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🇦🇷 Argentina /Elections & Politics

Why knowing what you want is difficult, according to Gabriel Rolón

From La Nación · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Interview Named sources Context piece
  • Gabriel Rolón said other people’s wishes, social expectations, and family commands often stand between individuals and their own desires.
  • He argued that self-knowledge requires separating genuine wishes from goals imposed by parents and society.
  • Rolón linked effort, learning, guilt, and disappointment to the struggle to build a more authentic life.

Knowing what you want sounds simple, but Gabriel Rolón says other people’s voices often make it surprisingly difficult. In an interview with Luis Novaresio on LN+, the Argentine psychoanalyst and writer described desire as something frequently obscured by family expectations, social rules, and the pressure to become what others imagined.

It is not easy to know what one desires. It is not easy. Because so many things come between desire and oneself. The first thing that comes between them is other people’s desires. Those voices. Those commands, what was expected of us.

· Gabriel RolónHis explanation of why people struggle to identify their own wishes.

“It is not easy to know what one desires,” Rolón said. The voices that intervene can include instructions about how to behave, whom to love, whether to study, and whether one is capable of being happy. Over time, he argued, people can become so shaped by outside opinions that they lose contact with their own center.

We are so shaped by other people’s opinions that we become eccentric to ourselves.

· Gabriel RolónHis description of how outside judgments distance people from their own identity.

That distance brings criticism, pain, guilt, and the anxiety of disappointing those who expected something else. Rolón said self-knowledge involves distinguishing authentic wishes from ambitions inherited from one’s closest circle. Parents may pass their own unfinished hopes to their children, he suggested, without asking whether those children want the same life.

Life becomes much brighter and much more attractive when one makes an effort.

· Gabriel RolónHis argument that effort and learning enrich a person’s life.

He also presented effort and continued learning as ways to make life richer and thought more engaging. Yet discovering one’s desire does not remove discomfort. Desire points toward what is missing, whether that means love, work, success, study, or another goal. For Rolón, living as a human being means accepting that absence, along with the knowledge that life and the people one loves are finite.

All that anguish, disappointment, and guilt comes between my desire and me.

· Gabriel RolónHis description of the emotional barriers created by failing to meet others’ expectations.
About this summary

Originally published by La Nación in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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