

So, then… what do we want?  Put simply, we want what makes us happy.

For the purposes of this essay, I’m going to distinguish between two kinds of happiness: short-term happiness and long-term happiness.  We are short-term happy when we like what we are doing right now.  Short-term happiness is in the moment and without thought for the future.

We are long-term happy when we are happy with the direction we feel we are headed.  Though we feel both short- and long-term happiness in the present, their content is distinct: long-term happiness is about the future rather than the present.  Long-term happiness is about goals, plans, and predictions.  We are long-term happy when we project ourselves into the future and imagine ourselves to be happy there.

We have corresponding short-term and long-term wants.  We short-term want what makes us short-term happy, and we long-term want what makes us long-term happy.  (I use the awkward phrasing to emphasize that long-term wants point toward the future; they are not necessarily experienced over a long time-period, as “want long-term” would imply.)

Our short- and long-term wants can sometimes conflict.  A long-term want may require actions in the present that make us short-term unhappy.  Many days I short-term want to stay in bed rather than go to the gym, but I long-term want to stay in shape.  The long-term want usually wins out, but that’s not always the case.

To know what you want, you must know what you want both short- and long-term.  You must also reconcile your short- and your long-term wants.  Though there can be–and probably will be–some conflict between them, the conflict must be small.  You don’t know what you want if you have long-term goal you hate pursuing in the short-term.  When you know what you want, you are both short- and long-term happy.  Your wants must, for the most part, align.

Short-Term Wants

Finding what you want short-term is relatively straightforward.  Trial-and-error is a common strategy — and since short-term happiness is immediate, it’s also an effective one.  Trial-and-error works in part because it’s a “dumb” strategy: it makes no assumptions about what you’ll like doing.  It’s hard to know in advance what things will make you happy and what things won’t.  You need to try them and see how you feel.

For finding short-term wants, I recommend the throw-things-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach.  Try as many activities as you can.  Place priority on the ones that seem most appealing, of course, but try even ones that sound unappealing.

Think you don’t like dancing?  Give it a fair shot anyway.  Fear may be clouding your judgment.  It’s hard to know before you’ve tried something whether fear or real dislike is turning you away from it.  Facing fears is worth the trouble: we often fear most what would make us most happy.

Long-Term Wants

Knowing what you want long-term is more difficult.  Since long-term wants are about the future, they are, by necessity, predictive.  You can know what you want right now by trying things and seeing how they make you feel, but you can’t do the same to find how you’ll feel ten years from now.  To know what you want long-term, you need to project yourself into the future and imagine how you’ll feel there.  This process is imperfect, but it’s the best one that’s available.

Remember that long-term happiness, though being about the future, is experienced in the present.  If you’re happy right now with the direction you’re headed, you’re long-term happy.  How you’ll actually feel in the future is thus, in a sense, irrelevant.  If you feel you’ve made a good plan and you’re following it, you’re long-term happy now.  This fact makes finding long-term wants a little simpler.

I recommend the following approach for finding long-term wants.  First, brainstorm a list of possibilities.  Write down every goal, achievement, and life path that comes to mind.  Then go through the list and, for each entry, imagine yourself ten (or however many) years from now.  You’ve reached the goal, you’ve made the achievement, you’ve followed the path.  Since you’re trying to discover your wants, don’t try to be “realistic” — assume you’ve been successful in whatever you set out to do.

Now, imagine how you feel in that future state.  Do you feel fulfilled?  Do you like how you are spending your time?  Are you happy day-to-day?  Or do you feel confined or trapped?  Are you bored?  Do you have regrets?

From your responses to each entry, try to form an overall plan.  The plan can be very specific or very vague.  The only constraint is that it makes you (long-term) happy.  You’ll know you know you know what you want when your plan fills you with a sense of purpose and excitement.  Of course, I wouldn’t expect this approach to yield a concrete plan immediately.  But it is good at clarifying your thinking: after following it, you may decide to rule out some possibilities and focus more energy on others.

Yes, it’s hard to predict exactly how you’ll feel in the future.  Your prediction may turn out to be completely wrong.  You have to accept that possibility.  Long-term happiness is always, to a degree, uncertain.  Make the best decision you can given the information that is available.  If you want to improve your predictive accuracy, I recommend Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling On Happiness (or others like it).  It outlines the errors people tend to make in predicting their future happiness.

Eliminating Conflicts

One issue remains: Your short- and your long-term wants must, for the most part, agree.  Long-term goals require short-term actions.  If you love a goal but hate the actions it entails, you don’t know what you want.  If you like the idea of writing a novel but don’t like sitting still for long periods of time, you may need to find another goal.  Short-term wants constrain long-term ones.

It’s unlikely that all of your long-term wants are ruled out by your short-term wants — but some of them may be.  In most cases, the future projection exercise I outlined will uncover long-term wants that conflict with short-term ones.  If you project yourself into the future and imagine yourself loving being a famous author but disliking the sitting-down-and-writing-books part, you’ve discovered a conflict.  Make sure to vet your long-term wants for conflicts with short-term ones.  There can be some conflict, but it must be small.

What about me?  My vision of what I want is still hazy, but it’s becoming more clear as follow my interests and see where they take me.  Though I can’t claim to be an expert in this area, the techniques I’ve outlined have worked well for me so far.  I recommend trying them if you are, like most people, unsure of what you want.