Hopesand Desires
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Latest Wanting is easy to feel and surprisingly hard to look at directly.
The long look

What we are actually doing when we want something

Wanting is one of the most common experiences a person has, and one of the least examined. It deserves a longer look than it usually gets.

Most of us spend a considerable portion of our waking life wanting things. Not dramatic things, usually. A quieter room. A different job. A weekend without obligations. The wanting runs underneath the day like a current, and we notice it mainly when it becomes uncomfortable, or when it is satisfied and briefly goes quiet. What is strange is how rarely we turn around and look at the wanting itself. We examine the object (is it good, is it worth it, can it be had) and almost never the wanting, which is the part of the arrangement actually located inside us and therefore the part we might have some purchase on.

Part of the reason is that wanting feels self evident. It presents itself as information about the world rather than as a state of mind. When you want a house with more light in it, the wanting does not feel like a psychological event. It feels like a fact about the house you currently live in. This is a useful illusion for getting things done and a poor one for understanding yourself. Desire almost always arrives already dressed as a conclusion, and the reasoning that supposedly produced it is assembled afterwards, quickly and with some skill.

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Wanting and Getting

When the long pursued thing arrives and changes less than expected

The dream sits inside the same life you were already living, and that life keeps its habits.

The quiet resetting that happens after every arrival

Satisfaction has a short half life, and the interesting question is what you do with that.

Borrowed Wants

Comparison is the engine of most ordinary dissatisfaction

The unhappiness rarely comes from the thing itself, but from the thing beside it.

Would you still want it if nobody ever knew

A blunt question that sorts wants faster than almost anything else.

Ambition Honestly

Counting the cost of a goal in the years it takes

Ambitions are usually priced in effort when they should be priced in time.

A life organised entirely around a future arrival

The present becomes a corridor rather than a place, and corridors are not where you live.

Satisfaction

Contentment misread as a lack of ambition

Being satisfied with things is often treated as a suspicious condition, which is odd.

The ordinary pleasures must be noticed to exist

Small good things are real, but they are quiet, and quiet things are easy to walk past.

Holding Both

Wants change and this is not a betrayal of your past self

The person who set the goal is not necessarily the person who has to keep it.

Wanting things for other people, which behaves differently

Desire aimed outward has its own logic and its own particular traps.

About Hopes and Desires

Hopes and Desires is about wanting: what it feels like, where it comes from, how it behaves when satisfied, and what happens when a person decides they have enough. It treats wanting as an ordinary human experience rather than a problem to be corrected, and it approaches the subject essayistically, which is to say by looking carefully at familiar things rather than by proposing systems. The aim throughout is description rather than instruction. Nothing here is intended to tell anyone what to want, which is a private matter and generally none of anyone else's business, and nothing here should be read as a programme for living better.

The pieces work from ordinary observation, the kind available to anybody who pays sustained attention to their own reactions over a period of months. They do not cite research, they do not offer techniques, and they do not carry the implication that a person who thinks clearly about desire will thereby be happier. Some of what appears here is uncomfortable rather than encouraging, and that is deliberate. The material rewards honesty more than it rewards reassurance, and reassurance offered too quickly tends to close down exactly the questions that were worth sitting with a while longer.

Material circumstances differ enormously between people, and much of what is described here reads differently depending on how much room a person actually has. That is acknowledged rather than resolved. The magazine also stays away from anything clinical: it describes ordinary fluctuations of wanting and satisfaction, and where unhappiness is persistent and unshifting, that belongs with a doctor or another qualified professional rather than with an essay. A sister publication deals with the separate question of deciding what is necessary. This one stays with wanting itself.