You Are Allowed to Want More Than This

Something has settled over us lately and I don’t think we are talking about it enough.

It is not despair exactly. It is quieter than that, and more of a shrug, or a collective “it is what it is,” as if we all agree that the world is too large and too broken to bother wanting anything different from it. I see it when I scroll through social media, talk to friends, and I watch the people around me navigate their days. There is a fog of apathy all around us and we have started to mistake it for realism.

I want to call this out and push back on it because I think it is costing us something we cannot afford to lose.

Before I say anything else, I want to clear say: Wanting more is not an ungrateful act. I know that many of us were taught, directly or indirectly, that wanting too much was dangerous or rude or selfish. You might not get it, and then you would have to feel the pain of that. You should focus on others, not just yourself. Better to be realistic and keep your expectations in check. Better to be grateful for what you have and quiet about what you do not.

Underneath all of that, there is a message that I think is harming us and our future: do not ask for things that do not exist yet.

But everything that exists was once something that did not exist yet, and the only reason it came into being is that someone wanted it badly enough to try to get it.

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Wanting something new is inherently destabilizing because it challenges the status quo. It questions systems and structures and traditions that have been in place long enough to feel like facts, which is exactly why we learn to not to do it. Wanting something different from what exists requires you to stand, at least briefly, in disagreement with the present state of affairs, and that is uncomfortable or even risky. So we learn to endure instead.

This shows up in the career you have outgrown but continue to stay in because leaving feels presumptuous, or the leadership behavior you tolerate because, what can you do? It shows up in the life that looks perfectly successful on paper, but does not quite fit you anymore because instead of acknowledging that, you adjust yourself to fit your life better. You shrink to match your circumstances rather than letting your wanting lead you toward something that actually matches you.

The problem is that when you shrink your wanting, you do not just limit your own life, you lower the ceiling for everyone around you. You tolerate leadership that de-motivates you, you accept systems that exhaust you, and you pass down to your children the message that the appropriate response to an imperfect world is to adapt to it, rather than to want something better from it, let alone try to build that thing.

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The apathy I see everywhere right now is understandable. There is an enormous amount of information coming at us every day, much of it overwhelming, much of it contradictory, most of it outside our control. The world is changing faster than any of us can fully process, and everyone has a different take on where it is all headed. In the face of that much noise and uncertainty, it makes complete sense to want to catch your breath and stop throwing your hat into a ring you cannot see clearly. To just wait it out.

But there is a cost to that waiting, and it accumulates over time.

When we aren’t actively in the mindset of wanting more, curiosity suffers, which in turn negatively impacts creativity. I don’t only mean artistic creativity, I mean the creativity required to solve difficult problems, to build better structures, and relate to each other in new ways. On a personal level, the disappearance of wanting shows up as resentment and exhaustion from living a life that doesn’t feel like your own. On a collective level, it looks like stagnant leadership, recycled ideas, and a culture that keeps repeating itself instead of evolving.

It is easy to mistake endurance for strength. Staying in things that are familiar feels so much like safety that you stop being able to tell the difference between the life you want and the life you simply adapted to.

Wanting more is not the threat to stability that we have been taught to believe it is. It is actually what keeps things stable because it ensures that society continues to be responsive and alive and capable of change. Nothing new has ever entered this world that somebody did not first want. Nothing improves until someone is willing to say, clearly and without apology, that what currently exists is not enough.

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I want to tell you about something that happened recently that was small, but stayed with me.

My husband came home and announced that we were all going out to dinner. He had a vision for the evening and he was excited about it. I was not feeling it, though. I was tired and had been looking forward to finishing the book I was reading and doing some writing. The version of me that I have been working very hard to move away from would have felt immediate guilt about prioritizing myself over time with my family. They were gone all day and I did miss them. What kind of mother chooses a book over her children?

But I told them to go without me and that I would see them when they got back.

They said: okay. And they left.

When they came home, they were full of stories, laughing about something that had happened at dinner, and talking over each other to tell me about it. And I felt rested and genuinely happy to see them. The evening was better for everyone because I had been honest about what I wanted rather than performing the version of myself that would have come along, been present in body, but resentful in every other way.

It is a very small example, but I have had much worse evenings that looked much more generous from the outside.

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Allowing yourself to want something is not the same as knowing how to get it or even being ready to pursue it. You do not start with a plan or an understanding of exactly how the wanting turns into reality. You just need to stop talking yourself out of it before it even has a chance to form.

When you allow a desire to exist without immediately minimizing it, something inside of you changes. Your sense of what is possible expands, you stop focusing on whether you are allowed to want this and start listening to what actually feels right to you, and letting that guide more of your thinking. You begin to trust your own signals, which is the necessary first step.

This is not only personal. When we collectively allow ourselves to want more, systems actually do change. We get better leadership because someone wanted leadership that was more human and said so loudly enough and long enough that it became impossible to ignore. We get different work structures because someone refused to accept that exhaustion was simply the cost of working. We get expanded possibilities because someone decided that the limits they were born into were not permanent facts.

Consider the Post-it Note. Someone wanted a better bookmark. That’s it. A small, modest desire has become so woven into how we work and think and organize our lives that it is nearly impossible to imagine offices, classrooms, or creative spaces without it. It did not start with a grand vision. It was just someone who refused to accept that what already existed was sufficient.

There is nothing selfish about imagining that new things could be better than what you currently have. It is the blueprint for everything meaningful that has ever existed. Without it, we create nothing new and become very good at managing what is. We lose the capacity to imagine what could be.

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Here is the only invitation I want to leave you with today, because this is not about action yet. This is not homework, just a question to sit with.

Where are you wanting something that you have not said out loud? Where have you been talking yourself out of a desire because it feels unrealistic or inconvenient or like too much to ask? What would change, even slightly, if you stopped dismissing it and let yourself want it fully, without immediately following the wanting with a list of reasons it probably will not happen?

You do not need permission to hear your own desires. You do not need to justify them or earn the right to them or know exactly where they lead before you allow them to exist. The wanting itself is not selfish or ungrateful or naive.

It is evidence that you are still awake. And that matters more than you know.

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