How Does a Person Know What They Really Want?

How a Person Builds a World · Season Three: Attention, Desire, and Self-Understanding · Article 4

When a menu is long, we say, “I don’t know what I want to eat.” We use the same sentence when contemplating a change of work, city or intimate relationship, though the consequences are far larger. The sentence makes it sound as if a true answer already exists somewhere within us but is temporarily inaccessible. If only we became quiet enough, excluded other people’s influence and were sufficiently honest, the authentic desire would rise from the depths.

Sometimes that is what happens. A person may have felt a stable pull for a long time but feared acknowledging it. More often, however, not knowing what one wants is not a failure of retrieval. The desire has not yet acquired enough form to carry a decision. What confronts us is not a hidden object in the mind but a group of conflicting tendencies that change with experience and become articulate only through comparison and practice.

Wanting is not one phenomenon

Ordinary language calls many different conditions “wanting”: bodily appetite, anticipation of a pleasant experience, envy of another person’s life, a long-term plan, a moral commitment, or the defensive wish not to lose an existing identity. They may point towards the same object while proposing different reasons.

Neuroscience of reward often distinguishes “wanting” from “liking”. Kent Berridge and colleagues use wanting in a technical sense for an incentive-salience process and liking for processes associated with hedonic reaction. Under some conditions, the two can be dissociated. Reviews of this work emphasise that these are technically defined and experimentally operationalised concepts. They are not direct names for every conscious desire and enjoyment in ordinary life. Even so, the distinction helps us notice that intense pursuit need not equal actual enjoyment, and that something once enjoyed need not be persistently pursued.

A person who repeatedly refreshes a message feed may not like the experience produced by refreshing. Someone who desires a position may desire recognition more than the work. Someone who wants to leave a city may feel both an attraction to a new life and an impulse to escape the present one. Asking “Do I want this?” compresses different motives into one answer too quickly.

More revealing questions are: which part of this do I want? What change in feeling, relationship or identity do I expect it to deliver? If the activity remained but lost its social signal, would I still choose it? If possession required the repetitive labour of maintenance, how would the desire change?

Preferences are often constructed in choosing

In “The Construction of Preference”, decision researcher Paul Slovic reviewed evidence that, in many complex or unfamiliar choices, people do not retrieve a stable and complete table of preferences. Evaluations are formed in response to wording, comparison, available information and the task used to elicit an answer. Choosing, pricing, ranking or rejecting the same objects may direct attention to different attributes.

Constructed does not mean false, and it does not imply that any preference can be manipulated into existence. Language, prior experience, bodily need and established commitments constrain possible answers. It does, however, change the work of self-knowledge. If preferences are not all fully formed in advance, knowing oneself cannot consist only in looking more deeply within. It must also examine how a decision environment makes some reasons salient.

When comparing two jobs, for example, a table invites alignment of salary, travel and leave. A conversation with future colleagues may suddenly make the manner of cooperation important. Imagining what one would actually be doing on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon can push abstract prestige into the background. These methods are not simply noisy measurements of one fixed desire. They can give different components of desire an opportunity to speak.

This is also why “more options” need not produce a truer choice. An unlimited list may force people to rely on whatever attribute is easiest to compare, or make avoiding the loss of the hypothetical best option into the dominant aim. Additional information serves self-understanding only when the structure of choice helps people encounter consequences, conflicts and possibilities of revision.

Other people’s desires enter mine

Desires do not form outside social influence. A family’s understanding of security, a profession’s scale of success, lives displayed by platforms, and paths already taken by friends supply both the vocabulary and the objects of wanting. We need to see lives lived by others before some forms of life become imaginable at all.

It therefore does not follow that a desire is inauthentic because another person influenced it. Without borrowed language, complex aspiration would be difficult to form. The task is to discriminate how influence works. Does it open a possibility, or close alternatives through shame and exclusion? Having understood the daily reality of a life, do I wish to assume it, or do I want only the reaction other people would have to seeing its result? If nobody knew about this choice, would I still regard it as worthwhile?

A desire can be one’s own without having no source. What matters is whether it can be owned after examination. Ownership means being able to connect it to concerns one accepts, being willing to bear its costs, and allowing reality to revise the original picture.

Desire has to live with time

The strongest present wish need not represent the most important long-term direction. A short impulse may expose a suppressed need; a long-standing plan may be no more than the inertia of an old identity. We should neither let the “future self” always overrule the present nor let present intensity cast the only vote on a life.

One way to discern desire is to return its object to time. Do not imagine only the moment of attainment. Imagine the ordinary week after attainment: what must be repeated, what must be relinquished, who will be present, and which parts will never be displayed. Another method is reversible practice on a smaller scale. Auditing a course, taking part for a limited period, or completing one real but bounded project often reveals more than an abstract personality test about whether a desire survives contact with reality.

Practice is not a final test either. The awkwardness of unfamiliarity can temporarily suppress enjoyment before the significance of competence appears. Difficulty may also reveal that costs exceed value. The key is to observe how desire changes with contact. Does it vanish when reality supplies detail, or does initial excitement become a quieter and more stable form of commitment?

“What I truly want” is a relation for which I can take responsibility

We often hope to obtain certainty from self-knowledge before acting. Yet many consequential desires become clear only through action, feedback and responsibility. Choosing a path does not prove that it was always one’s destined desire. The choice begins organising resources, abilities, relationships and memories so that the path gradually becomes a life that can be chosen again.

This is not an instruction to rationalise every established choice. Precisely because choices shape future desire, exit, experimentation and re-evaluation matter. A good commitment does not classify change as betrayal. It gives a possibility enough support for long enough that its actual consequences can become visible.

Knowing what one truly wants, then, does not mean finding a pure signal untouched by environment, other people or time. Such a signal may not exist. More reliable questions are whether the desire has some continuity across situations; whether I can distinguish wanting the object, wanting the feeling and wanting to be seen; whether it can admit new facts about its costs; whether the people affected are allowed into the judgement; and whether, after the first excitement has passed, I remain willing to arrange a life that supports it.

The truest desire is not necessarily the loudest. It is a direction whose consequences a person remains willing to assume after comparison, practice and revision. It is less like a mineral discovered deep within the self than a road formed through resistance from reality: not constructed arbitrarily, but not fully present before we begin to walk it.

Primary sources and further reading

• Paul Slovic, “The Construction of Preference”, American Psychologist, 1995.
• Kent C. Berridge and Terry E. Robinson, “Liking, Wanting, and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction”, American Psychologist, 2016.
• Eva Pool et al., systematic review of operational measures of “wanting” and “liking”, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2016.

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