Wanting things for other people, which behaves differently

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

A large share of what people want is not for themselves. They want things to go well for the people they are attached to, and this category of wanting has a different shape from the personal kind. It does not reset in the same way. It is less susceptible to comparison, because the reference point is the specific person rather than a general standard. And it tends to persist through satisfaction rather than being extinguished by it, since the wellbeing of someone you care about is an ongoing condition rather than an outcome that arrives once.

It has its own difficulty, though, which is that you cannot deliver it directly. The thing you want is happening inside another life over which you have partial influence at best. This produces a particular kind of strain, and it also produces a well known error, which is the substitution of what you would have wanted at their age for what they actually want now. The want is genuine and the affection behind it is genuine, and it can still be aimed at a target that only exists in your own head.

The redeeming feature of outward wanting is that it is durable in a way personal ambition often is not. It does not need renewing, it does not deflate on arrival, and it survives most changes of circumstance. Many people find, on looking back, that the wants that held up best across a life were not the ones about their own position at all, but the ones about how things went for a small number of other people. This is not offered as a lesson. It is just a pattern that shows up often enough to mention.