Not Knowing What You Want to Do Means the Wishes Are Borrowed

Introduction: However Long You Think, No Answer Settles

You do not know what it is you actually want to do. However long you think about what you ought to want, no answer settles into place. Many people treat this as a weakness of theirs and try to hide it — insufficient self-analysis, insufficient experience.

Many people are looking for a way to find what they want to do. What this article examines is the premise underneath that search: why, after chasing wishes for so long, a person ends up unable to tell what they genuinely want.

Here is the conclusion first. Not knowing what you want to do is not a shortage of time spent looking, and it is not an absence of passion in you. The more you chase borrowed wishes distributed from outside, the less visible the genuine wish buried underneath them becomes. The problem lies not in the method of searching but in the origin of the wishes already occupying the mind.

Who Wrote the Menu of Things Worth Wanting?

We feel that what we want is simply wanted, and do not question its origin. But appearing natural and having arisen from within are two different things. The wishes that feel as obvious as air are often precisely the ones breathed in from outside.

The major authors writing the menu of things worth wanting are advertising, consumer culture, and the self-help market. From birth onward we are bathed in images of what is desirable and what kind of life counts as success. Pass a certain income and you will be free. Meeting an ideal partner is happiness. Definitions of this kind circulate so widely that they cease to feel like anybody’s opinion and come to feel like objective truth. They are, without question, a menu that somebody wrote and somebody circulated.

Choosing a dish from a menu in a restaurant, we take ourselves to be choosing freely, and what can be chosen is only what the menu carries. The menu itself is decided in the kitchen. Wishes have much the same structure. Millions of people wish, as though by agreement, for the same things: money, success, recognition, an ideal partner. That uniformity is not coincidence. It is evidence that the menu of wishes is supplied from common sources.

The More You Wish, the Less Visible What You Actually Want

A cost here is easily overlooked. Pouring the whole of your awareness into wishes that arrived from outside leaves no room to attend to the quieter wishes of your own buried beneath them. It is the same as a faint voice going unheard in a room where a loud noise continues. Borrowed wishes are loud — society praises them repeatedly, advertising renders them in bright colour, and the people around you are wishing for the same things.

The practice of concentrated wishing accelerates the overwriting. Each day the wish that came from outside is spoken, and its realised form pictured. The repetition engraves the external wish more deeply still. Time that would otherwise have gone to stopping and asking is this wish actually mine is replaced by time spent concentrating. The more one concentrates, the less gap remains in which to ask again.

What makes this overwriting formidable is that the person cannot notice it while it proceeds. Someone overwritten by borrowed wishes feels that they are living honestly by their own. The wish being concentrated on feels urgent to them. In a mind where the overwriting is complete, the self that existed before it is no longer present, and with nothing left to compare against, not even a sense of having lost something arises.

The Test: If Nobody Knew

How, then, are borrowed wishes to be told apart from your own? There is an experiment. Call to mind the wishes you want realised, and ask of each one: if nobody knew about this — not on social media, not in advertising, not on the lips of anyone around me, but held only inside my own mind — would I still want it? With nobody to compare against and nobody to show it to, would it still be wanted?

Wishes to which yes comes back immediately are fewer than expected. Many wishes deflate the moment the gaze of others and the comparison are removed. Is a wish for a larger home about space in which you and your family live comfortably, or space that is not embarrassing to show? Ask repeatedly and it becomes visible that many wishes have their roots not in your interior but in comparison with others and in standards presented from outside.

The test is not there to deny desire. A desire that survives the test is close to a wish that is genuinely yours. A desire that deflates the moment the test’s light falls on it may have been a borrowed article, supplied from outside.

▸ The criteria for telling your own wish from one oriented by others are developed further in what it means to live by your own compass.

Stop Wishing for a While and Listen to the Quiet

To reclaim what you actually want, then, the first requirement is to stop concentrating and turn down the volume of the wishes that came from outside. Only with the borrowed wishes set aside does the quiet voice beneath them begin to be audible.

There is no need to worry that wishing for nothing will mean losing all aspiration. The reverse holds. When the place occupied by borrowed wishes empties, room appears for your own wishes to enter. Standing in the honest blank of I do not know is not a weakness. It is also a mark of the maturity of someone who no longer leaps at easy borrowed goods. It is rather when an answer arrives immediately — this is what I want — that one does well to suspect a ready-made wish, distributed from outside.

Conclusion: The Blank Is Honest, Not Defective

Not knowing what you want to do was never a shortage of time spent looking, or an absence of passion. Borrowed wishes distributed from outside were making noise and covering over the genuine wish beneath them. The more one concentrates, the further the overwriting proceeds and the smaller the gap for asking again. The not-knowing was not a defect but the natural blank that a person stands in, for a while, when they set the borrowed goods aside and begin searching for what is genuinely theirs.

What is required, then, is not better self-analysis or a new list of experiences. It is to stop concentrating, turn down the volume of wishes that came from outside, and listen in the quiet for your own voice. Receive the overall design as your next step. How these borrowed wishes operate across manifestation as a whole is set out in what the law of attraction actually is.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. “A Dark Side of the American Dream” (1993) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(2)
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press