Slavoj Zizek’s quote of the day: “Our problem is not whether our desires are fulfilled. The problem is…” And the reason why getting everything you want still leaves you feeling completely empty
You add three items to your online shopping cart, checkout and close the tab. Ten minutes later, you turn on your phone and start looking at something else. You receive your purchase, but the excitement wears off before the package leaves the warehouse.The strange feeling between getting what you want and feeling empty points to a deeper problem: We often don’t know what we really want.As Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said: “For us, the question is not whether our desires are met. The question is how we know what we want.”This sentence points out how human misfortune arises today. We often think of suffering as coming from a lack of basic needs like food, money, or freedom.
CJP Jantar Mantar Protest Updates
Žižek believes 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 desires are truly ours or have been handed to us by someone else.
Scene from an abandoned movie theater
This idea appears at the beginning Kinky Movie Guidea 2006 documentary by director Sophie Fiennes. In the film, Žižek stands in the desert and speaks directly to the camera on a recreated film set, explaining how cinema shapes our minds.In the opening scene, Zizek watches David Lynch’s 1986 film “Blue Velvet” and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller “Rear Window.” He believes that movies don’t just tell us stories; They are like machines that teach us what to dream about.Rather than seeing cinema as a simple escape from real life, Žižek uses cinema to show that human desires are mostly constructed by the world around us. We don’t choose our targets in a vacuum. We rely on culture, the arts, media and society to provide us with examples worth pursuing.
Borrowed Requirements Question
To understand Žižek’s point of view, you can look at the French thinker Jacques Lacan, whose thought has a great influence on Žižek. Lacan writes that human desires are always shaped by others.Simply put, children are not born knowing what their goals are. They observe their parents, friends, and society and then imitate what those people care about. Over time, people will mistake these copied goals for their own personal choices.This creates an obvious trap. When you finally achieve a long-term goal, like buying a specific car or landing a high-level job, victory can feel surprisingly mundane. This disappointment happens because you are living someone else’s dream instead of your own.French historian René Girard called this pattern mimetic desire. Girard shows through classic books that people rarely want an object just for what it is. Rather, we want certain things because we see others wanting them. The object becomes a way to attract attention or blend in.When Žižek says that our real problem is knowing what we want, he shows how difficult it is to separate our true personal goals from what others are doing.
Information flows, apps and modern choices
In a world run by automated phone apps and intelligent online messaging, this struggle becomes even more difficult.Platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Spotify don’t just guess what you’ll like based on your past clicks. They actively cultivate your taste. When an app constantly showcases short video clips of a certain style, travel location, or lifestyle, it creates new cravings that feel natural to you.Modern advertising is designed around this technique. Our goal is no longer just to sell products that solve real problems. Our goal is to make you feel incomplete before you buy.When you buy something your feed recommends, you fill a need your phone created minutes ago. You feel in control, but your decisions are guided from the outside.The same pattern appears at work. Many people experience burnout because they spend years chasing a big promotion or prestigious title, only to realize when they get it that they never enjoyed their real job. They want the status that comes with their job, not the day-to-day work itself.Solving this confusion begins with recognizing that our first instincts are rarely original. Figure out where your choices come from, because pursuing the wrong goal means gaining nothing when you finally catch it.
