Why We Want The Things We Want

How to know what you really, really want in life

I bought a pair of used climbing shoes so I can rock climb with my oldest son. The gear doesn’t matter until you become very good; it’s the pursuit and it’s opportunity for transcendence that matters. Photo: Per Håkansson.

There are things we need and there are things we want or desire in life. Our most basic needs are biological and shared by every human being: food, shelter, safety, and sense of belonging.

Once we have satisfied our needs, we enter the realm of wants. Wants or desires, if you will, is something completely different. Knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.

Where to draw the line between needs and wants is also not exactly clear. Maslow argued that needs can be structured in a hierarchy, and while this is true for the bottom of his pyramid, both self-actualization and transcendence might be considered both needs and wants.

But more importantly, how do we know what we want if there is no instinctual basis for it? We all need food and shelter to survive but we don’t all need to become billionaires or “having it all” to thrive (the opposite is often more true).

The French professor René Girard discovered that imitation is the force that drives what we want and desire in life. He called this mimetic desires or desire according to others.

“It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.” ― René Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes

It’s through the human capability of imitation that we can make new things, like music, language, and technology. All human innovation begins with imitation, and honestly, most of what we call innovation is just dots connected differently.

Our wants and desires are born outside ourselves and that’s why advertising and social media influencers work so well. We simply want what other people want, either the unattainable celebrity or our next door neighbor The Joneses.

We can be perfectly happy with what we are currently driving until our cool neighbor shows up in the latest Porsche. Suddenly the Mini Cooper that has worked so great on all those road trips doesn’t seem to be enough.

Of course this is how the market economy works: companies make products based on our perceived wants, hires a (role) model to promote them, and that attracts everyday consumers to want and consume their products ad infinitum.

In many cases these wants are positive. Instead of wanting a combustion engine car we now want an electric vehicle which is better for the environment. And instead of wanting fast fashion these day we want slow, sustainable fashion.

“If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.“ – Aristotle

So what’s the problem? Well, chasing other people’s wants is a never-ending saga with no happy ending. Once we have acquired one want a new want will appear. There is always some manufactured desire to satisfy (why Amazon exists).

The solution is to revisit the two most important questions in our lives: