Decide What You Want

10 billion dollars is being spent right now to get you to buy something you don’t have. But it’s deeper.

That investment is not just to get you to acquire X because you don’t have X in your drawer at home. Because the chain of decisions that is required between you seeing X and pulling out your credit card is long and convoluted, the 10 billion is spent on cultivating in you a desire for X that will compel you past the many possible off-ramps of the decision to pull out your wallet.

If that investment succeeds in creating a desire, it has told you what you want, how it feels to not have it, and the satisfaction you’ll experience once it’s in your possession.

People like us don’t hand over the responsibility of deciding what we want to an entity that stands to benefit from us. But “creating” our own desires is a tricky enterprise when billions of dollars are competing for that responsibility.

Here’s a radical suggestion: Grab a trusted friend and begin the intentional work of asking each other, “What should we want?”