Who owns your desires?

So much of what we do on a daily basis is fuelled by our desires. But we spend so little time thinking about where our desires come from.

This disconnect leads to a lack of fulfilment, coming about by living out the desires that others have projected upon to you.

Instead, we must try to live as true as possible to our core purpose - the real reason we're on this Earth.

However, everyone and everything influences our desires, whether we want to be influenced or not. Your parents want a certain thing for you? Congrats, it's automatically your desire. Close friends do something in a certain way? Chances are you'll have the desire to be like them too.

So how do we know which desires are ours and which are layers of irrelevance smothering our core purpose?

Regular introspectiveness is one activity I've noticed is effective. Whenever you have a desire to do something, take a moment to observe where it came from. Did you see a picture on social media? Or was it instead a deep-seated intuition telling you that the action is the right thing to do?

The former happens a lot more than you might think. But it should be the opposite.

Find what puts you into a flow state and manage your life so that you can spend as much time as possible doing these activities. They are most often something creative, perhaps writing, perhaps photography, perhaps sport. Regardless, this is where most fulfilment lies for you.

The external world fades away due to the depth of your attention, leaving you with a deep sense of fulfilment once the work is done.

The other tactic is embracing minimalism for more clarity. When there is less in your life for you to keep track of, you pay more attention to what remains. This means that you value what you do put your attention towards a lot higher than before.

It's my belief that the more peripheral desires we can strip away, the happier we're going to be. This is through spending more time on the one or very few fulfilling tasks that we still have the desire to do.

Figuring out your real desires is applying the Pareto Principle on the most intrinsic and most powerful level. If you can focus your attention on the 20% of things that truly make you happy, you're going to get an outsized return on your investment. This manifests itself as wellbeing and fulfilment - what we're all striving for in some form.

Spend some time looking into who owns your desires. It should be you and perhaps good people close to you as an exception to the rule. Live for you, not for anyone else.