People who claim, “I don’t care what others think” are either liars or psychopaths. For better or worse, status matters. People who claim, “I know exactly what I want for me” are either liars or live in an isolated cave. For all non-cave dwellers, the unending influence of people, adverts, media, art, etc. means it’s quite impossible to totally disentangle your unadulterated desires from socially-conditioned desires.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t partially disentangle the two. And even partial understanding meaningfully enhances self-awareness. Consider possessing zero self-awareness. Instead of having some idea about what you really want, you are solely guided by what society says you should want. All the times when your mysterious true desires fail to overlap with socially-conditioned ones, you may well “achieve” … and still be empty.  Because if you attain things the deep-down-unique-you didn’t truly covet, there’s a profound disconnect which shows remarkable concentricity with emptiness.

So we might as well try to get that partial understanding, right? Right. But how? Well, if you grew up in that cave, you would only have unadulterated desires. Of course this wasn’t your upbringing (thankfully), but we can extract a framework from the hypothetical: imagine what you would do if you couldn’t tell anyone what you did? It works both in your imagination and in practice. Like, go to a concert by yourself, snap zero pictures, and tell nobody you attended. Little dips into this practice can yield rapid insights. Oh shit, I don’t really like this band. Rather, I like being able to tell people I saw a band that’s considered “cool” which, by association, enhances my “coolness.” And, again, this may not be a bad thing! Status confers many benefits! But status doesn’t mean happiness, and so upgraded enlightenment can help better prioritize actions going forward. You may still rank, say, female attractiveness just as highly, but you’ll be doing so from a position of greater self-awareness where you can more confidently declare that I want this for me.