It sounds like the easiest thing in the world. You are the one doing the wanting, so who could know better? But wanting something and knowing why you want it are two different things, and the second is rare. Plenty of people spend ten years chasing a goal and only find out at the end that it was never really theirs.
The reason is simple. Wants arrive long before we are able to choose anything. As children we learn what to want the same way we learn to talk, by copying the people around us. We see what our parents praise. We see what gets applause at school, who is respected on our street, and what makes our friends jealous. By the time we sit down at eighteen to decide what we want from life, a lot of the deciding has already been done.
You can test this on yourself. Take the thing you are working hardest for right now, and ask whether you would still want it if nobody could ever know you had it. No photos, no telling anyone, no change in how people look at you. Some wants pass that test easily. Others go strangely quiet, and then you have to ask what you were really wishing for.
This is how a person ends up with one of the saddest experiences adult life has to offer. You work for years toward something, you get it, and then you stand inside it with a thought you can’t say out loud.
“This is what I always wanted. So why doesn’t it feel like mine?”
The usual advice is to forget what others expect and find out what you really want, deep down. The trouble is that there is no “deep down” of the kind this advice imagines. If you took away everything you learned from other people, your language, your taste, your sense of right and wrong, your idea of a good life, nothing would be left to do the wanting. There is no untouched version of you underneath, waiting to be found.
So we seem to be stuck. Our wants came from outside, and there is no pure inside to go back to. If that is true, how can any want be your own? And how can you be responsible for wants you never chose?
The Stoics worked on questions very close to this problem more than two thousand years ago, and their answer is more practical than anything I have found in modern advice.
Continue reading with a paid subscription to learn how Seneca explained where our wants come from, the Stoic philosopher Panaetius’s four-part way of finding the life that fits you, what Cicero says to do when you discover you chose the wrong one, and Epictetus’s method for turning an inherited want into your own.
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