How to Find What You Want
To find what you want, you need to do two things:
- Cut distractions.
- Talk to people.
1. The first condition is to cut distractions. To find what you want, you need to be bored and to understand your frustrations. What distraction does, it alleviate boredom and numbs your frustrations, so it actively prevents you from knowing what you want.
You might ask, why do I need boredom and frustrations in order to know what I want? I'll quote psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:
On boredom1:
"Winnicot describes depression as the fog in the battlefield. In other words it's an attempt to suppress what is felt to be an unbearable conflict, in a kind of vagueness. I think that you could imagine boredom as something similar, that when a certain conflict about desire becomes unbearable, boredom takes over, that would be one way of describing this. So when I'm bored, I'm determinedly withdrawing attention from the nature of my desire, and I'm trying not to know what it is I might want, because the consequence of the wanting is so problematic.". On frustrations2: “The most difficult thing for the patient to articulate is his frustration; indeed, he can only begin to articulate his desire if he can spell out his frustration.”.
2. The second condition is to have a conversation with somebody. Quoting Adam Phillips again3:
Adam Phillips: But it can be extremely difficult to know what you want, especially if you live in a consumer, capitalist culture which is phobic of frustration — where the moment you feel a glimmer of frustration, there’s something available to meet it. Now, shopping and eating and sex may not be what you’re wanting, but in order to find that out you have to have a conversation with somebody. You can’t sit in a room by yourself like Rodin’s Thinker.
Interviewer: Why not?
Adam Phillips: Because in your mind, you’re mad. But in conversation you have the chance of not being. Your mind by itself is full of unmediated anxieties and conflicts. In conversation things can be metabolized and digested through somebody else—I say something to you and you can give it back to me in different forms—whereas you’ll notice that your own mind is very often extremely repetitive. It is very difficult to surprise oneself in one’s own mind. The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.