The Stickiness of Want — and the Systemic Amnesia Beneath It
A quiet reflection today, drawn from the patterns of so many recent conversations: I’m struck by how tightly our collective imagination is tethered to what people think they want.
People want a detached home.
People want a car.
People want space, ownership, escape.
But what we call “want” here is not a deep, reflective desire—it’s an inherited template. It’s memory masquerading as future. And this stickiness of want—its inertial grip on our social imagination—is increasingly becoming a strategic liability. It’s constraining the space of what we consider plausible, and therefore possible.
We seem to be operating within a marketing-driven innovation landscape—one where the future is shaped not by emergent necessity, but by extrapolated focus groups. Demand is reverse-engineered into the past tense. User wants—however inherited, unsustainable, or brittle—are treated as sacrosanct, while the actual fundamentals go under-acknowledged.
What’s missing is a systemic view of the pressures now shaping our shared reality.
Wage compression.
Carbon scarcity.
Time poverty.
Psychological fragility.
Material limits.
Shrinking skill-capacity ratios.
Compounding crisis cycles.
We’re living in a moment of converging constraints, yet most public and private imagination seems to operate as if the future will simply be a redecoration of the past—with slightly more technology, slightly greener energy, and slightly better intentions.
We saw this tension break during COVID. Suddenly, the “non-negotiables” of modern life became fluid. Wants became fungible. Cities paused. Homes refunctioned. Work dislocated. In a matter of weeks, we glimpsed how malleable social infrastructure can be when systemic shocks force reconfiguration.
And yet, as the dust settled, we rushed to restore the old operating assumptions—resetting demand, propping up norms, and doubling down on familiar wants.
What haunts me is this: the deeper lock-in is not infrastructural, but imaginative.
We’re discounting the underlying reparameterisation of our world. We’re treating yesterday’s desires as tomorrow’s fixed coordinates, rather than treating them as artefacts of an operating system that is itself coming undone.
This isn’t a call for moralism or austerity. It’s a call to reawaken our capacity to see want as constructed, adaptive, even negotiable.
Our real task is not to meet historic demand with decarbonised precision.
It’s to reimagine what dignity, aspiration, and collective flourishing can look like under a different planetary logic.
If we don’t, we risk designing futures for ghosts—building cathedrals to yesterday’s desires, while the world quietly shifts beneath us.
This hits the spot Indy - my students have been looking at (asked to look at) the historical formation of their imaginations-encompassing stories-selves in the light of where we are now. Modernizing or ecologizing. Trying to bring it in close to how we make sense of things, precursor to how we act. Amnesia, distraction, avoidance, casual oblivion. As with earlier poster, your point - ‘not moralism.. but capacity to see’ - is the necessary interim work. The ‘not moralism’ surprises them.
I completely agree with your assessment. And I particularly appreciate your call for the imagination of flourishing in planetary alignment. The questions I ask myself, however, are what pathways are needed to get people to first acknowledge [1] and then change [2] their collective misconceptions of needs and wants. Seeing myself as ‘no self’ [and thus connected to everything] is not something people are used to aspire towards. And it can take tremendous cycles of disillusionment to admit that one's quest for achievement has been a farce, or that it might perhaps even be violently taken away by cascading crises.
Hence, might it not come across as moralistic and/or lead to social shaming to criticise people who are trapped in their habitual patterns? Or might your suggestions of systemic worldviews and new terminology lead to more 'systemic' buzzwords without real substance, further favouring the first movers?
The point I see you coming to is the question of 'personal' development, and whether and how it has a role to play at this point in time – particularly if promoted with poor quality. I oftentimes find myself caught between people who promote change while still be ‘trapped wounded healers’, and self-proclaimed mindfulness teachers who are one-point-optimising for their favourite practice.
So how can sustainable options for new economies AND sustainable re-education go hand in hand? Might we not try to build educational curricula alongside DML-like interventions, so that we can guide people towards such inquiries within safe spaces? Thoughts welcome