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April 18, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
11:53
What Do People Actually Want?

It's hard to say.

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What do people actually want?
It seems like a simple question, but why don't we have a ready answer for it?
Some will doubtless say that what people want is so diverse that no one answer can properly encompass it, and they'll give a range of examples to prove it.
They might argue that some people would be happy with a beachside villa in the tropics, or some in an alpine glen in Switzerland, whilst others might prefer to travel the world on a luxury cruise liner and a million other different desires besides.
However, I don't think these kinds of answers properly encapsulate what people actually want.
Giving materialistic answers like mansions, food, drink, drugs, sex, fame, or anything like that seems to miss the forest for the trees.
These are ways of satiating the imminent desires generated by our passions.
They are a response to the biological demands made by our lizard brain and can indeed make up a part of the good life, but they don't seem to answer the question.
What is it you actually want?
As in, what is the point of doing what you are doing once you have satisfied your biological cravings?
It's not hard to find examples of people who have climbed to the top of the pyramid of materialist excess, only to find that they utterly hate their life and the people around them and they don't know what to do about it.
It is easy then to leap from the mortal realm and up into the plane of eternal abstractions.
Perhaps we just want a world to be structured in a certain way that produces a definitive outcome, and then we will have what we actually want.
Since Plato first dreamt up the form of his perfect state, we have been plagued by fantastical visions of what it is that people are supposed to want, all in aid of bringing into being the reign of a certain set of values.
As with the desire for material goods, people might well justly claim to want liberty, equality, rights, godliness, or anything else like that, but these are not ends in themselves, but as a means to some other end that is continually left undefined.
Let's just assume we finally figure out a way to achieve one of these values.
Then what?
Could it be that we actually don't know what we want?
Perhaps we simply don't have the ability to properly articulate the thing that we are actually looking for.
Maybe satisfaction is persistently masked by satiation.
If our actual wants are obscured by our immediate desires, then how could we ever access them in a widespread and collective way?
But they are surely not outside of the reach of our imaginations, as we have many fictional examples which tend to serve as certain touchstones that seem to tap into a kind of central and fundamental desire which resonates across time, place and culture.
We agree that certain commonalities of particular pieces invoke consistent perceptions, and so they in some way contain these properties, at least when viewed from our situated human perspective.
That is, at the very least, the way in which we describe these things that we are considering.
Entire genres are built on this concept.
Take, for example, horror movies.
Horror movies ought to be horrific, that is, to induce in us a particular series of visceral feelings, which we call horror.
A good horror movie is one that makes us feel this way, and a bad horror movie is one that fails to provide this experience and provoke the desired reaction.
And whether a particular movie is good or bad at its job is subjective and up for debate, but we admit already that there is a fixed objective for a horror movie and a standard by which it may be judged, and in the way in which we describe the product is to say that the movie itself, in some way, contains the horror it provokes in the viewer.
We literally say that was a scary movie, if it was a good movie.
And if the movie doesn't provoke this horror in us, either due to poor writing or poor production, we can collectively judge it against a standard to which we all seem to objectively be able to comprehend.
What prevents us from using such an analysis for other states of feeling?
If we can identify that certain conditions can in some way contain the properties which provoke certain reliable responses from us, is it not reasonable to think that there might be a particular feeling that we are attempting to reach with all of our material avarice, political activism, or high-minded philosophizing?
I think what people actually might want may be revealed in the feeling of nostalgia, and I'm probably not the first to make this observation, but I'm not aware of anywhere else where the point has been made.
Strangely, it seems that nostalgia is a topic which few philosophers have directly engaged with, and I can't seem to find anything truly substantive on the topic that anyone else has written.
I'll continue looking, but for now, here are my thoughts on it.
Nostalgia is made up of two Greek root words, gnostos and algos, meaning return, in the context of a kind of homecoming and pain in an emotional context, so it can literally be translated as the agony of longing for a return home.
It seems that anyone, indeed, everyone at some point in their life, has felt nostalgia, and it might be that this longing for home is the proper root of what it is we actually want, which is continually obscured by our immediate needs.
The satisfaction of the longing for home seems like it might plausibly point us in the direction of something that could be that thing which people actually want.
It is the concept of home that is the part of nostalgia that generates the pain of its absence.
So what do we mean by a home?
We don't simply mean a domicile in which we find shelter from the elements or store our belongings, obviously.
If the emotional conditions are wrong, a house is certainly not a home, and indeed may take on the aspect of a temporary accommodation if it's loveless, or even a prison if it's abusive.
No, it's clear that the old adage that home is where the heart is reveals that in our longing for home we are really looking for something else, something that we know is real but exists either within or because of us.
Something built on a kind of love that we can never really shake off and probably can't properly describe in words.
That kind of love that we take for granted because, God willing, it's been with us our entire lives and forms a kind of unthinking assumption that becomes lost to our conscious minds during the hustle and bustle of our daily lives.
I can't help but feel that it might be connected with the concept of romance.
Why would a certain person bewitch us if we only had transient expectations of them?
It isn't just that they are physically attractive, there are many people to whom we are physically attractive, with which we don't feel that romantic spark.
That suggestion that there could be a promise of a happily ever after through the mutual enchantment of a story shared together.
It seems that romance is nature's way of telling us that, with this particular person, we could create something magical together.
And I think the magical thing that is created could be what our hearts are tugging us towards when we feel nostalgia.
But I think it might only be partially ours.
Not only do we share it with our partner, but I think it's there to be shared with our children as well.
I think the ideal that we carry and cynically discard because we fear that it might be beyond us is that, at its romantic best, a home is founded on the love we would share with someone whose future with us was written in the stars, the object of our destiny, and the person with whom we bring something unique and beautiful into existence.
When we found a home with the person we love, we are taking the first step on the road to establishing our own familial mythology, which is itself inherited by the children who are born from it.
If we play our part, it is our children that will carry in their hearts their own longing for the home in which they were raised, in the same way that we can find ourselves longing for our own childhood homes.
What I am describing here is of course a fairy tale ideal, I concede, but in more concrete and realistic terms, it seems to me that a home is something to which people have created a kind of unique sentimental attachment, and from which they develop a series of relationships which binds them to a place and to one another.
These metaphysical chains connect our hearts to the people around us and the place where we live, and the longer that we live in the same place, the deeper and more entrenching these bonds become.
The more we love the people around us, the harder it is for us to be separated from them, and the more powerful this sense of nostalgia becomes when we catch a scent on the breeze or hear a refrain from a song, which triggers a sudden rush of feeling and memory.
So for the briefest moment we are transported back to that place we call home and feel that lump in our chest that tells us that we aren't really where we ought to be.
And I think this reveals the question that will help guide us to what we actually want.
We have to ask ourselves, where do I belong?
Where is it that we have these ties that bind us to the people and the place, who accept us and who we accept in turn, that makes us really feel that we belong to it?
Where can we go that we feel that we've been there forever?
Walk streets it feels we paved ourselves and to pass people whose minds it feels like we can read.
When we possess all of this, I believe it becomes some kind of binding psychic tapestry of being and expectation which we collectively understand is ours, which is as much a part of us as we are of the people with whom we share it.
It becomes our home, and I think a healthy home creates in us a kind of emotional equilibrium which makes us feel that the world is as it ought to be and makes us realize that this is where we should be.
And once you strip away the material pursuits, the political grandstanding and the esoteric theorising, what else are you left with?
When viewed in this way, the search for belonging and the search for meaning harmonize into the same concept.
So this is what I think people actually want.
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