Episode 260 Transcript: Wanting More Doesn’t Make You Ungrateful
0:00:03:03 – 00:00:33:22
Nancy Levin
Welcome back to another episode of The Nancy Levin Show. Today, I want to start with a sentence that I know might be hard for you to say out loud: “I want more.” Not because what you have is terrible. Not because you’re ungrateful. Not because you can’t see what is working, what is beautiful, what is genuinely good in your life.
00:00:33:25 – 00:01:02:13
But because underneath all of that, underneath the productivity and the capability and the gratitude and the showing up, there’s something else. There’s a quiet knowing. There’s a persistent longing. There’s a sense that you’ve been living adjacent to your life rather than fully inside of it. And that wanting, the wanting more, has been there for a while. Maybe you have not let yourself say it out loud.
00:01:02:15 – 00:01:44:09
Maybe you have been very good at redirecting your own attention away from it. Maybe you’ve become an expert in managing the desire so that it does not get too loud. So that it doesn’t get to make too much trouble. So that it doesn’t require you to do anything inconvenient. But it is still there. More truth, more aliveness, more joy, more ease, more intimacy, more meaning, more freedom, more alignment with who you actually are beneath all the roles and obligations and performances, more space to actually be yourself. t.
00:01:44:12 – 00:02:18:07
And even listening to that list, I wonder if something in you slightly relaxed? Because being seen in your wanting, even before you fully let yourself want, it’s kind of its own relief. And today, I want to talk about that one thing. About why it’s so hard to admit. About what we have been taught to believe it means. About the distorted relationship so many of us have with desire. And about what becomes possible when you finally stop making your longing wrong.
00:02:18:09 – 00:02:51:02
Because here’s what I know. The part of you that wants more is not a problem. It may be the part of you that’s most connected to your truth. So before we go any further, I want to address guilt. Because for so many people, the desire for more is immediately followed by guilt. The moment you let yourself feel it, that longing, that recognition that something is missing, the inner critic shows up almost immediately.
00:02:51:04 – 00:03:17:06
You should be grateful. Other people have it so much worse. Who do you think you are to want more? Stop being greedy. You have no right to be dissatisfied. And so, instead of letting the desire be what it is — information, guidance, a signal from your inner world — you immediately put it on trial. You become the prosecutor and the defendant at the same time.
00:03:17:09 – 00:03:44:03
You make the case against yourself before anyone else has a chance to. And then you minimize the desire. You explain it away. You shame yourself for having it. You tell yourself you’re being selfish, demanding, unrealistic, naive. And for a while, maybe that works. The desire gets quiet enough that you can function until it comes back. Because it always comes back.
00:03:44:05 – 00:04:08:26
So what I want to get to today is the deeper layer. Because the guilt is not random. It’s sourced from a set of beliefs, very old beliefs, beliefs we absorbed in childhood about what desire means and what it means about us. If I want more, it means something is wrong with my life. If I want more, it means something is wrong with me.
00:04:09:00 – 00:04:50:26
If I want more, I’m being selfish. If I want more, I am rejecting everything I’ve been giving. If I want more, I have to change something. And change is terrifying. If I want more, I might disappoint the people who depend on me staying exactly as I am. And these beliefs run deep. And they are reinforced constantly by cultural messages about gratitude, by religious frameworks that equate desire with sin, by familial systems where wanting more than what was given felt dangerous or disloyal, by the very real experiences of being shamed for asking for too much.
00:04:50:29 – 00:05:18:27
So by the time we’re adults, many of us have become experts at self-denial. Not because we do not know what we want, but because we know. And we’ve spent years learning to not trust it. We have learned to ask, “What can I justify?” Instead of, “What do I want?” We have learned to ask “What is reasonable for everyone else?” instead of, “What feels true for me?”
00:05:19:01 – 00:05:53:03
We’ve learned to ask, “What can I settle for without making too much trouble?” instead of, “What would actually nourish me?” And that is how a life gets built quietly around self-denial. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But in the small moments of choosing other people’s comfort over your own truth. In the habit of minimizing your needs before anyone else has a chance to respond. In the pattern of making yourself small so the people around you can feel big.
00:05:53:05 – 00:06:20:21
And that self-denial has a cost. Not always visible immediately, but over time. A flattening, a dimming, a sense of moving through your life without really inhabiting it. Of being functional and capable and admired, while somewhere underneath you’re quietly disappearing. So I’m going to offer you this, and I want you to let it land. Desire is not the problem.
00:06:20:23 – 00:06:46:24
Desire is guidance. Desire is data. It’s information. It’s one of the ways your life is trying to move through you. Desire is trying to show you where there is more aliveness available, where you’ve been abandoning yourself in the name of being responsible or reasonable or good. Your desire is not here to ruin your life. Your desire is not the enemy of your stability.
00:06:46:27 – 00:07:10:02
Your desire is not what makes you selfish or difficult or too much. Your desire is showing you where your life wants to grow. And I want to be clear about this. That does not mean every desire needs to be acted on immediately or impulsively. That’s not what I’m saying. But it does mean that your desires deserve to be heard.
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They deserve to be honored. They deserve to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as inconvenient. Because when you shut down desire, when you mute it, when you shame it, when you override it, when you justify it, when you rationalize it, when you explain it away, you do not just silence the wanting. You silence the part of you that knows the part of you that senses when something is off.
00:07:36:04 – 00:08:05:15
The part that recognizes what is missing before your mind has the language for it. And that part is always quietly pointing toward more truth, more aliveness, more of who you actually are. And silencing that part is a profound loss. Not just for you, but for everyone who would be touched by the more fully alive version of you.
00:08:05:21 – 00:08:36:08
Nancy Levin
So here’s what I see happens when someone has spent years managing their desire instead of honoring it. They become efficient at the expense of alive. They become productive at the expense of present. They become capable at the expense of connected. To themselves, to their joy, to their creativity, to their sense of genuine aliveness that comes from actually living the life that’s meant for you rather than the life that looks acceptable from the outside.
00:08:36:10 – 00:09:05:03
And there is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from this. It’s not the exhaustion of working too hard. It’s the exhaustion of living too small. The exhaustion of constantly negotiating against yourself. The exhaustion of keeping desire quiet so you can maintain a peace that’s not really peace. It’s just managed resignation. I have felt this exhaustion in my own life.
00:09:05:03 – 00:09:29:24
I have sat with countless people who feel it too often without being able to name it. Because from the outside, their lives look fine, sometimes better than fine. But inside there is a quiet, deep desperation. A sense that they’re playing a role in their own life rather than actually living it. And that is the cost of shutting down desire.
00:09:29:26 – 00:09:57:15
Not a dramatic collapse, but a slow, quiet dimming of the self. And you, my dear, deserve more than that. So if you are listening right now and recognizing yourself in the longing, in the quiet, knowing that you want more, in the exhaustion of living too small, I invite you to join me (for free) for Reignite Your Spark. This is a free five day experience I created exactly for you.
00:09:57:18 – 00:10:26:28
Exactly for this moment when you can feel the wanting, but you’ve been so trained to make it wrong that you don’t know where to begin. We spend five days reconnecting with your desires, with your truth, with the version of you that knows has always known that your life is meant to feel more alive than this. So go to nancylevin.com/spark and you will receive emails from me.
00:10:27:00 – 00:10:58:10
Short videos, prompts, and a lovely workbook to use. And you will hear from me for five days. And I’m here to support you in reigniting your spark: nancylevin.com/spark. Now let’s keep going, because I want to talk about gratitude and how it can get distorted in ways that quietly keep us stuck. So gratitude is one of the most beautiful and important practices available to us.
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It’s also one of the most commonly weaponized. Weaponized against ourselves. And I want to be careful and precise here because I’m not anti-gratitude. Not even close. I believe deeply in the practice of appreciating what is here, what is working, what is genuinely good. But real gratitude and distorted gratitude are not the same thing. Real gratitude says, I see what’s here.
00:11:23:07 – 00:11:51:08
I’m genuinely thankful for it. Distorted gratitude says, I see what’s here and therefore I’m not allowed to want anything more. Real gratitude is expansive. It has room for appreciation and desire. It can hold what is beautiful about the present moment and what is still calling you forward. Distorted gratitude is a lid. It keeps you in place. It turns appreciation into obligation.
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The obligation to stay satisfied. To stop longing. To silence the part of you that knows there’s more available. And that distorted gratitude sounds so reasonable on the surface. I should be grateful for what I have. Other people would love to have my problems. Who am I to want more when so many have lost? And I want to ask you something.
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Would you say that to someone you love? If the person you love most in this world came to you and said, “I want more. More joy, more meaning, more aliveness in my life.” Would you look at them in the eyes and say, “You should be grateful for what you have? Stop wanting.” I do not think you would. Because you would understand instinctively that gratitude and desire are not opposites. That loving your life and wanting it to grow are not contradictions.
00:12:47:29 – 00:13:22:05
That acknowledging what is good and still feeling called towards something more is not in gratitude. So why do we refuse to extend that same grace to ourselves? That is the people-pleaser pattern at its most subtle and its most insidious. We have become so practiced at making other people comfortable. So expert at managing other people’s feelings. So deeply conditioned to believe that our worth lives in our usefulness that we have forgotten.
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We are also someone who deserves to be considered. We have confused gratitude with self-erasure. We have confused contentment with resignation. We have called our self-denial maturity. We have called our smallness humility. And I’m here to tell you it’s not humility. That is self-abandonment with a very good PR. Real gratitude does not require you to shrink. Real gratitude does not require you to silence your desires.
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Real gratitude does not require you to perform contentment you do not feel. You can be grateful and still want more. You can appreciate what is here and still feel called towards something truer. You can love parts of your life and still know in your bones that this is not the whole story. There’s no contradiction here. That’s not ingratitude.
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That’s wholeness. So I want to get to something here that I think is really important. Because I notice that when people hear the invitation to want more, the mind immediately jumps to more as bigger. More as grander. More as external acquisition. A bigger house, a better title, a larger platform, more recognition. And sometimes that’s part of it. Sometimes wanting more does include wanting to expand in those external ways. But more often, and most often, especially for the people I work with, the high-achievers, the perfectionists, the people-pleasers who’ve been hustling and achieving and performing for years.
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More is actually something quieter. Something internal. Something that does not require adding anything at all. Sometimes more means deeper or slower or simpler or less. Less performing. Less proving. Less managing how you’re perceived. Less pretending. Less pressure. Less striving. Less of the exhausting effort to be everything to everyone, all the time. More connection to yourself. More room to breathe.
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More honesty in your relationships. More creativity. More rest. More genuine delight. More freedom from living according to what everyone else expects of you. More permission to actually be who you are rather than who you’ve learned to perform. And this is a radically different kind of more. And it is available to you right now. Not after you fix something. Not after you earn it.
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Not after you’ve convinced someone it’s okay right now. So get curious about your desire. I invite you to do this not as homework, but as a genuine act of self curiosity. The next time you feel that longing, that ache of wanting something more, instead of immediately shutting it down, get curious. Ask yourself, “More of what?” More peace. More ease.
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More honest expression. More creativity. More reciprocity in my relationships. More support. More genuine delight. More meaning. More freedom to be exactly who I am. Because desire points. It’s not always clear at first. It’s not always articulate. It does not always come with a five step plan. But it points toward what matters. Toward what is missing. Toward what is calling you forward.
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And the more willing you are to listen without immediately judging or defending or explaining, the more clearly your next step begins to emerge. Not because desire gives you all the answers, but because desire points you in the direction. And from there, you begin to move. So before we close, I want to name something that often does not get said.
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Sometimes admitting desire is not the hardest part. The hardest part is what the desire reveals. Because when you stop arguing with your wanting and actually let yourself feel it, let yourself say, “Yes, I want more of this. Yes, I want less of that. Yes, this is not enough. Yes, there is something more for me.” The desire does not just liberate you.
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It also shows you something. It shows you that something needs attention. It reveals that something might need to change. It reveals that you might no longer be willing to live the same way. It reveals that the version of you emerging wants something the old version of you would have denied. And that can feel destabilizing. Because the desire is not just information.
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It’s also an invitation. An invitation to take yourself seriously. An invitation to stop treating your inner life like an inconvenience. An invitation to begin reorganizing your choices around what is actually true for you, rather than around what keeps everyone else comfortable. This is no small invitation. And I think one of the reasons we stay in the suppression cycle, managing the desire rather than honoring it, is not because we don’t know what we want.
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It’s because we do know and we feel what honoring it will require of us. It will require someone else being disappointed. It will require taking up space. It will require letting go of a version of yourself that you’ve been performing for quite some time. It will require trusting yourself, possibly more than you have ever allowed yourself to. And so the question I leave you with is not is it okay to want this?
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The question is, “What happens when you keep pretending that you don’t?” Because pretending does not create peace. Pretending comes at a cost. It creates disconnection, internal tension, a creeping deadness that gets harder to ignore over time. And you deserve more than a life that requires you to disappear inside of it. And so, as we close today, I bring you back to something simple.
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Wanting more does not make you ungrateful. Wanting more does not mean your current life is wrong. Wanting more does not mean you have to have everything figured out before you’re allowed to acknowledge it. Wanting more simply means something in you is still alive enough to know that there’s more available. And that aliveness, that persistence of your own, deeper knowing, that’s not a problem to be managed.
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That is a gift. That’s your inner compass. Still working, still pointing, still trying to orient you toward the life that’s actually meant for you. So again, I invite you to say to yourself out loud, if you can, in your journal, if you need the privacy in your own heart, if that’s what’s available to you: “I want more.” Because it’s true.
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And truth, your truth, deserves to be spoken. Because once desire is acknowledged, once you stop arguing with your own wanting, something begins to reorganize. Your life force starts to come back online. Your energy you were spending on suppression becomes available for something else. And from there, change is possible. Honesty is where everything really begins. You can want more without making your life wrong.
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You can want more and still be grateful. You can want more and still be enough. The part of you that wants more is not your weakness. It may be the part that’s most connected to your truth. And so I invite you to trust it. Thanks for being here. I’m glad you’re listening, and genuinely thank you for being willing to tell the truth about wanting more.