manifesting part ii: on not knowing what you want and my sneaky trick for discovering your true desires

I.

In February, I made a short and silly post called what I’m manifesting in 2026, expressing all the things in life I wished would come my way. I posted it mostly as a fun short post with no real expectations. But the last two months have convinced me it’s one of the most important things I’ve ever written, and I want to come back to advocate for this idea even more strongly.

In short, the exercise of manifesting helps you identify your true desires, calibrate your priorities, and actually internalize them—while most importantly, letting the world around you collaborate to help you achieve these goals.

My view now is not only that everyone should create a manifest list, but that people should share it with their entire network, at least annually.

Here’s what concretely happened after I wrote the post: a reader and internet friend shared it with Tyler Cowen, which led to him writing this thread. This nearly doubled my subscriber count overnight, caused a lot of interesting people to message me, and led to several of my blogs being shared elsewhere, including Zvi’s monthly roundup—serendipitously bringing me several of the exact things I had explicitly written that I was manifesting. I feel confident in saying that all of this wouldn’t have happened but for my “manifesting”.

But the external results, while genuinely wonderful, are secondary. The bigger and more meaningful benefit has been internal: something about doing the exercise made me feel more aligned—more willing to actually explore what I want, more willing to believe it could happen, and more courageous about embracing what I actually wish for in life.

II.

The most common objection I’ve received when I try to convert people to this exercise is: I don’t actually know what I want. Nothing comes to mind.

Which, to me, makes it seem even more critical that these people try this. I’ll share my hacks for how to trick yourself into figuring out what you should be manifesting at the end of this article. But first, a digression into the problem of agency, and why knowing what you want is so difficult.

III.

I have an internet friend named Misha Saul. More than almost anyone I’ve met online or in person, he seems from a distance to be living exactly the life he wants. Two things stand out. First, Misha truly shares what he thinks and doesn’t write to try to impress people or appeal to certain audiences; Misha has the courage to advocate all his views without any self-censorship, while I censor myself constantly (I am working on this!). Second, and something that really stands out to me: Misha has four kids. More precisely, Misha decided at a much younger age that he wanted many children, and then he built his life around this objective and made it happen.

It’s possible I could end up with four kids one day too. But the difference is that he decided it, and then willed it into existence. That’s something I genuinely can’t do.

When I moved from Canada to NYC at 33—even though I knew I wanted to leave Toronto for years—I only made the move after systematically exploring and testing living in multiple other cities, trying to make life in Toronto as full as possible, until it became so clear and obvious (and relatively easy and risk-free for me) that I had to move that I finally had the courage to pull the trigger.

In contrast, there are people who know at 22 they want to move to a new city, or pursue some dream career—even if it’s difficult and scary—and then just do it. I wanted to be a concert promoter when I was younger; I wanted to work in basketball analytics; there were many other paths in life I wanted. But I could never just go and do those things. If someone reached out to me and offered me an opportunity, this would have been my dream, but to put in the work and sacrifice something to actively pursue those goals? I never considered it a real possibility.

As another small example, Misha also has his own podcast. I doubt Misha inherently wanted to have a podcast any more than I do, but I suspect it’s just that when he reflected and realized he would enjoy having one, he simply decided to do it. Whereas I could only pursue something if it was a truly incredibly strong desire, had minimal friction, and came after years of deliberation. I find this framing helpful: there are many people who do x, and while it’s superficially easy to think that they must want x more than you do, it’s often not because they want x more than you do, but because they have fewer barriers to accepting that they want that thing and doing it.

Henrik Karlsson writes about something similar in his post on Agency:

“The reason having Maud in my life made me more agentic was that it was the first time I experienced what it means to surrender to my values. I had a lot of idiosyncratic opinions and values when I was younger, too, but I held onto them in a rather flimsy way. Whenever things got too hard or people disapproved of what I was doing, I tended to give up and do the normal thing instead. When Maud was two, Johanna and I decided that we wanted to homeschool her. This is not only illegal in Sweden, but also seen as something akin to child abuse. So when we told my parents we were going to leave the country to homeschool their grandchild, they were shocked, afraid, heartbroken, embarrassed, and did what they could to talk us out of it. I remember lying on the sofa, reading their emails, and thinking there was no way to ever repair this. If I had experienced it before Maud, I would have caved in after 30 seconds. But in this case, caving in was unforgivable; I must never fail Maud. So I had to sit through the experience of having nearly everyone I knew either quietly disapprove of what we were doing or actively try to talk us out of it, crying. This was very empowering. Because I got to experience what it was like to stand my ground and do what I knew needed to be done, and see how good the outcome was.”

The thing about being free is it’s not enough to know it in your mind—you need to feel it in every part of your body.

But what do you do if you are unable to act like Misha, and you don’t have an external forcing function like Henrik?

The reality is that for most of us, we wouldn’t even be able to realize the things we should be wanting. Consider if there was a video game version of your life, where the high score was determined by your exact life utility function (and your own strengths and weaknesses as your character attributes). Think of what strategies would get the highest score—are those decisions the same ones you actually made in your life? If hundreds of thousands of people started playing the simulated version of your life video game—and then posted on message boards about what strategies yielded the highest results—the things that proved to be actually best for you are very unlikely to be the things you are currently doing.

IV.

This happens because there are at least two distinct kinds of wanting. There is abstract wanting—when you can clearly articulate that you want something in advance of the experience. And there is situational wanting—what you discover you want once life nudges something in your direction, and only after the fact do you realize that it was something you should have wanted.

In Ingmar Bergman’s movie Persona, Bibi Andersson’s character recounts one of the most vivid memories of her life—the most intense pleasure she says she ever experienced. She and a stranger are sunbathing naked on a beach when two teenage boys appear and begin staring at them. When one gets very close, the stranger calls him over and initiates a sexual encounter, and Andersson’s character joins in.

If you had asked her the day before whether she wanted two teenage boys to stare at her naked on a public beach, she would have said no. If you asked her whether she wanted to have sex with a teenage stranger on that beach while in a committed relationship, she would have emphatically said no. The experience wasn’t something she knew she wanted. It was something she discovered she wanted only from within it, after the universe presented it to her and all of the friction of initiation—or even thinking about it—had been removed.

Something similar plays out in a much more ordinary context. Think of the somewhat academic debate of whether someone should, after a first (or second) date, ask before kissing, or just lean in and kiss. The reality is that this is only up for discussion because asking vs kissing leads to different outcomes, and not just because of what asking reveals about a person—or because the recipient is scared to pull away—but because there is a big zone of uncertainty when someone is unsure of what they actually think is good and can only discern this after the fact.

This is an important gap for manifesting. Most of our genuine desires are latent, situational, and only accessible from inside the experience. We can’t identify most of what we want because the friction of initiation is too high for us to ever get close enough to discover whether we’d actually love it. So we need to find ways to make ourselves feel like we never had to start the process at all.

V.

So my hack for manifesting is just to use this dynamic to reframe our desires. Instead of asking what do I want?—which requires abstract wanting, is underspecified for most people, and produces anxiety rather than answers—ask questions like: what email could land in my inbox tomorrow that would make me the happiest?

This converts the question from preference-in-the-abstract to a simulated situational response of what you think you would actually benefit from. It forces you to confront the potential opportunity without requiring you to initiate anything. You’re not being asked to want something; you’re being asked how you’d react to something that simply appeared.

To this end, as part of thinking about your wants, I recommend reflecting on prompts like these:

• Who are you jealous of, and why? Or whose life would you want to switch places with?

• Who reaching out to you, with what kind of offer, would make your entire year?

• Which person you haven’t spoken to in ages would you love to hear from?

• If your best friend came to you and said, “I want to start a venture, I will put up $100,000 and work my ass off on it, but I need you to join me with your idea”—what would the idea be, and how excited would you be?

• If your partner said they wanted to move somewhere for a year, or a recruiter cold-emailed you about a job at a dream company—how excited would you actually be, and which city or job would it be?

• If someone offered to start an article club where you and three other people discuss the best articles you read that month—would you be eager to participate? Or to co-host a podcast?

• If someone offered to pay you $10,000 if you hosted a dinner party with at least ten guests, each month for the rest of the year—what would you do to make this happen?

• If you were hiking and spent several days walking alongside a billionaire who took a liking to you and offered to fund any project you felt most excited about—what would you pitch?

• If the same billionaire asked if they could buy you a gift out of appreciation for your time, and you had to choose something orderable online that costs less than $1000, what would you ask them to buy for you?

• If you had to move to a new city and try to build a social group from scratch, what would you do?

• If your friend invited you to go on a three-month thru-hike? Or a trip to Tajikistan? Or to attend a specific music festival? How excited would you be?

• If your partner asked if you would be comfortable joining her at a nude beach, or at a swingers club? Would this prospect scare or excite you?

The point is to work through examples like these and notice what comes up. If the universe nudged you in that direction, which hypotheticals make you feel 10/10 excited versus “sure, that would be nice, but who cares.”

VI.

Once you trick your brain into identifying those 10/10 desires, the illusion drops and they simply become wants that you can action.

And while you might think, well, if I had a friend, partner, or billionaire offering me these opportunities this would be easy, that’s exactly the point. You don’t need a practical plan to make these things materialize yet.

Your wanting has a discovery problem. But by thinking through prompts like these, you can help better identify your wants. And by identifying your wants, removing the friction of initiation, and sharing those desires with the people around you, you can then sit back and let the world collaborate to help you achieve these goals.