How much of what you want did you actually choose

Desires are absorbed far more often than they are decided.

Very few wants are invented from scratch. Most are picked up, the way an accent is picked up, from the people you spend time near. This is not a criticism of anyone. It is how a social animal learns what is worth having, and for most of human history it was excellent guidance: want what the competent people around you want, and you will probably do well. The system only becomes awkward when the range of people you observe is much larger and much less relevant than it used to be, so the wants you absorb are calibrated to lives that have very little to do with yours.

The signs of a borrowed want are usually detectable if you look. It tends to be described in general terms rather than specific ones. It comes with a picture of how it looks from outside rather than a picture of what the days feel like from inside. It is frequently phrased as a category (a certain kind of career, a certain kind of home) rather than as a particular thing you could describe in detail. And it often has a curiously flat quality when you try to imagine actually living inside it, because you never imagined the inside, only the outline.

Noticing this is not the same as discarding it. Plenty of borrowed wants turn out to be worth keeping, because the people you borrowed them from were onto something. The value of noticing is that it converts an assumption into a question, and questions can be answered. A want you have examined and kept is a different kind of possession from a want you never realised you had acquired.