You add three items to your online shopping cart, check out, and close the tab. Ten minutes later, you open your phone and start looking at something else. You got what you bought, but the excitement fades before the package even leaves the warehouse.That awkward feeling between getting what you wanted and feeling empty reflects a deeper problem: We often don’t know what we really want.As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek said: “The problem for us is not whether our desires are satisfied. The problem is how we know what we want.”The quote explains how human unhappiness works today. We generally think that suffering comes from the disappearance of basic needs like food, money or freedom.
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Žižek argues that modern life produces a different kind of despair. When society gives us endless choices, our main struggle is not to get what we ask for, but to figure out whether those desires are truly ours or handed down to us by someone else.
A scene from an abandoned cinema
This idea appears at the beginning The Pervert’s Guide to CinemaA 2006 documentary film made by director Sophie Fiennes. In the film, Zizek stands in a desert, and speaks directly to the camera from inside a reconstructed movie set, explaining how movies shape our minds.In the opening scene, Zizek looks at David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller Rear Window. He argues that films don’t just tell us stories; They work like machines that teach us what to dream about.Rather than seeing films as a simple escape from real life, Zizek used film to show that human desires are mostly constructed by the world around us. We do not choose our goals randomly. We rely on culture, art, media, and society to tell us what’s worth pursuing.
problem of need for credit
To understand Zizek’s point, it helps to look at the French thinker Jacques Lacan, whose ideas greatly influenced Zizek. Lacan wrote that human desire is always shaped by other people.In simple words, children are not born knowing what their goal is. They look at their parents, friends, and society, and then copy the things those people care about. Over time, people mistake these copied goals for their personal choices.This creates a clear trap. When you finally reach a long-held goal, such as buying a specific car or obtaining a high-status job position, victory can feel surprisingly flat. That disappointment happens because instead of fulfilling your own dream, you fulfilled someone else’s dream.René Girard, a French historian, has called this pattern imitative desire. Girard showed through classic books that people rarely want an object just as it is. Instead, we want things because we see someone else wants them. The object becomes a way to attract attention or fit in.When Žižek says that our real problem is knowing what we want, he is showing how hard it is to separate our real personal goals from what everyone else is doing.
Feed, Apps, and Modern Options
This struggle has become much more difficult in a world driven by automated phone apps and smart online feeds.Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify don’t guess what you like based solely on your past clicks. They actively train your tastes. When an app continuously shows short video clips of a certain style, travel destination or lifestyle, it creates new cravings that feel natural to you.Modern advertising is based on this exact strategy. The goal is no longer just to sell a product that solves a real problem. The goal is to make you feel incomplete until you buy it.When you buy something recommended by the feed, you satisfy a need that the phone created a few minutes ago. You feel in control, but your decisions are dictated from outside.The same pattern is visible in the workplace also. Many people experience burnout because they work hard for years to get a big promotion or a coveted title, but when they get it they realize that they never enjoyed actual work. They did not want a daily job, but wanted the status that came with the job.Fixing this confusion begins with realizing that our first instincts are rarely primal. Find out where your passion comes from, because chasing the wrong goal means achieving nothing when you finally catch it.