Desire

I often feel that I do not know what I want. Today I have come to the conclusion that this is because of a confusion between two different kinds of desire for something, for which I do not have distinct names.

The first is distinguished from the second by its painfulness. There is a certain kind of wanting, relatively rarely experienced (by me), which is such that the lack of the thing desired is seriously painful.

The second kind is a kind of mere (meaning, lacking the distinguishing character of the first) motivating belief that the thing desired would be good. Most of my desires are of this kind. When I want a beer, this means that I think it more likely than not that drinking a beer would be nice. If I don't get one, it's no skin off my nose. One source of confusion about what I want is that sometimes I do not know whether what I think might be good really will be. But this is not the main problem.

I think one reason I am sometimes confused about what I want is that I sometimes want something in the first sense, but, believing that I am not likely to get what I want, conclude that some other things would be good to have instead. Perhaps really I want these other things only because they seem likely to help assuage the pain of failing to get what I wanted in the first sense. Since sometimes the things wanted secondarily, as it were, are in fact counter-productive with respect to getting what I want primarily, I find myself confused and conflicted. Even more confusing, perhaps, is that I sometimes mistake the unhappiness resulting from a failure to satisfy my primary wants for a result of my failure to get what is only secondarily desired, when those things would be at least temporarily anaesthetic.