When You Don't Know What You Want Anymore

It's Saturday, the kids are at a birthday party until four and for once nobody needs a lift anywhere. You've been looking forward to it all week. Then you're standing at the kitchen bench with a cup of tea going cold, and you can't think of one thing you'd like to do. In the end you put a load of washing on, wipe down the bench and answer a couple of work emails. By the time everyone's home, the afternoon has gone and you couldn't really say where.

Or someone asks where you'd like to go for dinner and you say, "I don't mind, wherever you like." You've said it for years to keep things easy. Lately, though, you've noticed that when you stop and ask yourself, there isn't really an answer there.

This comes up a lot in my work, often with people who are very good at knowing what everyone else wants. They know which child needs a quiet night and which friend could do with a phone call this week. Ask them what they'd like for themselves, and there's a long pause. "I honestly don't know," they'll say, sometimes with a little laugh, as if it's a silly thing to admit.

How it slips away

Hardly anyone loses touch with what they want all at once. It tends to happen in small trade-offs that make sense at the time. You pick the restaurant the kids will eat at. You take the job with the better hours. You stop going to Thursday netball when the shifts change. None of those were wrong, and you'd probably make most of them again. Over the years, though, "What do I want?" turns into "What will work for everyone?", and after a while that's the only question you ask.

For some people it comes into focus after a change. The kids need you less, a relationship ends, you leave a job you'd been in for years or you move somewhere new. There's suddenly more space, and people start asking, "So what's next for you?" You might expect that space to feel like freedom. For a lot of people it's more like standing in an empty room.

That sounds hard. It can be unsettling and a bit lonely too, especially when everyone around you seems so sure of what they want.

Why it's so uncomfortable

A lot of people feel embarrassed about not knowing. You're an adult with a full life, so it seems strange to go blank at such a simple question. Some people take it as a sign they've become boring, or that they're ungrateful for what they have. Others feel uneasy about wanting anything at all, as if their wishes would just be one more thing for the family to make room for.

Something I notice is how often not knowing what you want sits alongside a lot of tiredness. When you've been tired for a long time, it's hard to feel drawn to much of anything. Wanting takes a bit of energy, and there hasn't been much spare.

People often say to me, "I should know what I want by now." When you say should, that's a big demand on yourself. What people want tends to change many times over a life, and there's no age when it's meant to be settled.

What might still be there

I don't think most people stop wanting things. More often the wants get very quiet and learn to wait until there's room. They tend to show up sideways first.

Maybe it's the little pang when a friend posts photos from a weekend away on her own. Or the way you linger in the garden section at Bunnings. A Sunday-night flatness that isn't really about Monday. Those moments are easy to brush off, but I'd be curious about them, because they're often the first signs of something you'd like more of. Envy gets a bad name. I tend to see it as information about what you'd like in your own life.

It might help to start much smaller than "What do I want from my life?" A question that big would leave almost anyone blank. Some people find it easier to begin with the very small things, like which mug you reach for in the morning. Or saying "Actually, I'd love Thai" when someone asks about dinner.

When I ask people what they used to love before life got this full, the answers often come more easily. Swimming before work, or long drives with the music up. Not all of it will fit the life you have now, and it doesn't need to. It can just be a reminder that you've always had tastes of your own, even if they've been on hold for a while.

You can love the life you've built and still not be sure what you want from it next.

There's no rush to work any of this out. What you want tends to come back slowly, in small, ordinary ways, once it has some room and nobody's hurrying it. Until then, "I'm not sure yet" is an honest answer, and you're allowed to give it for a while. I wonder what you might let yourself want, if it didn't have to make sense to anyone else.