What’s Worth Wanting? / Discerning What Matters Most in a Life Worth Living

From auto-pilot, to effectiveness, to self-awareness, to self-transcendence and pursuing a life worthy of our humanity. From there, we can tune our desires around what we believe matters most. And we can craft strategies with greater confidence that what we’re seeking is actually worth finding. Perhaps some day we might even live on auto-pilot with habits tuned around what matters most.

Senior Lecturer at Yale College and Life Worth Living Director, Matthew Croasmun explores what's worth wanting in this this chapter-by-chapter video curriculum series based on his bestselling book (with Ryan McAnnally-Linz and Miroslav Volf), Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

Life can come at us at a crazy pace. Most of the time we’re running on auto-pilot. For better or worse, our habits are carrying us wherever they will…

My hunch is that you’re probably watching this video because you want to go deeper. But what do we mean by “deeper”?

As it turns out, “deeper” comes in at least three importantly different flavors.

The first and most common we might call “effectiveness.” After running on auto-pilot, we go a bit deeper to ask whether what we’re doing is getting us where we trying to go. When we’re thinking in terms of effectiveness, the goal is given; we’re just asking about what gets us to it. We’re looking for strategies that get us where we’re going—faster, cheaper, or more efficiently.

Dig a little deeper still and we engage in what we can call “self-awareness.” If in effectiveness mode the goal was unquestioned, in self-awareness we begin to ask what it is we really want. Do we really want fame, or are we after recognition? Do we really want wealth, or are we after security? Do we really want pleasure, or are we after joy?

But there’s a yet deeper question to ask—one that we hardly ever ask these days: namely, What is worth wanting? This question takes us to the realm of self-transcendence. Whatever it is we want—whatever it is we’re truly after—in this mode, we want to know: What is a fitting, worthy shape for our aspirations? What would be worth wanting in the first place?

From there, we can tune our desires around what we believe matters most. And we can craft strategies with greater confidence that what we’re seeking is actually worth finding. Perhaps some day we might even live on auto-pilot with habits tuned around what matters most.

But only if we dig deep.

So, let’s dare to ask not just what we want and how to get it, but what is actually worth wanting in the first place. What matters most?