Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not.

All of the things we want, or have been taught to want, flood in. It turns out our wants are not as clear as we may have thought. As we attempt to sort through the endless images offered up by our desires, we realize they come from many sources: what our culture values, what our family considers worthwhile, what our friends or social circles prize,

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Most of all: know where your desires came from. Your desires have a history. You can’t know what a ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ desire is unless you understand where it came from – and that involves diving deep into your past, understanding how you have evolved as a person, and seeing which desires have been with you for a long time and which ones have... See more