What I want may not be what I really want. Said in another way, what I want may not be worth wanting. We want worthy lives, lives that are worth living, that are the best they can be. But, we do not always want what in our best reflective moments, is best for us. In this post I suggest that you need to reflect on your desires for a worthy life. I use some tools from the great book, Life Worth Living (2024) by Volf, Croasmun, and McAnnally-Linz (LWL, henceforth).
Better and Worse Lives
It is not common for us to scrutinize our desires, at least our desires for ultimate, life orienting things. When students begin to think about “ a life worth living” bound to come up is some sense of freedom. A life of imprisonment or heavy restriction on our choices is a life that is less than the best. This leads many to say that the best, flourishing life is a life of “getting what we want.” But this is simply at that is inadequate. If we reflect on our desires, our deepest ones, others things come into view.
The Pizza Life
We can see this most clearly in our eating desires. Surely at some low level, we have desires to eat junk food all the time. You don’t need to reflect on your desires to know this! I have a desire to eat pizza, potato chips, and ice cream most of the time. I indulge this desire, however, only a select times. Why? Because even though I want those things, I want something else more: health. Health surely is part of a life worth living. So obviously not everything I want, nor what you want, is worth wanting, even if we are free. So there has to be some other way to characterize a flourishing life other than “getting what we want.”
Could it simply be that health in this situation is what I want the most? Health is surely one of the most basic good things of a flourishing life. But even health can be outweighed.
Even Health has Limits
Consider two examples. First, we can pursue health to such an extreme extent that it snuffs out another basic human good: pleasure. There are delights of food and of company with food that are available to us only if we, at least at times, relax our food regimen. Getting together with friends to have a delicious meal that is less than completely optimal for your bodily health may be good for your friendship. Same goes for celebrations and holidays. In these cases, there are other goals of a life worth living that outweigh strict dietary goals for bodily health.
Second, consider another reason one might risk their health: a good cause. Suppose one wants to volunteer with refugees in refugee camps. Once refugee camps have sub-optimal sanitary and health environments. Depending on which part of the world and the extent of the conflict causing the displacement, there are communicable diseases, mental health risks, environmental hazards, and so on. If we consider only our bodily and mental health, contributing to the relief in such a crisis is not advised. Of course, there are other perhaps more important reasons to contribute. Again, there might be other goals that outweigh strict dietary goals.
Each of these examples aims to show that our desires, even our good desires for something as basic as health, is not above scrutiny and must be weighed in light of other considerations. The examples show that while health is always a good to be pursued, it has to be pursued in a certain way that is in balance with other important goals, like friendship and service to our fellow human beings.
Levels of the Depths
We do not often question our desires in an overt way because we live most of life in an autopilot mode of existence. But our autopilot depends upon deeper answers that we often assume and do not reflect on. In the great book LWL, the authors detail three different modes of reflection of increasing depth that feeds into our autopilot mode of existence. Each of these modes supports and results in our autopilot actions and vision of life as a whole, even if we have not consciously reflected on them. My autopilot actions to allow my diet to pause when I am celebrating with friends or family suggests a deeper commitment to loving relationships in conjunction with health, even if I have not consciously thought of this before.
Level #1: You on Autopilot
Autopilot is the layer that we live in most of the time. We act but we do not know why we act (LWL: 5). If our day to day actions and pursuits are in alignment with what we hold as the greatest value and is, in fact, the greatest values, then we are wise. We are living the best life. However, without reflection there is no guarantee that our lives are in alignment with what is truly worth living for. This is why Socrates criticizes the unexamined life, if it is not examined, it is likely that it is not in alignment with the best pursuits there are. So, in order to examine these we must plunge the depths.
Reflect on Desires #2: Get Things Done
This is the first layer of how you reflect on your desires (LWL: 6). It essentially asks, “Are my activities achieving my goals or ends?” Or as LWL says, “How can I get more of what I want?” This allows to stop autopilot and examine our activity to see if it is getting what we really want. As I have mentioned in another post, though, this layer is indifferent to what we’re pursuing. Rather, it just allows us to get whatever we’re aiming for with more efficiency. The immense liability is that the goals that we pursue may be pretty pitiful, or down right bad.
Reflect on Desires #3: A Vision of Your Life Worth Living
If we go deeper we find important depths of how you reflect on your desires. When we go deeper, we begin to find what really makes us tick, what we really want. We may want more recognition on our team or in our work, may want to date this person, or finally finish some project. But these are only surface wants. This level asks, “but, why do I want that?” Do we want recognition because we’re insecure, because it allows to get some achievement, or something else? But why do we want those things? When you reflect on your desires at this level, it can quickly devolves into our most basic desire for a flourishing, happy life. There may be specifics here but it is typically more broad or general.
“Perhaps what we want is a life lived with courage. Or maybe it’s a life that, most of all, leaves room for others. Perhaps we treasure a life of abundant provision. Or maybe one that has just enough. Do we want a life of ecstatic joy or peaceful serenity? […] Choices abound. And the choices are ours” (LWL: 9).
Once we find this, we now have the task of orienting our life around it. A daunting but important task.
Reflect on Desires #4: A Vision of THE Life Worth Living
But even if we can get at our deepest desires and we are clear on what we should pursue, it is not automatic smooth sailing. Our deepest desires may be misguided. Many people get what they most want only to discover that what they most wanted was worth all that much. This can happen with success in a field, relationships, and fame. We can find ourselves absolutely clear on the overall desire of our life and pursue it ardently only to find that what we were pursuing is not all that valuable. We need to go even deeper to reflect on your desires.
This happens to me when I plan and agonize over a potential big purchase or new toy. I’ll mention one in particular. I had wanted this item for over 10 years and for most of that time, it had been out of my budget. An opportunity arose where I could affordably purchase it. I finally got to use it and it was amazing, cooler than I thought it would be. But now over a year after having it, it has lost its luster. It’s still cool but I now think that I could have perhaps been happy without it. This story is just about a toy, what happens when this realization applies to our life?
Worthy Lives is What We Desire
No amount of reflection in the prior levels will alleviate this hollowness. We should not pursue bad ends with more fervency (that would be bad) nor can we dig deeper and deeper into our desires (this would never end). At level this deep level we must ask, “is what I want, worth wanting?” Is my vision of life, or yours, a legitimate, valid way to live a human life? We need not ask how we figure this out yet all you need to acknowledge is that it is a legitimate question and among the most important we can ask as humans.
This layer focuses us on questions of truth and this is unfamiliar territory for most of us (LWL: 13). And this is exciting—and somewhat confusion—territory. Not only are we not accustomed to this layer but we also find that this layer opens us up to uncomfortable territory for now our lives can be scrutinized. There are differing claims about the good life and what is worth pursuing and we have to admit that ours might be wrong. But that is OK because while ignorance may be blissful, blissful meaninglessness is no life we want to live.
These layers function as an apparatus to examine our life and ideally we should move between adjacent layers. This can be a scary place for some us to start to consider but I assure you there is nothing more important.