One of the most aggravating things I learned reading about neurology/psychology is the fact that dopamine, the “want” chemical is different from the chemicals activating the pleasure center of your brain. In other words, what you want isn’t what’s good for you and what’s good for you isn’t what you want. There are cases of people who, despite experiencing pleasure doing certain activities never seek them out for lack of dopamine, or the more common reverse case, addiction, where one always wants something that he no longer finds rewarding. But you, as a rational being obviously want what’s good for you. This is a problem I have with the word “want” in general, it refers to both what you want in terms of what causes your brain to release dopamine and what you want as a rational thinker, mainly what’s good for you.

I think there needs to be a split here between these to types of want. I’ll call the former (dopamine induced) what you “want” and the latter (deduced by reason) “want to want”. I think this distinction needs to be used more regularly on everyday language because these different “orders” of wants are treated very differently. People generally treat things you “want to want” with much more respect than things you want. Ex: people always see curing addictions as a good thing. The person addicted wants to continue the addictive behavior (or else he wouldn’t be addicted) but wants to want to get rid of it.