Step 3:

Ask yourself whether any really important wants have been left off your list. Good health for yourself and your family? The present and future happiness of your children or spouse? The feeling that you are living an honest life? Remember to include matters that might seem important when looking back on your life at age seventy that might not come to mind now, such as spending plenty of time with your children, or having the reputation as a person who is helpful to others.(3)

Step 4:

Look for the conflicts in your list of wants. Check if conflicts are resolved in a manner that contradicts the indications of importance that you accord to the various elements. For example, you may put health for yourself in the top rank, and professional success in the second rank, but you may nevertheless be working so hard for professional success that you are doing serious harm to your health, with depression as a result.

In my case, future and present happiness of my children is at the top of the list, and I believe that the chance that children will be happy in the future is much better if their parents are not depressed as the children are growing up. Close to the top for me, but not at the top, is success in my work as measured by its impact upon the society. Yet I had invested so much of myself in my work, and with such results, that my thoughts about my work depressed me. It therefore became clear to me that if I am to live in accordance with my stated values and priorities, I must treat my work in some fashion that it does not depress me, for the sake of my children even if for no other reason.

In my discussions with others about their depressions, we usually discover a conflict between a tomp-level value which demands that the person not be depressed, and one or more lower- level values that are involved in depression. The goal that life is a gift to be cherished and enjoyed is a frequent top-level value of this sort (though, unlike such writers as Abraham Maslow, Fromm, Ellis, and others, I do not consider this to be an instinct or a self-evident truth). More about this later.)

Step 5:

Take steps to resolve the conflicts between higher-order and lower-order values in such manner that higher- order values requiring you not to be depressed are put in control. If you recognize that you are working so hard that you are injuring your health and additionally depressing yourself, and that health is more important than the fruits of the extra work, you will be more likely to face up to a decision to work less, and to avoid being depressed; a wise general physician may put the matter to you in exactly this fashion. In my case I had to recognize that I owe it to my children to somehow keep my work-life from depressing me.

Many sorts of devices may be employed once you address yourself to a task such as this one. One such device is to make and enforce a less-demanding work schedule. Another device is to prepare and follow an agenda for future projects that promises a fair measure of success in completion and in reception. Another device is to refuse to allow negative self-comparisons concerned with work to remain in the mind, either by pushing them out with brute force of will, or by training yourself to switch them off with behavior-modification techniques, or by meditation techniques, or whatever.

Mapping Out Your Wants

Your wants, goals, values, beliefs, preferences, or desires by any other name are a most complex subject for anyone. Counselors often ask people, "What do you really want?" This question tends to confuse and mislead the person of whom it is asked. The question suggests that (a) there is one most- important want that (b) the person can discover if she will only be sufficiently honest and sincere, the word "really" suggesting such honesty and truth. In fact there usually are several important wants, and no amount of "sincere" searching can determine which one is "really" most important.

The key point here is that we must aim at learning the structure of our many wants, rather than fruitlessly chasing after just one most-important want.

We must also recognize that our wants cannot easily be sorted out. Consider this curiosity: No matter how depressed a person is, he usually would not say that he would prefer to change places with other individuals who are not depressed, even super-happy or super-successful people. Why? Is there some deep confusion here about the meaning of "I" in the sentence "I would like to change places with X"? What can one make of this? Does it show some greater self-affection than we attribute to depression sufferers? Or is it simply the impossibility or meaninglessness of "changing places"? Would memories remain with the person after the change? Is there just a problem of misfitting, as a beggar would not prefer the clothes of a rich man if the clothes are a grossly bad fit to the beggar? I do not urge you to break your head on this curious question, but only to recognize that the structure of wants is more complex than a shopping list.