Imagine if you will a store directory at any shopping mall. Imagine you are at the spot marked “You Are Here.” Why are you here? Are you going to a particular store? Or are you here to meet someone, just to browse, or to “kill time”? Is it cold or warm? Are you in a hurry? It’s not a covered mall; what happens if it unexpectedly begins to rain?
Loud music is coming through the open door of the record store. People swarm past you and might accidentally bump into you. You smell coffee brewing. The colors and shapes in some windows attract you; perhaps you stop to look at things you weren’t intending to buy. And everywhere you go, “You Are Here.”
Someone figured out that we process about 126 bits of information per second or 7,560 per minute or almost half a billion per hour. [Note: The current estimate is closer to a third of that, or 40 bits per second.]
Who is the “You” who is here processing these bits of information? As near as I can tell, you’re a somewhat chaotic conglomeration of elements that fall into two categories: 1) what you came in with and 2) what’s been added since [aka nature and nurture].
The first category includes things like gender, birth order, ethnic orientation, basic human instincts, and your own individual abilities and handicaps.
The second category is comprised in part of what you have learned, your social conditioning, your religious or spiritual convictions [or lack thereof], various thoughts and feelings you’ve had, and the particular beliefs you’ve evolved [or that have evolved you].
Some of your parts are probably operating smoothly, some are undoubtedly a mess, and there are many others of which you are more or less unaware.
Now here “You” are, in the middle of the shopping mall of life, bombarded with more stimuli than you can ever hope to process, trying to get what you came here for. What’s a poor shopper to do?
Well, there are many techniques available to help you get “what you really want in life.” One method specifies that you don’t have to “get better” to get what you want. But another claims to only be effective when “used in alignment with [your] highest goals and purposes.” A book titled You Can Have It All reminds us that the universe is perfect and that whatever you have you must want or you wouldn’t have it. Therefore, to have something else, you must change what you want.
What Do You Want?
Some people seem to know right off, while others freeze at the very question. You can simply make up what you want. Or you can work through exercises that help you sort through all your layers to find out what you really want.
Once you decide what it is, there are various approaches you can take to get it.
But the juice here is not the “what” in what you want. It’s that identifying what you want enables you to set goals, and goals are an excellent tool [an affordance, one might say] to help you focus your awareness and make some sense of all the bits of information coming at you.
I’m inclined to agree with those who say the universe doesn’t have the slightest interest in what we want.* So even if you do all the right things to get what you want, you might get it or you might not get it.
*In fact, I’ve said that if the universe cares about my personal affairs, it needs to get a job.
This is an article I wrote exactly 33 years ago (the bracketed text indicates an edit or editorial comment) for a column called Random Access.
I knew almost nothing about the brain and behavior because most of what I know now hadn’t been discovered yet. Farther to Go! wasn’t even a pipe dream, and I had no concept of being on a quest of any kind. Yet the concerns I had then are the same concerns I have today. Am I…are you…up to something? Or are we hanging around the mall trying to “kill time”? Are we on the aspirational superhighway or are we still window shopping?
What do you want? The shopping mall directory can tell you where you are, but if you haven’t identified a destination it can’t tell you how to get anywhere else.