You Can't Always Know What You Want

But If You Try Sometime You Might Just Find You Must Commit, Anyways

Moderns are good at getting what they want but bad at figuring out what they want.

Ancients are bad at getting what they want but good at figuring it out.

How do I know? I don’t, but my hypothesis is that anxiety and depression track with prosperity and liberty (when these are not accompanied by a sense of purpose). Having more stuff or more optionality doesn’t get us too far when it comes to figuring out how to orient our lives.

I’ve been thinking about this for awhile, but I give a hat tip to Russ Roberts who puts beautiful language to it in his new book, Wild Problems, which is about how the most important questions in life can’t be answered by using data or utility optimization functions because they concern who we are and who we want to become.

I find broad overlap between Roberts (look out for our podcast conversation in a month) and my recent podcast guest, Mark Lilla, who argues that the point of the humanities is to help us figure out what we should desire rather than simply how to execute on our desires (which is the task of, say, STEM).

I also found this to be a theme in a recent essay by Antonio Garcia Martinez called Why Judaism? Abandoning Secular Modernity.

One way of putting it is this: modern liberty means we have choice but not all choices are equally good or good for us, so if we worship liberty alone, we’ll have nothing to help us know what to choose. We have more choice than ever yet the overwhelm from it can lead to fatigue or even despair, a life of constantly weighing options.

Leo Strauss might say that the ancients were aware of the modern tendency to excess and so curtailed our options intentionally. But the more interesting question to ask is whether we can celebrate choice itself without cheapening the importance of a counter-veiling weight in life, commitment.

In many ways this is what the notion of conversion seeks to solve, which is the idea that once you choose something you can no longer unchoose it. And it raises the question of whether it is better to be born into a tradition or to choose to take that tradition on.

When I think about the archetype of a hero’s journey I think of immigration, leaving a known place for an unknown one, and I think of it as a story of conversion, of discovering oneself anew by recreating oneself in a new context. The difference between Abraham and Emerson, though, is this: Abraham is commanded to leave his place of origin, while Emerson’s mandate of becoming is immanent—it comes from within.

Progressives like the Emersonian idea better because they think that learning is best when it comes from internal motivation, but I’m not so sure. Perhaps internal motivation exists in dialectic with external motivation, and we need some spurs from outside to get the wheels going, even if we end up resenting the external, revising it, repurposing it, or something else entirely.

The Emersonian problem is that even if we want to “become” we don’t know what we should. Abraham had a clear directive—he had to decide whether to follow God, but once he did, the rest followed.

I think we can take solace from the fact that both ancients and moderns have it tough, and that baked into the human life is the existential anguish of having to discover who one is—by changing.