The Difference Between What You Want And What You Want

“I want to go to the concert with Rob, but I also want to be there for my mom’s birthday party.” “I know he’s wrong for me, but I just can’t help it. I keep taking him back!” “I need to get the lawn mowed, and I really do want to get it done, but I keep procrastinating.” Do you know what all three of these situations have in common? The person saying them is suffering from a lack of clarity on what their wants (plural) are or even how they work. Humans are complex creatures. We can want more than one thing. We can even want two or more things that are mutually exclusive, like wanting to keep hanging out at a party, and wanting to be home playing video games. It’s possible - common even - to want things that aren’t possible in the physical universe, like defying gravity or erasing our past actions.

To understand how your wants work - how they work together or against each other - it is first important to dissect exactly what a want is at a fundamental level. It’s easy to say “I want some ice cream” and we all know what that means, but do we? Could you define it? It’s one of the first concepts we learn as children, and once learned, how many of us go back and really figure out what that sentence means at a fundamental level? Does it mean we “need” ice cream? What does “need” mean for that matter? That it is fundamental to our life or lifestyle? Is it some mystical force from deep inside ourselves, making demands of us that we must comply with? Can you ignore your wants? If so, what happens?

The answer to these questions is both more simple and more complex than you might first expect. At its essence, a want is most often just a special name we give a certain type of yes/no question we pose to our Cognizant Mind. When you say you want some ice cream, it just means you have - probably without thinking about it consciously - posed a question to your cog mind “Will we benefit from eating some ice cream?” and your cog mind has decided that - on the whole, taking everything else into consideration - your life would be improved (even if only in a small way) by you eating some ice cream. Whether that’s actually true or not is a different question. It has to do with the chemicals released in our brain when we eat (especially sugar and fat), any feelings of guilt that you may have installed, your social standing if someone sees you, and anything else that factors into whether your Cog Mind figures the act of eating ice cream will have a net positive effect on your life at this moment. Whether that’s true or not, it’s what your Cognizant Mind thinks. And the result of that yes/no question comes back as a gut feeling that gets translated into either “I want ice cream,” or “I do not want ice cream.”

However, it is important to recognize the form of the question you have asked your Cognizant Mind. You have not asked it if eating ice cream is the best thing you could be doing right now (compared to other options), or whether it’s the best thing for you in the long run. Or at least, that is not what the want-question entails. “Do I want it?” is a very tightly scoped context that means “right now” and “without regard to other wants.”

And as we’ve already established, other wants are not only a possibility, but the norm:

Op: Do I want ice cream?
Cog: Yes.
Op: Do I want to lose weight?
Cog: Yes.
Op: Won’t eating ice cream cause me to gain weight?
Cog: Yes.
Op: Dude!
Cog: What?

However, this raises the other definition for the word “want.” Sometimes, when we discuss “what I want,” we’re actually talking about the reconciliation of all of our wants into one conscious decision. English really wants [sic] for a distinction between these two forms of the word “want.” Myself, I usually distinguish them as either “micro-wants” or “macro-wants.” A micro-want is an instance of what we’ve talked about above - asking a yes/no question of your Cog Mind as to the benefits of an activity or decision within a very small-minded context. But a macro-want is where your Op Mind weighs in. When weighting a macro-want, the discussion goes more like this:

Op: Do I want ice cream?
Cog: Yes.
Op: Do I want to lose weight?
Cog: Yes.
Op: Which is more important to me: the immediate gratification of eating ice cream or the long term effects of a trimmer body?
Cog: Trimmer body.
Op: Then that is what I shall choose.

Note that in this example, I opted for the trimmer body, but whether that decision is the correct one or not is purely subjective and based on your own personal experiences and circumstances. Maybe you have just suffered a bad breakup, and the emotional lift from the ice cream is worth more to your emotional well-being, than this one-time indiscretion will hurt your overall bodily health. That’s a perfectly legitimate decision and since it is entirely within your own garden, no one else gets a vote or has any standing to judge your choice. This isn’t about the decision, so much as the process of how the decision is made.

They key, though, is to understand that, while English only has one word for “want,” there are actually two very different internal mechanics at play here, and as long as you understand and recognize the difference in your own decision-making, the seemingly contradictory scenarios listed at the beginning of this essay resolve themselves quite nicely, and you can go about your day much more confident in your decisions.