You add three items to your online shopping cart, check out, and close the tab. Ten minutes later, you open your phone and start looking at something else. You got what you bought, but the excitement faded before the package even left the warehouse.That strange feeling between getting what you wanted and feeling empty shows a deeper problem: we often do not know what we actually want.As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek put it: “The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.”The quote points out how human unhappiness works today. We usually think suffering comes from missing basic needs like food, money, or freedom.
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Žižek argues that modern life creates a different kind of frustration. When society gives us endless choices, our main struggle is no longer getting what we ask for, but figuring out whether those wishes are really ours or were handed to us by someone else.
A scene in a deserted cinema
This idea appears right at the start of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, a 2006 documentary film made by director Sophie Fiennes. In the movie, Žižek stands in a desert, speaking directly to the camera from inside rebuilt movie sets to explain how films shape our minds.In the opening scene, Žižek looks at David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller Rear Window. He argues that movies do not just tell us stories; they act like machines that teach us what to dream about.Instead of seeing movies as a simple escape from real life, Žižek used the film to show that human wishes are mostly built by the world around us. We do not pick our goals out of nowhere. We rely on culture, art, media, and society to give us a model of what is worth chasing.
The problem of borrowed wants
To understand Žižek’s point, it helps to look at French thinker Jacques Lacan, whose ideas heavily influenced Žižek. Lacan wrote that human desire is always shaped by other people.In simple terms, children are not born knowing what to aim for. They watch their parents, friends, and society, and then copy what those people care about. Over time, people mistake these copied goals for their own personal choices.This creates a clear trap. When you finally reach a long-held goal, like buying a specific car or getting a high-status job title, the victory can feel surprisingly flat. That disappointment happens because you achieved someone else’s dream instead of your own.René Girard, a French historian, called this pattern mimetic desire. Girard showed through classic books that people rarely want an object just for what it is. Instead, we want things because we see someone else wanting them. The object becomes a way to get attention or fit in.When Žižek says our real problem is knowing what we want, he is showing how hard it is to separate our true personal goals from what everyone else is doing.
Feeds, apps, and modern choices
This struggle has become much harder in a world run by automated phone apps and smart online feeds.Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify do not just guess what you like based on your past clicks. They actively train your tastes. When an app constantly shows short video clips of a certain style, travel spot, or lifestyle, it creates new cravings that feel natural to you.Modern advertising is designed around this exact trick. The goal is no longer just selling a product that fixes a real problem. The goal is making you feel incomplete until you buy it.When you buy something recommended by a feed, you satisfy a need that the phone created just minutes earlier. You feel in control, but your decision was guided from the outside.This same pattern shows up at work. Many people experience burnout because they spend years grinding for a big promotion or a prestigious title, only to realize when they get it that they never enjoyed the actual work. They wanted the status that came with the job, not the daily job itself.Fixing this confusion starts with realizing that our first instincts are rarely original. Figure out where your choices come from, because chasing the wrong goal means gaining nothing when you finally catch it.
