Find the right river

To get what we want, we must first know what we want.

But knowing what we want is hard. It is neither consistent nor innate. Our wants change and are influenced by our environment. Because we are bad at knowing what we want, we look to others to find out. Through this process of memetic desire, we end up wanting what others around us want. We spend our lives floating in these rivers of communal desire.

But if what we want is determined by our environment, and we can choose our environment, then we can choose what we will want. The important question then becomes, “What do you want to want?”. Or put differently, what river should you jump in?

Perhaps it’s turtles all the way down in this process of wanting, where what we want to want is also determined by those around us. But that doesn’t feel quite right to me. At some level, our deepest desires do appear to become more innate. If we had a quiet moment and asked our soul, “What do we truly want for our lives?”, the response would likely be much closer to our true, non-memetically derived desires.

We must also consider that wanting certain things is more likely to make us happy than wanting others. For example, the average person would be more likely to be happy wanting to be healthy than wanting to acquire financial success.

With this knowledge - that we do have deeper, innate desires and that some desires are more likely to make us happy than others - we can then choose which river to jump into with the confidence that its flow will guide our wants and subsequently our behaviour.

We will have done the hardest thing, choosing what we wanted to want. Wanting it and achieving it will be done by the river.

[1] I live in Bondi. When people move to this town, they start working out more, they eat healthier, and they sleep more. Why do they do this? Is it because it is easier to be healthy here? Perhaps. But I believe a much stronger determinant is that the environment makes people want to be healthy. When you walk around Bondi you see healthy people. These people clearly want to be healthy. When we see this desire enough in people around us, we adopt it. So, people who move to Bondi start wanting to be healthier. That desire then drives their behaviours. Similarly, if someone moves to New York, they will start wanting to become more financially successful.