As long as I can remember, I’ve done exactly what I wanted.
Paired with an underdeveloped frontal lobe in the ’90s, that translated into being loud, driving too fast, and moving through the world with full main-character energy. I mistook intensity for authenticity and impulse for truth. It felt alive. It felt honest. It also carried a kind of carelessness that only reveals itself in hindsight.
When the turn of the century arrived with depression and mental health struggles, that same philosophy—do what you want—didn’t disappear. It simply took darker forms. Drugs. Manipulation. Dangerous situations that felt justified in the moment because they were, after all, what I wanted. Want, when left unexamined, has no built-in morality. It will happily steer you straight into a wall and call it freedom.
In my early twenties, after introspection had begun to replace bravado, a book quietly altered the way I understood myself. Diary of a Drug Fiend landed at exactly the right moment. On the surface, it’s a story of addicts living lavishly, burning bright, and eventually confronting something deeper than pleasure or escape. Beneath that, it’s a meditation on Will—not willpower in the self-help sense, but Will as orientation. Direction. Hierarchy.
The idea that stayed with me was deceptively simple: wants can be layered.
Not all wants are equal. The desire directly in front of you isn’t always the one most worthy of obedience. Sometimes the truest act of self-honesty is not indulging the immediate urge, but recognizing that it serves a smaller, noisier want at the expense of a quieter, more enduring one. That realization didn’t make me less free. It made my freedom intelligible.
I didn’t stop doing what I wanted. I refined what wanting meant.
I still do exactly what I want. I don’t accept lunch dates with people I’m not genuinely interested in. I don’t participate in social rituals that drain me or require me to pretend. I don’t say yes out of obligation or fear of being misunderstood. If I’m present, it’s because I choose to be.
But over the decades, I’ve learned that serving the highest-order want often requires actions the lower ones would resist. If you want a successful marriage, you may attend an event you actively dislike because your deeper want—your partner’s happiness—outweighs your momentary discomfort. If you want your child to feel safe, seen, and deeply loved, you might find yourself sitting on a hard floor playing Barbies long after your knees have started negotiating terms. Not because it’s fun. Because it matters.
This is where the idea is often misunderstood. From the outside, it can look like sacrifice. From the inside, it feels like alignment.
There is a profound difference between doing something because you should and doing it because it serves what you want most. One breeds resentment. The other breeds coherence. When your actions answer to your highest values, even inconvenience takes on meaning.
I often tell new friends that if I’m doing something with them, they can trust that I genuinely want to be there. There’s no decoding required. No hidden ledger. No unspoken obligation. That kind of clarity is rare—and it’s a gift, not just to others, but to myself. It keeps my life smaller, quieter, and far more intentional.
I don’t live impulsively anymore, but I also don’t live performatively. I live by asking a simple, ongoing question: Which want am I serving right now? When the answer is honest, the path tends to reveal itself.
Freedom, it turns out, isn’t about obeying every desire that appears. It’s about choosing which ones deserve your loyalty.