WHAT YOU WANT

This is a piece I love so much. Written by my brother. Please read to understand. We grow up thinking we know exactly what we want, but No, we’re wrong. We all start with the wrong idea about it. Our whole life, society has told us what we want. Others know what they want you to want. Your family, your religious institutions, your politicians and your retailers know exactly what they want you to want. You’ll get everyone’s idea but your own, but these external ideas will accumulate, and in the absence of your own they get you chasing things. And you’re not born knowing what you want either. People assume they ought to automatically know what they want, which tends to be whatever the convention it is in our culture. For some, that means marrying off to “ MR LOADED”, for others it means achieving a senior managment position, for others it could simply mean a Personal Relationship With Jesus Christ. Then we become adults and, if we’re lucky, slowly learn that nobody can teach you what you want. You stumble upon it. But only if you do a lot of stumbling though. Your parents didn’t know what you want, they figured it’s the same as what they wanted. The only ideas they can give you of what you ought to want are the wants they can identify with. Advertisers don’t know what you want. The only idea they can give you is what they hope you want, which is to buy their products Your own idea appears only when you have the actual experience of what you want. You can’t know until you taste it. We all start with a false idea of what we want in life, inherited from others during childhood, before we gain any perspective about life. The false idea has to be given up and the real desires have to be discovered. They may make others uncomfortable. They may make you uncomfortable at first, because in inherited your comfort zone from others. You will either recognize this and overcome it, or you will always pursue what other people want you to want, convinced it’s what you want. I believe that how happy a person becomes in life depends on how much time they spend learning what they want. Just to know what makes you glow inside is the work of a lifetime. Your real, heartfelt wants accumulate over the years, as you stumble into new experiences that electrify or should I say interests you. How quickly that happens depends on how often you do what you’re not used to doing. That means travel hastens it, and habits stifle it. Doing scary and unfamiliar things hastens it, doing comfortable things stifles it. You can’t know what you want until you taste it. Do more tasting. Don’t make the mistake of thinking what you want is just one thing. Each of our personalities is so intricate that we will resonate with thousands of categories of experiences, from the kind of clothes you feel best in, to the city you want to live in, to the person you want to grow old with, to the type of sanitary pad you use. You may not know these preferences of yours yet, even if you assume you’ve known for 18 years. Your wants are always going to be more articulate than the ones you inherit from society. They are more specific. They make something tingle in your consciousness in a way that nobody else will understand. That’s why you can’t listen to anyone else when it comes to what you want in life. I’m slowly learning what I want, and I only began to learn, really learn, once I discovered that I don’t already know what I want. that the things I’ve been chasing all this time have been other people’s wants.