What if most of the things you think you want, the ski trip, the career, the version of yourself you’re working toward, aren’t actually what you want at all?
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In this week’s episode of the Adam & Reed Morning Show, we stumble into one of the most quietly destabilizing questions we’ve asked yet: do you actually know what you want? From ego, desire, and shadow work, to animal consciousness and the universe knowing itself, here’s where the conversation went.
The Resistance Is the Map
We started, as we often do, by disagreeing with each other. Adam came into the episode frustrated, not at Reed exactly, but at himself. He’d spent the week pushing back on ideas about how to run the show, defending his instincts, and partway through realized what was actually happening: the resistance wasn’t insight, it was ego.
“I’m the one with all the experience,” he admitted. “And that image of my past and my ideas about what I think will work is fighting your ability to come at it fresh.”
It’s a familiar pattern. Strong feelings and strong resistance are often the clearest signals about where our beliefs have calcified, the places we’ve decided are too important to question. Double Spy (a live viewer) brought in Jung’s idea of the shadow: what we refuse to examine materializes as resistance. The unseen makes itself known by blocking the door.
This led into a conversation about what Reed calls “the second arrow.” There’s a saying, loosely attributed to a Buddhist teaching, that when you’re struck by an arrow, you feel pain. That’s the first arrow. The second arrow is everything you do to the pain afterward: the analysis, the blame, the “why is this happening to me.” The first arrow lands. The second one you throw yourself.
The goal isn’t to transcend reaction. The enlightened Zen master cries at his friends funeral because his friend died. It’s as simple as that.
Do You Actually Like or Dislike Anything?
This is the episode’s central question, and it’s more unsettling than it first sounds. We assume we know what we like. But when you examine it, what you actually have is a mental projection of how you think you’ll feel in response to a future situation. You don’t like skiing. You like what you imagine your reaction to skiing will be.
Reed used his own example: he’s wanted to go skiing since a childhood trip with his dad. But when he examines that want honestly, it’s not really about skiing, it’s about the association with his father, the specific memory of a family vacation, and a kind of warm nostalgia that got attached to the activity. If that trip had never happened, the desire probably wouldn’t exist. So what is he actually wanting? Not skiing. Something else.
The same logic applies everywhere. When you sit down to do something you “love” and find yourself not feeling it, that’s not a malfunction, it’s information. The mind has a habit of locking in past experiences as permanent facts about what it needs. Reed described the version of this with music: the desire to make music is genuine in the moment of making it. But the mind’s claim that “I’m a person who loves making music, therefore I should be doing it right now” is a different and often counterproductive kind of wanting.
The conclusion isn’t nihilism. It’s more like: you can only know what you want in the moment you’re actually in it. The projection is always going to be a guess.
OKness First
Threading through all of this is a concept we keep returning to: OKness. Not happiness, not fulfillment, not peace in some elevated spiritual sense, but the baseline recognition that you’re not actually lacking anything right now, in this moment.
The trouble is, most of us are trying to get to OKness. And that trying is precisely what keeps us from it. As Reed put it, sitting on the couch for an hour and a half trying to be okay every morning for half a year didn’t work for Adam because sitting there trying to realize OKness reinforced the belief that something was missing. He was constantly generating the very lack he was trying to fill.
You can’t think yourself into OKness. And this is also, we think, why people build entire lives around things they don’t truly want. We pursue money, status, relationships, and achievements. Not because we want those things, but because we believe they’ll provide OKness. They usually don’t, because OKness was never actually contingent on them. The lack that drove the pursuit didn’t actually exist.
This is where Anthony DeMello is useful, particularly his book Rediscovering Life, which we mentioned more than once. His core argument is that what we’re actually seeking, underneath every specific want, is simply to be okay. Once you see that clearly, the specific wants tend to rearrange themselves without a lot of effort.
The question Holger, from a non-duality community called the Garden of Friends we’ve both spent time in, would ask new members is: what do you actually want? Not the surface answer. Not the list of goals. The real one, underneath. It’s a harder question than it sounds and most of us haven’t seriously sat with it.
Why Violence in Nature Disturbs Us
Partway through the episode we shifted to a question that had been sitting on the topic list: why does violence in nature disturb us? Not violence done by humans, but the ordinary, unremarkable brutality of the natural world. A hawk taking a rabbit. A predator running down prey. Things that happen millions of times a day on every continent and have occurred since long before we arrived.
We are nature. We evolved inside it, we are built from it, we participate in it every time we eat. And yet most of us, confronted with footage of an animal being killed and eaten, experience something that feels a lot like moral distress. That’s suspicious. What’s the story we’re telling about ourselves that makes nature’s normal operations feel like a violation?
Part of the answer might be that our moral and ethical frameworks, the ones that allow us to live in community without constant violence against each other, have become so fundamental to our sense of identity that we’ve started applying them to contexts they weren’t built for. The instinct that says don’t harm your tribe got attached to a much broader concept of harm. The rules got generalized past their original territory.
There’s also something about survival instincts running in an environment they weren’t designed for. Our fight-or-flight responses evolved for genuine physical threats: predators, resource scarcity, hostile strangers. In modern life, most of those threats are gone, but the hardware is still running. It latches onto whatever it can find. The result is a lot of existential dread about things that aren’t actually threatening us, and a sensitivity to witnessed suffering that sometimes goes well beyond what’s useful.
What Animals Know — and What We’ve Overthought
The conversation moved from violence in nature into a broader question about consciousness and what, if anything, animals experience. Do animals have awareness? Do they need it? And what does the fact that we seem to have it actually tell us?
One angle that emerged: consciousness might not serve an obvious evolutionary function. The body and brain operate without requiring an observer. The body regulates temperature, processes information, reacts to stimuli. None of that requires anyone to be aware it’s happening. Awareness seems to be this additional, somewhat mysterious layer, that doesn’t clearly map to survival advantage. Which raises the question of what it’s actually for.
Live viewer Ionatune offered a compelling frame: the purpose of existence might simply be experience in its maximum form. The universe, at increasing levels of complexity, finds ways to have richer and more intricate experiences of itself. That’s speculative, but it has a kind of internal logic. It would explain why complexity seems to correlate with emotional range. Not because emotions are useful for survival, but because a more complex organism is capable of experiencing more.
We talked about the short story Flatland, which explores how creatures at different levels of dimensional complexity would experience each other. A three-dimensional sphere passing through a two-dimensional plane would appear, to the inhabitants of that plane, as a point that grows into a circle and then contracts and disappears. They’d have no framework for understanding what they’d witnessed. It’s a useful image for thinking about the limits of our own perception. What might be passing through our plane of existence right now that we simply don’t have the sensory equipment to recognize?
DoubleSpy quoted David Attenborough: he sometimes feels that he may be lacking some sense organ, that there’s something involved in all of this that he simply doesn’t have the capacity to perceive. He called it a kind of agnosticism. Not a refusal to engage with the question, but an honest acknowledgment of the limits of the instrument doing the asking.
Where we landed is something like this: the universe is not a collection of separate things happening to each other. It’s a single process experiencing itself from an infinite number of vantage points. The apparent separation between cause and effect, between observer and observed, between you and everything else, is real at the level of experience but not at the level of what’s actually occurring. What we call consciousness might just be the universe developing enough complexity to notice itself.
Stay Cool
We didn’t resolve any of this. We rarely do, and that’s kind of the point. The Adam & Reed Morning Show isn’t trying to give you answers. We’re trying to have the conversation honestly, out of our own experience, without telling anyone what they should believe. If any of this resonated, we’d love to have you along for the next one.
We go live every Saturday morning. Join us in the Discord to continue the conversation. And as always — stay cool.
Mentioned in This Episode
• Rediscovering Life — Anthony DeMello
• Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism — Chögyam Trungpa
• Flatland — Edwin Abbott
• Jim Newman (non-duality teacher)
• The Holger Group (non-duality community)
• David Attenborough (quoted via Double Spy)
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