I have this friend, who says all kinds of things apropos of nothing. I've thought about getting him a card made up with that phrase on it, so he could just wave it around everytime he opened his mouth. Once, we were sitting on the train talking, and he said "Tell me about something deep. Let's not waste time with chitchat." So I talked about the first thing I could think of, which wasn't much at all. I was caught off guard, as usual. He often asks questions which I didn't expect right then. Which is how this little story gets started.

I was daydreaming about a bunch of us standing around talking. There's a group of us who play sport together every Wednesday, and I was thinking about us talking about something. Then, in the daydream, this guy opens his mouth and says something completely unrelated to the daydream. As usual. He said, "So what is everybody here's goal in life? Really." And part of me is thinking "Hey, this is *my* daydream, who said you could change the topic?", but it's buried a long way down. In the daydream, my daydream self responded immediately with a grin and flippant reply, as would be in character: "What, apart from wanting everybody to love me and give me lots of hugs?" Several of us laughed or smiled, and we began to talk about the question more seriously. But as my daydream self began to talk about creating rapport with nature and creating technological understanding and other stuff that's important to me to achieve in this life, I pulled out of the daydream. I wanted to think about that flippant reply.

What I realised is that my reply was accurate. It is actually a very strong unconscious motivation. I would never have said that it was a conscious goal, not by any means. But, it's definitely a common thread underlying a lot of my behaviour. So I started thinking about it more seriously still.

My first instinct was to say something like "Oh well, something like that is a fairly useless sort of goal, not really realistic or generically useful, guess now we've identified it we can dump it." But then I thought that would be silly. To me, while it's an unrealistic goal, one that I'm likely to be disappointed in relatively often, I'd rather have it as a motivation than a lot of other things. Ethically, it beats things like the desire for world domination hands down. So I guess I decided to keep it as a motivation. I'm not sure I could actually truly get rid of it anyway, not really knowing much about how such things work. Instead, what knowing about it does for me is to give me the option of modifying my behaviour. Of saying "Well, I know where *that* wish or emotion is coming from, is it something I want to allow to that extreme?". Of recognising when what I really want to do perhaps isn't the best of all options, and then being able to decide whether to go on with it anyway. I'm not totally convinced that such a motivation will really lead me astray, and I still sort of believe anyway in following your heart. I also get the option of being able to consciously say "Can I take actions that are more effective?" rather than simply being driven.

So, I guess I'd still class this as an unconscious motivation. It's not one I consciously drive myself with. But it's now a motivation that I'm conscious of and can recognise. I think that's probably a good thing. Guess I'll keep it.