What Do I Actually Want This For

There is a question that turns up at inconvenient times. In the car outside the house with the engine off. Halfway through a meeting. On the fourth day of a holiday, once you have finally stopped being tired. It goes roughly: what is all this actually for?

Most of us push it back down, because it does not arrive with an answer attached and there is a school run.

It is not a crisis. It is a maintenance question

We have made this question dramatic, which is a mistake. Asking what you want your life to be about is not a symptom of anything. It is the same check you would run on anything you depend on: is this still pointing where I thought it was pointing?

When it does feel like a crisis, it is usually because it has been ignored for a decade and has turned up all at once.

Why you cannot think it through in your head

Try it. Sit somewhere quiet and think about what you want. Within ninety seconds you will be thinking about something else, or having an argument with somebody who is not in the room.

The head is not built for this. It loops, it defends, and it reaches the practical objection before the idea has finished forming. Writing is slower than thinking, and slower is the entire point. A sentence has to be finished before you can object to it.

Ask smaller questions

"What is my purpose" is unanswerable and everybody knows it, which is exactly why it gets asked. It is safe. The questions that move things are narrower and slightly rude.

• What did I spend most of last week doing, and who chose that?
• What have I said yes to twice that I did not want either time?
• What would I genuinely miss if it stopped tomorrow, not sentimentally, actually?
• What am I waiting to have before I start?
• Who do I envy and what specifically about it?

The last one is uncomfortable and it is the most reliable of the five. Envy is a fairly accurate compass with terrible manners.

Envy is a fairly accurate compass with terrible manners.

Write the first answer, not the good one

The first answer is usually a little embarrassing and mostly correct. The good answer, the one you would say out loud, arrives about four sentences later and is largely built from things you think you ought to want.

So put the first one down before you have had time to improve it. You can be reasonable in the second paragraph.

Once a month is enough

This is not a daily practice. Ask these questions every day and they turn into noise. Ask them once a month, on a page, and something else happens: you start reading last month's answer before you write this month's.

That is where it gets interesting. One answer is an opinion. Twelve answers in your own handwriting is evidence. You find out which of your complaints is permanent and which one you quietly solved in March and never noticed.

Where to do it

Not at your desk and not at the kitchen table with everybody else in the room. This is the one kind of writing that wants somewhere slightly out of the ordinary: a cafe, a train, a bench, the car before you go back inside.

The reason is straightforward. In your usual chair you answer as the person who sits in that chair. An hour somewhere else and the answers come out differently, which tells you something in itself about how much of what you want is really just where you were sitting.

Expect the answer to be small

People brace for the answer to be "leave everything". It almost never is. After twelve months of asking, the usual result is two or three specific things: one thing you will stop agreeing to, one thing you will make room for, one conversation you have been avoiding.

That is not a modest outcome. That is most of what changes anybody's life.

The book

What Is This For is twelve months of this. One set of questions a month, with room to read back before you write. It does not tell you what to want. It asks the same awkward things at intervals long enough for your answers to move.