I don't mean this to be an incendiary topic, but I wonder if this view or the opposing one is felt with any passion by anyone here.
There's a monumental question, in determining your path forward, in what you choose to use as your North Star. Your guiding principle, that which propels you forward and leads you along your journey. People use all sorts of different things, but typically they all boil down to a personal reason. Looking deeper, however, I think there are two main camps from which this decision is made.
What you want, versus what you like. Seemingly similar, perhaps even related, you say? I say not. Like the eternal rivals of cause and effect, of push and pull, these two titans stare each other down icily across the no man's land of free will.
I'm here today to make the case to put your eggs in the basket of what you like, and not simply what you want.
What you like is what you lean toward when all else is constant. It is the sole variable by which you should judge and make your choices, in true scientific method. What you like comes from the purest form of yourself, what you idly prefer, what you - without any better reason of gain or motive - simply enjoy. It's what you like. It's a better representation of who you are, what represents what truly makes you happy, and what contains within itself your best avenue by which you should live your life.
Trust what you like more than what you want, as what you want may just be a product of your immediate conditions/surroundings. What you want can be merely a construct of what your parents wanted for you, what your neighborhood expects of you. What you want can drown out the simple, quiet truth of what you like, and steamroll right over it on a destructive path toward someone else's idea of a future. What you want is a cowboy with a barbed lasso, catching you with its pricks and making you its own, branding you with the outcomes and effects of the world immediately around you.
Let what you like be the light that guides you. it knows you better, and answers to something you hold more deeply.
i got some ideas on this. will post in a few days. but yeah. side with what you like for sure.
with one caveat
make sure you figure out what you like.
when blinded by what you want, you start thinking you like things that you actually don't.
like does one really like to eat a whole box of ice cream? does one really like to snort grams of coke? no.... chained by their wants they've grown to sacrifice their likes to somebody else and it got twisted.
It's always good to reflect when you find yourself liking something too much, and try to become aware of the emergent entanglement