Why do you not know what you want?

The short answer: **you almost certainly do know, and the knowing is being overwritten by a faster, louder answer about what you should want.** The should-answer is well-formed, defensible and arrives instantly. Yours is vague, slightly embarrassing, and arrives second, which means it usually does not arrive at all.

So this is not a search problem. It is an interference problem.

How to tell which answer you are getting

The should-answer comes with justification attached. You can explain it. It would sound sensible if you said it to a colleague. It tends to be shaped like a plan.

Yours is usually a single image, or a feeling about a place or a way of spending a day, and when you say it out loud it sounds insufficient. *I want to live somewhere quiet.* *I want to stop being in charge.*

The embarrassment is diagnostic. The should-answer is never embarrassing, because it was built to be presentable.

The question that gets round it

Not *what do I want*. That question invites the should-answer directly.

Try instead: **what would I do if nobody I know would find out?** Or: what did I stop doing, and when, and what was happening at the time? Or the most useful one — **what am I envious of?** Envy is unflattering and it is a superb instrument, because it responds before the presentable part of you has time to intervene.

Make a list of who you envy and for what. It will be specific, it will not be about money, and it will point somewhere.

Not knowing is sometimes protective

Worth naming. Not knowing what you want is safe. You cannot be refused it, you cannot fail at it, and nobody can object to it. The moment you name a want you have taken a position, and positions can be disappointed.

People who have been punished for wanting things — as children, usually — get very good at not knowing, and it is a skill rather than a deficiency. That does not make it less of a cost now, but it does mean the answer is not to try harder to know.

Start smaller than the question

You do not have to know what you want from your life. Almost nobody does. Start at the size of a Saturday: what do you want to do on Saturday, and then actually do that, and notice whether it was right.

That is real information, it is available this week, and a life is largely made of Saturdays anyway.

Where this is in the book

*The Quiet Conspiracy* is a scene in which several people want things they cannot say, in a room where saying them is the only thing that would help.