A Cosmic Echo

How do you know what you want?

A friend asked me how to know how you feel about things, how you know what you want. I didn't exactly provide a satisfying, practical answer to their question, but it might be helpful to read. Heavily inspired by Ziz (see her glossary entry on Core) and similar sets of ideas, probably convergent with many ideas from psychoanalysis and other therapy frameworks.

There is something that drives you to do things, some reason why you do not do nothing. So you do want things, there is some part of your brain which chooses one action over another.

I also have to assume that you are not completely a bundle of social expectations and traumas and etc.s, that you have some part of your brain that wants specific things such that you will take at least some actions independently of your environment. I have very little idea of for how many people such a thing exists - I have reason to believe that anywhere from 100% to 5% of people have it. (I'm also not entirely sure how to clearly divide these two sorts of causes for action, since it seems like this wanting part of your mind is self-reinforcing, changes itself based on your past actions. Something something hippocampus sleep credit assignment.)

I think (from first principles) this should reasonably straightforwardly tell you what you want, since doing so is helpful for getting what you want. However this doesn't seem to actually be the case for most people.

At least one possible explanation is that it is legitimately helpful to hide what you want from yourself in many situations. This shows up most strongly with fawners - best way to do what others want is to think you want the same things - best way to hide what you want from others is to hide it from yourself.

Another possible explanation is that it is legitimately hard to know what you want. I think this definitely makes sense over the long term - I think some people might naturally have high vs. low discount rates i.e. be short-sighted or be long-term planners. Maybe this all just comes down to being good at simulating yourself in the future. These might also just be legitimately different agent strategies - in some situations having a clear picture of the future is very helpful, in some situations it's basically useless (and in fact stops you from taking correct actions in the moment).

But it's a bit weird to fully not know how you feel about things in the short term when not intentionally obfuscating it. I just then immediately have the question of: why do you choose one thing over another?

In particular the way I would disambiguate this from obfuscation / social expectations / trauma / etc. is to give yourself a situation where you have freedom to do what you want outside of internal/external judgement, where you actually be okay no matter what you do and then notice what you do.

Alternatively, if that's too much (it probably will be for people who struggle greatly with lack of self-knowledge due to obfuscation), give yourself a situation where you have even a slight freedom to indicate what you want without internal/external judgement (then react positively to that to build trust and feel freer, or update on that information).

Some descriptions of ways to get out of completely-obfuscated-wants / related problems: