You Don't Actually Know What You Want
and that's ok
Humans are terrible at predicting what will make us happy…which is the goal of deciding what we want, yeah? If you really inspect the process we’re just guessing - we hardly acknowledge our current emotional state, usually, but we forge ahead with a vision of our future self and then make spurious correlations between some set of actions and achieving that future state.
We shouldn’t be chasing happiness, anyways. Western culture teaches us that happiness is the ultimate “you’ve made it!” signal. But success is always defined around things and achievements, which often leave us feeling empty, not internal peace or congruence with values. So we’re usually wanting the wrong things to achieve our future state.
Buddhism & Stoicism popularized the idea that maybe we shouldn’t want anything. It’s a wonderful thought exercise to try and see how you react. But in the real world it’s fighting against our biology. I think that’s never a great idea. Sure, we have a big fat neocortex that can over-ride our instinctual/emotional circuits. But logic without content & context is no path to the hyperbolic enlightenment. Our brains are hard-wired to ask questions, seek complexity, and build things. It’s in our DNA.
So we end up chasing goals that don’t fit our Puzzles - forcing pieces into it that damage our harmony, build nothing, and eventually force a reset.
Instead of trying to guess at our perfect future, we should focus on the process of building it. In my post about AI and changing how we build out future, I talk about how we don’t need specific long-term goals if we focus on areas of life that are important to us and apply our attention/intention or presence/self-reflection cycles. We will naturally combine what our brains do well with the kind of person we want to be. We will usually find, in presence, that our brains reward us for cooperation, caring for others, and building things. These endorphin rewards are more powerful than any drug.
chop wood. carry water. Engaging with the reality in front of us, consistently, instead of focusing on a fantasy in the future, will show us what we want. It’s counter-intuitive - do, then want. But it’s magical. Do what’s in front of you. Do the damn thing. Do it better than you’ve ever done before. Do it better than it’s ever been done before. Every day we are placing Puzzle pieces, whether we’re paying attention or not. Doing with attention is the antidote to the wrong wanting.
But, we’re still mostly wrong. Lots of wrong wanting may have gotten us into situations where our Puzzles are chaotic or we’re building the wrong things. That’s why frequent check-ins, self-reflection, are crucial to building your best Puzzle. We must make micro-adjustments to our daily Doing, sometimes macro-adjustments. Our subconscious will build us through Doing and our conscious mind can help adjust our heading - move the needle closer to alignment with ourselves.
If you’re brand new to, shall we say Trusting the Build instead of Guessing the Future, check out the full series about The Puzzle, or for a summary of this topic - Zooming In and Out of the Puzzle. In it’s simplest form you can take 2-4 things you know are crucially important to you. Things you couldn’t live without. Buckets you want to fill with your time/attention. Focus your presence on those things as much as you can, within the bounds of your reality. They may quickly expand to more buckets with slightly more complexity. Or you may become laser focused on them. But spending time/attention on them will invariably get you those endorphin rewards and further build The Puzzle that, in retrospect, you realize you wanted all along.