Whose idea was this want

A young graduate in Kuwait starts work and, within a month, wants a particular kind of new car. Not any car. The large one, in the dark colour, the one half the people in the office car park seem to drive and every other video in the feed seems to be filmed beside.

Ask why, and the reasons come easily. Safety. Comfort. Resale value. All real. But the wanting came first, and the reasons arrived afterwards to support it.

A great deal of our wanting arrives this way. We rarely sit down, look at our lives and work out what would make them better. We look at the people near us, and the people on our screens, and we absorb what they want. The wanting spreads from person to person, the way an accent does. It feels like our own because it lives in our own head.

There is nothing shameful in that. People have always learnt what to value from one another. It is part of how a culture holds together.

The only question is whether it is working. The car arrives, the payments start, and for a few weeks it feels like arriving somewhere. Then the feed moves on to the next thing, and the wanting moves with it, and the car is just a car.

If the things we were taught to want keep leaving us a little emptier than promised, the answer is not to stop wanting. It is to go looking for different ideas about what is worth having, and this time to choose them on purpose.