Desire has layers, and they can be tricky to navigate. If someone asks you what you really desire right now, the first instinct might be towards immediate pleasures and urges: pizza and milkshakes, sex with that cute barista, revenge on the driver who cut you off this morning — generally engaging with your most immediate and stickiest patterns.

If you brush past those, you may find yourself in a forest of shoulds that you’ve absorbed from family, friends, society, and your personal history; the things that you want because they’re what you’re supposed to want. These vary widely depending on your culture and upbringing, but might include things like a stable job with a wife and 2.4 children, a promotion, a six pack, access to the 3rd jhana, more kindness, stronger faith, and so on.

If you manage to tunnel down under all the shoulds, you’ll start finding things that don’t even feel like desires — they just feel like outcomes of What Reality Is Like. Whether you want them or not is irrelevant, they simply are. These ones are harder to point to without knowing you as an individual, but some of them for other people have included things like

• Humans are comfort-maximizing machines, it’s just what we’re like.
• The universe is a random and chaotic, my own life is the outcome of a trillion trillion random turning points.
• Men are gross monsters, women are a lovely community of Beings.
• Technology has destroyed society.
• Society has held back technology.
• City living is uniquely stressful.
• Country living is uniquely stressful.

Each one of these, for a given person, may feel like a simple fact of existence, barely worth pointing out and certainly not classifiable as a “desire” they have.

And yet: humans are amazing at convincing ourselves of just about anything. The ability astounds. And out of the many possibilities for what humans find (and have historically found) common sense to believe about the world, you hold these facts to be common sense. Regardless of their ‘truth’ value, something in you wants these to be true.

Why do you want these specifically to be true about the world? How does that let you act? What do these facts make necessary in your life? In your relationships? What do they give you an excuse for?

These aren’t questions that can be answered in an afternoon, or in a single month. But over time, more and more possibilities open up.

When you can feel how your own desires go down not just to your daily wants and needs, but into the kind of world you choose to live in — it eventually becomes obvious just how free and open you are to navigate the world, and to change how others navigate it.