Wants, the Chasing of Things, and Knowing Yourself

Going after the things we want is a part of life, but we need to distinguish them from needs, and we need to learn from our wanting and chasing so that we take better care of ourselves.

Something I’ve found myself thinking about a lot over the last few months after upending my work life is trying to answer the question What do I want? Or maybe it’s What do I want next?

Of course, I know I’m not alone in pondering these questions. Plenty of us struggle quite simply because we were never taught about needs and wants and also because zoning in on what we want takes vulnerability and patience. The recovering people pleaser and perfectionist in me is like, Frickin tell me now! Or, Point me in the direction of the thing or person that will tell me so I don’t have to fanny around (read: show up and live) figuring it out. The real me is like, It’ll reveal itself in time. Also, right now, you want to be slower because that’s what you need.

After writing about needs and why they matter a while back, I figured it’s time to delve into wants. If I could condense the thousands of stories and questions I’ve received over the years into one question, it would be, I need(ed)/want(ed) this person/thing/goal and I got it, so… why aren’t I happy / why are things going so wrong or I didn’t get it, so… how can I be okay in myself and not hate me for not getting it yet or failing or how do I go about getting it so that I can finally feel good enough?

How well we know and take care of ourselves, including how good we feel about us (our self-esteem), is, in essence, an expression of how aware we are of our needs. Most humans, however, experience a degree of confusion and frustration about their needs because of wants. Some of us don’t even know there’s a difference between the two!

One of my all-time favourite quotes is, “A need sustains you. A want entertains you”, by Karen McCall from her book Financial Recovery.

Wants represent what we find desirable in life.

We get a strong sense of wanting or wishing for us to be, do or have something or for something to happen.

Behind our wants, which can be driven by our values (our preferences, principles and priorities for living happily and authentically) as well what we may have been conditioned to desire or that we’ve seen others be, do and have, are the feelings our wants represent.

Our wants are shorthand for the person we are or want to be or who we think we’re not.

On some level, we want something because of how we think we’ll feel once we be, do, or have it and who we think we’ll become. Again, all very human.

Where things get messy is that we use wants to meet needs and so we wind up excessively focusing on wants to the detriment of our well-being.

Chasing our wants and desires feels less vulnerable and sometimes gives instant gratification, whereas being honest about who we are, which means being honest about our needs, can feel scary. We often see wants as, Right, if I do this, this and this and follow the blueprint/formula/paint-by-numbers or put enough effort into it, then I can get it. Wants often feel like they’re outside of ourselves—a person, thing, goal—that we can throw our bandwidth (time, energy, effort and emotions) at whereas needs can feel like we’re poking around in emotional territory and being “needy”.

There’s also the culture of selling us wants and desires as if they’re a need through, for instance, the media and advertising. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t make anywhere near as much money.

We might not know how to articulate, for instance, that we need connection and intimacy, but we do know that humans are conditioned to want to tick off the box of being settled down in a romantic relationship. This desire for a relationship, and for it to look a particular way romantically and for it to have happened by a particular time, is peddled to us by family, church, community, umpteen books, films, television shows, and snippets of people’s lives on social media.

We might know that we feel under-recognised and under-acknowledged from childhood but not realise that part of why we chase certain versions of success through work or material goods is because we’re still trying to satisfy those old unmet needs. Again, we have enough influences around us to convince ourselves that if we can just attain our particular version of success, we will feel whole. At the same time, we ignore the many examples of people being miserable despite their ‘success’.

We think we’re meeting our needs, but we throw our wants into the mix and sometimes want something so much that it feels like a need.

And then we get the thing we wanted and that we thought we so desperately needed, only to sometimes feel like a bottomless pit. We wonder why we feel empty/disappointed/hopeless/anxious/ready to chase the next thing/{insert your feeling of choice} even though we technically have or are being or doing the thing we believed we wanted.

What I’ve discovered in the journey of getting to know myself is that chasing after things and feeling like something I don’t possess yet is somehow crucial to my identity, and, so, on some level, my self-worth is a pretty good indicator that it’s a want masquerading as a need that’s also distracting me from a real need or quite simply myself.

That doesn’t mean that I think there’s anything ‘wrong’ with chasing after things, but chasing in and of itself also requires us to be honest about our ‘why’.

• Do you want the thing for reasons that mean you can be happy in yourself right now and going forward regardless of what happens? Or do you want the thing because of what you think it will mean about you if you get it?

• Also, do you genuinely want this thing or is it that you want it because you’re programmed to want it?

One of my favourite examples of preference versus programming is how some women can feel as if they’re “behind” if they reach their thirties and haven’t already ticked off the career, relationship and kid boxes, even if some of these aren’t their priority or actual desire. And then many thirty-something women feel pressure to get their skates on and have children… even if they don’t actually want to have them. And then many late-thirty-somethings and forty-something women are programmed to feel as if they’re “past it” if they’ve “failed” to do what society programmed them to think women are “supposed” to do by a certain age. I dive deep into preference versus programming in this podcast episode.

I remember being thirty-eight and suddenly being consumed by thoughts of whether to have another child. To be fair, it also felt, at times, like the world and its dog wanted to know if I was going to have another. I felt like time was “running out” even though, paradoxically, 1) I didn’t actually have the desire to have another; I just felt like I should want to consider children at that point in my life because I was programmed by what I’d absorbed from society and the media and 2) I grew up in Ireland where having children in your forties was the norm. Truth be told, I didn’t have a strong feeling in either direction [about having more children], and that was enough for me.

Even when I consider some of the pressures I’ve put myself under as a writer, I acknowledge that, for instance, chasing a book deal is the programming of what I internalised about the writing-career ladder. It started to feel like I needed it for ‘credibility’ even though I’d previously been really happy doing my own thing.

When I’m honest about where wanting the book deal kicked in, it was a couple of weird rejection and exclusion experiences combined with wanting recognition. In people-pleasing terms, I am an efforter, someone who not only uses their efforts to please and advance themselves but who’s also driven by a need to feel seen to be making an effort and a need to feel perfect. As a result, I associate effort with outcomes. This also means I could wind up wanting something because I’m aware of my efforts and what a version of recognition (and success) looks like. You can find out more about efforting and the other styles of people pleasing in my book The Joy of Saying No.

Wants are the decoration, the icing, what can be very nice to have, but if we’re not being and getting to know ourselves through healthily meeting our needs, which includes having healthy boundaries and living by our values, not other people’s, then no matter how much we accumulate and appear to attain our wants, we’re not truly going to feel good in ourselves.

So we can want to please others and might go to extraordinary lengths to do so, but we need to be and take care of ourselves. That want and need might look like two very different things.

For instance, we might crave the attention and approval of a certain type of person, but we have a greater need to 1) give ourselves attention and self-validate and 2) engage with the people, things and situations that healthily allow us to meet our needs.

We might want to achieve all the things, climb the ladder, have the success, accolades and recognition, but odds are, our need for connection, authenticity, rest, intimacy, to spend time with loved ones, to explore our curiosity is greater than our need for power, status and recognition.

This means that if our dream something isn’t that (e.g. dream job, person, purchase, achievement, etc.), it’s okay. It is. If we’re not feeling the way we expected we would once we achieved or attained the thing, that’s also okay. It’s all information, data about ourselves. It’s a call for us to dig deeper into what we need.

It may well be that it’s our ego that wants, for instance, the “dream job” more than our true self does.

In fact, the clues about who we are will come from our often quieter inner voice, our intuition.

Our ego will be concerned with being right instead of wrong, the winner instead of loser, or having power and recognition. It will concern itself with what everyone else thinks. Incidentally, these are totally human concerns and motivations. We all have egos, and they have their uses, but we can’t let them run the show.

The true you—your true self—just wants you to be okay. It wants you to be you without mashing yourself up.

So your ego will be concerned with, for example, letting go of the “dream job”, but your true self will breathe a big-ass sigh of relief and whisper that you’ll be alright while your inner critic tries to scare the bejaysus out of you. How the frick are you going to pay the bills? How did you manage to screw this up? No one will take you seriously after this. Stop being such a baby about things.

The less we know ourselves and the less willing we are to pay attention to the information from our experiences and choices, the more likely we are to be driven by consciously and unconsciously trying to fulfil unmet needs via our wants. We’re likely to pursue our wants in ways that breach our boundaries, and we’ll confuse wants driven by our ego with needs.

Often the chasing of things and climbing of ladders just leads to more chasing and climbing. Where are we going? And to what end? What is it all for?

Over the past few months, I’ve felt, well, tired. It feels like I’ve been climbing ladders, chasing things, and often trying to feel ‘enough’ and ‘included’ in some way for most of my life. And it’s so feckin subtle and sneaky sometimes that it’s taken being slowed down to notice how bloody pushy and striving I can be.

In knowing myself, I recognise that slowing down is a really good way of picking up on old patterns and making sure I’m aware of my ‘why’.

Notice the patterns in your life. How we do something is how we do a lot of things.

We’re often seeking something we already have—e.g. power, status and recognition—we just haven’t acknowledged and internalised this yet.

The least we can do if we’re going to chase and climb is acknowledge that not only have we done this but what this has required from us en route.

Sometimes we think we want something so much because of how hard we’re chasing it or the pain we’ve suffered en route or the sunk cost of what we’ve already invested, or the version of us (idealised self) we think we’ll lose or fail to be if we stop or change course.

And I think this is where we need to acknowledge that as much as wanting things is a fundamental part of the human experience, it’s also partly about our emotional baggage. We’re all carrying stories, judgements, beliefs and old feelings about the past that guide how we think, feel, behave and choose today. If the way we’re going about achieving our wants means that we don’t feel good about ourselves, it’s a call to explore the baggage behind what we’re chasing or our approach.

The more in touch we are with our feelings (emotionally available), the more in touch we are with our needs and wants. When our lives are too busy to feel, or we’re so invested in something that we don’t have the space or desire to truly consider ourselves, our wants, our desires become murky.

I know I’ve had things that I’ve wanted and been (and remain) super happy and content with them, and then others, meh, not so much. Such is life.

You discover who you are by discovering who you’re not. You also discover what you need and want by getting the things you’ve needed and wanted and receiving more data about what’s a right fit. Tweak and refine as you go.

If you’re not starving yourself out in some way, you healthily desire things and are willing to learn from what comes up in your life. You feel content because you’re not looking for something outside of yourself or a thing that hasn’t happened yet to define you. You live more in the present than in the past.

I’m pretty sure that it’s not a coincidence that I made big changes in my work life, made the decision to choose and keep re-choosing to stop chasing recognition and also broke up with my mother. My relationship with her played a big role in my quest for recognition in the first place, and I just don’t want to play that role in any way anymore.

Pay attention to anything you withhold from yourself or tend to see as only being available from others because this is where the self-care of healthier boundaries will pay big dividends.

Over the last few months, I’ve learned that I’ve wondered what’s “next” because I’m programmed to believe that there has to be a next thing, a grand plan, something to chase. But there doesn’t have to be, and certainly not all the time. And so the gentle exploration continues even though the recovery perfectionist in me sometimes squirms and panics at my being slower.

You don’t always have to know exactly what you want (not realistic, and sometimes we need a rest from wanting), but you do need to live your life in a way that healthily allows you to take care of your needs. From there, it’s much easier to figure out wants and discern them from needs because you feel safe and content within. You feel like home because you feel more like yourself.

I’m planning to teach some classes around figuring out who you are, what you need and want, and knowing when you’re off course. If you have suggestions of what you’d like help with, leave a comment or ping me an email.