If you allow yourself to explore your wants and desires without guilt — simply noticing which ones feel good and which don’t — self-interest naturally evolves into altruism. The mechanism to teach compassion, empathy, and altruism is not to suppress wants, but to support them. Let someone explore a desire and discover its limitations so they can find the deeper want underneath.
Joe illustrates with a staircase of romantic wants: you might start wanting the perfect body (maybe television taught you that), discover it’s unsatisfying after the initial thrill, realize you want someone essential in their body, then deeper still, discover you need genuine love connection. Skipping steps doesn’t work — if you jump from wanting the body straight to wanting connection, you’ll always be pulled back to the unresolved want.
“All self-interest, if you allow it to, leads to a more refined understanding of what makes us happy.”
Even altruism has selfishness in it — helping others feels genuinely good. The distinction is between craving (a hungry ghost quality that signals an addictive want) and healthy wanting (which evolves through exploration). Our wants are like the way a tree bends toward light — they teach us the next step, not the ultimate step, in our evolution.
Related Concepts
- Craving versus wanting
- Wanting matters more than what you want
- Wanting is aliveness
- Discovery, not improvement
- Wants are strategies for essential human needs