A Case for Second-Order Wants

Last week, a coworker and I discussed criteria for making major life decisions, among many other topics in a delightfully rambling conversation. I suggested a criterion that I believe directed me towards a more satisfying career trajectory, even if my adoption of this criterion was completely accidental.

When making a major career1 decision, deemphasize your first-order wants (“I want A”) and consider your second-order wants (“I want to want B”).

I’ll start with two caveats. First, this criterion likely only applies to a small group of people lucky enough to have the room to step back from more pressing needs. If you are lucky to be part of that group, I think you should use that privilege wisely. Second, this advice assumes that you place a high value on your career. I don’t think you necessarily should or should not do that. I also think you could want to want to place less value on your work.

Now, I’ll attempt to make this advice more concrete by applying it to my own short career. Bear with me.

In 2024, I decided to take a year off of my PhD and consider other work.2 While the process of finding a job was difficult, the process of defining my choice set was less painful than I expected. I agonized over finding a job during my senior year of college.

In this recent search, I knew that I wanted to work on interesting problems aimed at allowing humans and animals to live slightly richer lives. I wanted at least some of this work to be quantitative. I acknowledge that this is ill-defined and self-congratulatory. I also want to stress the “aimed at” above—my work might not be helping anyone at all.

While there are still a lot of jobs that fall into this category, this set of jobs is a rather small sliver of all the jobs I might consider. This narrowing of my choices made for a long search, so I was lucky to have the security of my PhD stipend. I first applied to a job in December of 2023. I started working part-time at FRI in July 2024 and full-time in October 2024, at which point I went on leave for the 2024/25 academic year. It wasn’t until early 2025 that I made the decision to permanently leave the program.

As an aside, I think we do cool work at FRI. We are looking for more people to join the team, and you should take a look at these positions. Or, if you think our work is somehow misguided, please let me know.

Anyways, the job-choice problem feels a bit easier to me at this stage in my life, although I still give it quite a lot of thought.3 However, I found this problem horribly difficult when I was graduating from college. I felt paralyzed by the question, “what should I do?” This problem should not necessarily be easy, but the extent of my rumination was unambiguously unhealthy.

Why was this decision so difficult?

In our conversation, my coworker and I discussed Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming by Agnes Callard. Now, I’m going to draw a conclusion that Callard explicitly dismisses in the book. The book argues that aspiration is distinct from acting on some second-order preference. I didn’t follow that argument. I think we can consider aspiration an anticipatory or forward-looking case of acting on a second-order preference. Specifically, aspiration is the process of transforming a second-order preference into a first-order preference. I think aspiration is difficult and worth doing.

When faced with my dread at deciding what to do after graduation, I considered only what I wanted, and I think this approach was misguided. I wanted status, I wanted security, and I wanted money. I optimized for these preferences in making my career choices. Working in management consulting seemed the easiest path to status, security, and money. To use the terms from the book, I chose on the basis of ambition rather than aspiration. I was reasoning from my contemporary values, which were excessively reliant on status-seeking. Something about this process made me feel deeply uneasy.

I believe I felt this turmoil because I wanted to want a different life. I wanted to want to work on interesting problems aimed at allowing humans4 to live slightly richer lives. I wanted to not want money as much as I did. I found many ways to pretend—both for myself and others—that I was working towards this goal. But, my choices revealed a different set of preferences. I was unwilling to deemphasize my first-order wants and elevate my second-order wants. I did not have any sort of framework to make a decision on that basis. First-order wants tend to feel more pressing.

So, I worked as a management consultant for 11 months. The job was drudgery. I was unfulfilled, because I was not working towards any of my second-order desires. My job was not challenging me to aspire. I was also stressed and miserable, which is the primary reason I left. I do not think I was intentionally aspiring. I just wanted out. Luckily, I happened into a great job working on poverty measurement research. I had great mentors who helped me be a better researcher. More importantly, these mentors were deeply motivated to answer the questions posed in our work. I wanted to want the same, but I did not want the same. I did not share their motivation, but I wanted to be a person who was motivated in the same way.

In my two years at this job, I became slightly more like that person. I found my work more fulfilling. When I left that job to start graduate school, I enjoyed the work in a way that would have been unfamiliar to me when I started.

There is still so much more to be done. I am still excessively status seeking and apt to choose on the basis of security, but these desires at least now face some competition.

I suspect a lot more people think what I currently do for work is wacky and/or worthless. This perspective affects me less than it previously would have, but I still struggle when I read or hear negative things about our work. The progress on my desires for security and money has been similarly slight.

Further, I now at least partially want to work on interesting problems that I think can help us all lead richer lives. If I’m being honest, I think the “interesting problems” part plays a greater role than the altruistic concerns. I have a found a way to package up my desire to work on interesting, quantitative problems as altruism. I want to want to work on things that help people or animals.

I wish I had considered my second-order preferences in making my decisions, because I would have perhaps made more progress. I think this consideration would have led me to interesting work earlier, even if I didn’t fully recognize that the work was interesting at the outset.

The tenuous value grasp that characterizes aspiration is frustrating. Nevertheless, I think the knowledge that I was optimizing for second-order wants could have made me at least slightly more comfortable with the paralyzing uncertainty of that period. Perhaps that knowledge would have granted me the bravery to not listen so intently to my first-order wants. It felt like these wants were screaming in my ear, and I could hear nothing else.

In Aspiration, I found the call for special compassion towards aspirants compelling. I hope I can show and receive such compassion. Aspiration is a difficult but worthy effort.