IS IT BAD TO WANT THINGS?

In a separate post I talked about how people who have achieved their goals and dreams have sometimes found that it’s not all they thought it was going to be. It didn’t gratify them in the way they were hoping to be gratified – or if they did, they got used to it pretty quickly, while the downsides and costs of getting what they wanted remained.

Is that a cautionary tale? In a sense, yes. Does that mean you shouldn’t want things, or that it’s bad to want things? I don’t think so. It’s just a sign that you should be careful.

Different people from different cultures have different attitudes about this, obviously. With notable exceptions like the Amish, and monastic types, I think most of the modern world is part of “iPhone culture” – ie a world where an iPhone is a status symbol. A world that respects and admires material success, pop stars and athletes and so on. “Greed is good”. At the same time, there’s this… Protestant? Puritanical? quality that’s in play, too. You’re supposed to work, you’re supposed to have a respectable job. You’re not supposed to be too idle or self-indulgent. You’re supposed to be “a productive member of society”.

Some parents encourage their childrens’ every whim. Some parents are the opposite, and try to “keep their kids humble”. Some people try to find some sort of balance in between, and I think most people would agree that that’s ideal.

What’s my personal opinion? What’s my life experience? I don’t think I was a particularly materialistic child. I liked reading books a lot. I wasn’t particularly brand conscious. I remember being aware of what other kids thought was high status – Oakley glasses, Nike shoes. But I don’t think I ever really had a hankering for those items. I still haven’t ever owned a pair of Nike shoes in my life. There was a period of time where I was a musician, and I wanted some gear, but I was never a gearhead either. I bought a guitar for about $400 and i was pretty happy with that.

I don’t think wanting things is bad. But I think it’s important to be honest with ourselves about what we want. And why we want what we want. Processing that can be incredibly insightful and cathartic. There are usually all sorts of buried assumptions underlying whatever we want.

It’s obviously not bad to want good things that are healthy and pro-social, like world peace… although the moment I type that out I find myself thinking, is that even a meaningful thing to say? It’s something that’s out of reach, and the roads to that destination are incredibly complicated and convoluted, and heinous things have been done by people trying to achieve supposedly good outcomes.

STATED WANTS VS ACTUAL WANTS

Rory Sutherland is a advertising guy who has some clever observations about perceptions and reality. He’s pointed out, for example, that when people say they want faster lifts, what they really mean is that they don’t like waiting for lifts. Making lifts faster can be a costly engineering challenge. But the waiting experience for a lift can be mitigated by having lifts be mirrored, or having mirrors around lifts – and people can observe themselves, groom, etc, and time seems to pass faster.

It feels relevant to throw in the supposed Ford quote at some point about faster horses – “If I asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses”. It’s quite a contested quote, which I will have to dig into separately when editing this.

IS IT BAD TO WANT THE SAME THINGS AS OTHERS?

There are some pretty universal things that people want. Everybody wants to feel appreciated, respected, loved. To feel safe, happy, comfortable, healthy. To have good friends. These things are healthy.

That said, there’s also this whole other world of mimetic contagion, where everybody is doing the same thing on the same path, pursuing the same careers, seeking prestige. I think prestige-seeking is a costly trap. It’s generally a bad idea to want something because it’s prestigious. I’ll quote what Paul Graham said here: ” Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”

Paul Graham’s essay “how to do what you love” (which this quote is from) is a great read overall, and one I will have to revisit when writing this. He has a bit about how he has a friend who’s a successful doctor who doesn’t like her job – and she got into that fix because she was so ambitious and determined as a teenager that she pursued (and achieved) her goal without stopping to figure out if it was something she’d actually like doing. So… to some degree, I think she became a doctor because other people told her it would be a good idea. Maybe not directly; maybe it’s through the culture.

“Do what you love doesn’t mean do what you would most like to do this second – rather, it’s about what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy you have to do something.”

What I’m thinking from re-reading this PG essay is that there are things that the reader should know about the nature of reality – more specifically, about what work is like, what pleasure is like, and how these things change over time. This is about contextualizing your wants. You might think as a child that paradise is eating ice cream for every meal, but no adult does this – we know that there are diminishing returns, and eventually all that binging is unpleasant and has unpleasant consequences as well. There are similar insights to be had about life in general, and knowing these things will have you adjusting your wants.