Higher order wants are effective—even necessary—tools for herding your mental state towards greater harmony.
So, what are they, exactly?
Most wants are of what we’ll call the first order. Wants for things like pizza, sex, cigarettes, a vacation in Italy, or nobler things like helping a friend in need or caring for one’s child. Put simply, first order wants can pertain to almost anything, the only exception being that they cannot pertain to other wants, because then they would be beyond the first order.
For example, lets say a smoker currently wants a cigarette. But then they decide to pop a nicotine lozenge, motivated to undermine their want for a cigarette. In other words, they want to diminish their want for a cigarette. This sort of want, one that pertains to a first order want, is of the second order.
And from there the pattern may continue upwards: wants that target second order wants are of the third order, and on and on. Theoretically there’s no limit to how many orders of wanting are possible. The smoker could want their want to want their craving to diminish to diminish—that would be a fourth order want.
Personally, I can only go up to about the third order before losing my mind.
To turn back to the question that instigated the last three paragraphs: while most wants are of the first order, higher order wants are those peculiar ones that pertain to other wants.
The most obvious examples include wants to eradicate other wants one considers destructive or shameful, like those rooted in addiction to alcohol, heroin, pornography, or what have you. But higher order wants need not simply demarcate whether we want other wants. Rather, they can be more nuanced, concerning any aspect of another want, such as its timing, strength, duration, or content.
When you put an event on your calendar or set an alarm on your phone, in either case you’re effectively scheduling a set of wants for a particular time.
Or when you adjust an item on a checklist, whether for a work procedure, recipe, or skincare routine, you’re adjusting the content of the wants you’ll have when you follow the checklist.
A final quirk to consider is that higher order wants need not only concern one’s own wants—they can just as well extend to the wants of others.
A sexually driven individual might coax their partner into sharing their sensual sentiment, whether by sexy seduction, or perhaps, as comedian Romesh Ranganathan once tried, by nakedly gyrating and singing a song about how his “dicky is hard like a sticky”.
Or consider advertisers and politicians, whose professions regularly require them to influence the wants of others, for better or worse.
Hopefully this has inspired some ideas about how you might use higher order wants harmonize your wants more generally, so you are moved you towards their mutual fulfillment rather than their self-inflicted demise.