The Things We Think We Want

“There are things we want because they suit our lives. And there are things we want because we think they will change how our lives feel.”

A wise man once told me to go and buy everything I wanted.

Buy the car. The clothes. The house. The holidays. Keep going until there was nothing left I could think of wanting. Because, he said, when there is nothing left to buy, you are eventually forced to ask yourself a much harder question.

What do I actually want?

I have never reached the point of owning every material thing I could possibly desire. There are still things I would happily buy, places I want to travel and experiences I want to have. I am not someone who believes wanting beautiful things makes us shallow, or that ambition becomes more virtuous when we pretend not to care about money.

But I have become increasingly interested in the difference between the things we want with clarity and the things we can simply make a very good case for wanting.

They can look remarkably similar.

Both can be exciting. Both can be logical. Both can fit the picture we have created of the life we are building. Yet some desires have a certainty beneath them, while others need to be continually explained, justified or imagined into significance.

I know this because many of the things I once wanted are no longer the things I want now. Not because I lowered my expectations. Because life gave me more information.

When I started my online business, I sold my carbon-fibre road bicycle. At the time, I had been training for triathlons and that bike belonged to a version of my life I knew well. Selling it was practical, but I made myself a promise: when I made enough profit from the business, I would buy myself a better one.

It became one of those markers we create for ourselves. A future reward. Evidence that the sacrifice had been worth it.

Except, by the time I received the profit to replace it, I no longer wanted to.

In the time between selling that bike and being able to buy another, I had changed. I immersed myself in the personal and leadership development products I had purchased, building a business and, perhaps more significantly, building a different relationship with myself. The person who had made that promise was not quite the person who had arrived at the point of being able to keep it.

For a while, I thought I wanted a mountain bike instead. Something less structured, more adventurous, a little further from the road I had already travelled. So I bought one.

It turns out that was not quite me either.

I still have the mountain bike, but these days the riding I enjoy most is with my children. I returned to tennis, a sport that feels more naturally like mine. The expensive road bike I had once promised myself disappeared from the list without ceremony.

This is one of the things about growth that we do not talk about enough. We spend so much time discussing how to get what we want that we rarely consider whether we will still want it by the time we get there.

“Some desires are deeply ours. Others belong to a season, an identity or an idea of who we thought we were supposed to become.”

The challenge is that they can feel exactly the same while we are inside them.

The meaning underneath the thing

After my divorce, I no longer wanted my diamond ring. It no longer held meaning, or represented something I wanted to continue carrying into my next chapter.

I took it to the jeweller to exchange the gold for cash, then asked my mum to take my boys into the store to choose a pearl ring for me. I used the money from the old ring to help buy the one they chose.

Today, I wear a pearl and diamond ring from my children, and I still absolutely love it.

The material object did not become less important to me. In some ways, it became more important. What changed was the meaning I wanted it to hold.

There is a tendency, particularly in conversations about personal growth, to create a false divide between material success and emotional depth. We are encouraged to believe that one is superficial and the other enlightened. I do not see life that way.

A beautiful home can create space for family. Money can create choice. A successful business can return time. A vehicle can carry children, bicycles and camping gear towards a life you genuinely enjoy.

The object itself is rarely the whole story.

What matters is whether we understand what we are asking it to give us.

We chase success, but often what we are really searching for is freedom. We want the bigger income because we want choice. We want the beautiful home because we want to feel safe. We want the holiday because we desire space and experience. We want the promotion because we want to feel valued. We want the relationship because we want to feel connected, chosen, loved and understood.

Sometimes the thing delivers that feeling. Sometimes it does not.

“Emotional wealth, to me, is partly the ability to know the difference.”

It is the richness of a life that feels good from the inside, not only one that looks successful from the outside. It is having enough self-awareness to recognise what creates peace, connection, freedom and meaning for you, and enough courage to allow that answer to change.

We are allowed to change what we want

What I thought I wanted in a life partner when I was younger is not what I want now.

That is not about looking back and rewriting the past. Life teaches us what matters to us, what we value and what we need in order to feel at peace within our own lives.

My wants now are far more internally refined.

Peace. Flow. Space. The freedom and synergy to create a life together, with aligned values and open communication. 

Age has not made me less discerning. Experience has simply made me less interested in details that do not determine the quality of a life.

I think this happens in many areas.

We spend years creating a picture of success, often before we have enough experience to know how we want our days to feel. We choose careers before we fully understand ourselves. We set financial goals before we understand what enough means. We imagine relationships before we understand what we value most within them. We create a version of the future using the knowledge, values and perspective we have at the time.

And then life gives us more information.

The problem is not that we change our minds. It is how often we continue chasing an old desire because we have already invested so much of ourselves in wanting it.

There is a certain maturity in being able to say: I wanted that once. I do not want it anymore.

It does not make the earlier desire foolish. It simply means we know something now that we did not know then.

I see this in the way I make decisions now, and increasingly, in the way my children do too.

We have a rule in our family for anything with a lasting effect. A tattoo is the great example. If you want a particular design, you need to still want it twelve months later before you make it permanent. No one is getting a tattoo. Especially at their young ages. But the conversation has come up along with many others.

The boys have adapted this principle to other decisions.

Recently, my eldest was choosing which middle school he wanted to attend. He had an answer, but he did not tell me for two weeks. He wanted to make sure he still felt the same way.

I loved that.

Not because every decision requires twelve months, or even two weeks, but because there is wisdom in learning not to confuse the intensity of a feeling with the permanence of a desire.

We live in a world designed to shorten the distance between wanting and having. We can buy almost anything immediately. We can change direction because we are bored, upgrade because something newer exists and mistake urgency for clarity.

But wanting something for a moment and wanting it as part of your life are two very different things.

The truck I think I want

At the moment, I think I want a truck.

Not simply because I like it, although I do. I imagine putting the bikes in the back and taking the kids riding somewhere new. I imagine camping trips, carrying furniture home without organising delivery, and having a vehicle that fits the way we live at this stage of our lives.

The truck has a purpose.

If my children were older and living their own lives, perhaps I would want a Mercedes or a Volvo instead. My needs would be different because my life would be different.

The Volkswagen I drive now was exactly what I wanted when my previous car broke down. It still does everything I needed it to do then with all the tech I still love. Nothing is wrong with it simply because I can now imagine something else.

And perhaps that is why I have not bought the truck.

I can make a very good case for wanting it. I can explain its purpose, imagine how we would use it and justify why it makes sense for this season of our lives.

But I cannot decide.

I have learnt something about myself over the years: the decisions that are right for me tend to arrive with intuitive clarity. They may require sacrifice, patience or a willingness to do something other people do not understand. But beneath all of that, there is usually a clear knowing.

The truck does not have that.

And increasingly, I have come to understand that the absence of a yes is information too.

Perhaps I will buy one later. Perhaps the clarity will come. Perhaps I will realise I wanted the life I imagined around the truck more than I wanted the truck itself.

For now, I do not need to force an answer.

This is where wanting becomes more interesting to me. We are often encouraged to make the decision, set the goal and move quickly towards it. But not every desire needs immediate action. Sometimes we need to leave enough space between wanting something and having it to discover whether the desire stays.

There is also the question of what I want more.

I could buy the truck now. Or I could continue to invest in myself, my business, shares or property. I could have the thing today, or continue strengthening my ability to create more choice later.

When I first started my business, I made a decision to prioritise it. There were things I could have spent money on then, but I chose to invest in creating a better life later. I was not building a business because I wanted to spend my entire life working. I was building it because I wanted more authority over how my life was designed.

That decision came with clarity.

And it has stayed with me.

It changed the way I see money, but more importantly, it changed the way I see choice.

The greatest return from building an online business has not been the ability to buy more things. It has been the expansion of what is possible. More flexibility around my children. More freedom to travel. More space to think. More control over where I direct my time and energy.

The business became valuable because of the life it made possible around it.

“We can spend our lives chasing the visible evidence of success while overlooking the invisible wealth we hoped success would create. Time. Peace. Choice. Relationships. Health. Purpose. The freedom to change our minds.”

These are not consolation prizes for people who do not achieve material success. They are often the reason we wanted success in the first place.

Perhaps the goal is not to want less

I do not think the answer is to become detached from desire.

Wanting can be wonderful. It gives us movement. It invites us to imagine beyond our current circumstances. Ambition has created some of the most meaningful changes in my own life.

But there is a difference between being driven by desire and being directed by it.

The older I get, the less interested I am in whether I can make a convincing argument for wanting something. I am more interested in whether, beneath the logic and the possibility and the picture I have created around it, the answer feels clear.

Not because every decision needs to become a deep philosophical exercise. Sometimes we simply like the shoes. Sometimes the holiday is just a holiday. Sometimes a truck is a truck.

But the bigger the decision, the more useful it is to understand what we believe it will change.

The career. The business. The house. The relationship. The income. The next version of ourselves.

Some things we know we want. Some things we think we want. Some things we continue wanting long after they have stopped belonging to us.

And some things make perfect sense on paper but never quite become a yes.

Perhaps that is one of the privileges of personal growth. We become more selective and more intentional, not because life offers us less, but because we understand ourselves more.

We learn that changing our minds is not failure. That waiting is not always indecision. That the absence of clarity does not need to be overcome simply because we are capable of making a decision.

“Sometimes, the space between wanting something and having it is where we discover what we were really searching for.”

The list may get shorter. The life becomes deeper.

And somewhere along the way, success stops being about collecting everything we once thought we wanted. It becomes having enough freedom to choose, enough self-awareness to recognise what matters, and enough trust in ourselves not to force a yes before it arrives.

xx

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