Today's question is simple. Or at least it appears to be:
What do you want? When we hear that question, any number of voices may pop into ours head from the crudest, "I wanna get laid" to the most noble, "I want to bring happiness to the world" to the most mundane, "I want to finish my homework and take a nap." How are we to sort through these disparate inclinations?
A simple test to cut through the sundry internal voices is to imagine ourselves in old age looking back on our lives. This forces us to follow our desires to their conclusions. For some desires, this can be a pretty simple exercise: If we look at the desire to eat a candy bar, we can see that this desire ends in feeling satiated and possibly guilty, but in the long run, one candy bar will not be very significant.
Long-range desires may be more difficult to follow to their conclusions because they are often part of a larger, unconscious vision of an ideal life. If you are aiming to go to business school, for example, you probably will not be satisfied with just arriving at the first day of classes at Fuqua. Part of the idea of going to business school is to get on a fast career track that would include making a lot of money and holding position of authority. Of course, having all that money and power would not be truly gratifying unless friends, family and lots of women took notice. The story may go on, but the point is that the aspiration to go to business school is part of a larger, overarching story of how you want your life to turn out.
With this overall vision of life in view, we can take a critical look at it. We must first ask if the series of events we envision are possible. We may realize that our personal fairy tail has us running a multi-million dollar company, raising a family, traveling the world and gardening five hours a day-all at the same time. This simply isn't feasible. We may unconsciously think that business school will bring us all these things, but in reality, it cannot.
By recognizing this, we could avoid years of wasted effort trying to get into business school and take up gardening instead. Or maybe we would realize that we should quit wasting time learning about plants and having long-term relationships so we can spend more time reading the Wall Street Journal. Either way we can save ourselves a lot of time and effort by taking some time to reflect on where our aspirations are ultimately leading us.
If we find that our ideal lives are possible, we next have to ask ourselves what we are currently doing to reach our goals. We might have aspirations involving money, family, travel and gardening, but find that at the moment, our grades are mediocre, our social skills are only average and the only thing we know about plants is the feeling we get from smoking weed on Wednesday night.
We may forestall taking steps toward our aspirations because they are lofty, intangible goals such as love, power or truth. If we listen to common wisdom, however, we know this is not a valid excuse because "every great journey begins with a single step" or "Rome wasn't built in a day." You may not know exactly how to work toward an ideal, but you can guess the general direction you need to follow.
If you want to fall in love, you are better off hanging out oat George's Garage Friday night rather than sitting in your room, even though we all know that George's is no guarantee that you will find your soul mate. If you want to find the truth, you can increase your chances by spending more time reading Socrates and talking with deep people instead of watching "The Simpsons." In the end, any gift of the magnitude of love or truth is given, not earned, but you can increase your odds of getting it.
After finding feasible life goals and coming up with plans to achieve them, we have to answer a final question that may seem redundant at first: Is that what you really want?
All of our life plans have one thing in common: an ending that reads, "and they lived happily ever after." But is this necessarily true? In his description of Hinduism in "The World's Religions," Huston Smith says that the worst curse that can be cast on man is that he gets what he wants. The idea of reaching a goal like having a family or getting rich may seem too distant to concern ourselves with now, but I don't think so.
It wasn't too long ago that I was a freshman and dared to imagine what I could make of my four long years at the University. Now I am a senior and I have everything at the University I could have imagined: I live in a house with wonderful friends, I lead a vigorous life, I spend hours everyday chatting with people on campus, I have the opportunity to wrestle with life's toughest questions with a sincere group of people (and write about it in this column), and yet somehow I do not feel I've got it made the way I imagined freshman year.
So I leave you with a new question: What is worth wanting?
James Todd is a Trinity senior.
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