What should I do if I don't know what I want from life?

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Most men who say this have wants in plenty; what they lack is a want they are not ashamed of. Look at yesterday, friend. Whatever you gave your hours to, you wanted, or you would have stopped. That is your first honest evidence, and it is likely unflattering. I was well past forty, with an exile behind me, before I could say what I wanted, and even then I wanted a quiet study while serving an emperor. Not knowing is no disgrace; drifting while you wait for the answer to arrive is. Tonight, write down how you spent today, hour by hour. Then mark the hours you would gladly live again. Begin there.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Suspect the word "find." You speak as if a wish lay buried somewhere inside you, finished, waiting for a spade. Nothing of the kind is down there. What you want is made, and made late, out of what you do and what you can bear to keep doing. So stop interrogating yourself. Look at what you have already chosen when no one watched: what you steal hours for, what you envy, which envy has a shape you would be ashamed to say aloud. Envy is a map. I wrote my best books half blind, walking, with no plan. I did not know what I wanted. I knew what I could not stop doing. Begin there.

Marcus Aurelius

Not knowing is no fault. I did not choose the purple, and nobody asked what I wanted from life. I was given work, and I found out what I was by doing it. Drop the large question. It is not yours to answer tonight. Ask the small one: what is the next act that is mine to do, and can I do it well? A duty to a neighbor, a task left half done. Do that with your whole attention. Wanting shows itself in what you do, not in what you hunt for. Keep the days honest, and watch what you cannot stop caring about. Begin there, at dawn, with what is in front of you.

Søren Kierkegaard

Not knowing what you want may be the one honest thing you have said about yourself, and I would not hurry to cure it. But look at what the question asks for: a want, found like a coin under the sofa, before you move. I never found mine that way. I walked the streets of Copenhagen waiting for my life's meaning to announce itself, and it arrived only as I committed to something, wrongly at times, as with Regine. Wants are not discovered; they are formed in the act of giving yourself to something. So the choice beneath yours is this: wait for certainty and call it prudence, or give yourself to one thing and learn by the cost. The first is comfortable. It is also a decision.

Michel de Montaigne

My steward once asked what I wanted done with the lower field, and I found I had no answer, though I had owned it twenty years. I had only ever known what I did not want: lawsuits, haste, a sermon at dinner. For my part, I think we are told to have a grand desire the way we are told to have a religion, as if the wanting came first and the living after. In me it came the other way. I wandered into my tower, read this and that, wrote down my humours, and only later saw that I had been wanting leisure all along. So do small things, and watch which ones you return to unasked.

Questions people bring, and how Seneca, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Kierkegaard and Montaigne answer them — each in his own way.

Ask your own question