The brain runs a prediction system about what will make it happy. The predictions are wrong consistently, measurably, across cultures and generations. Santos calls it miswanting. The strange part is not that the predictions are wrong — it is that the brain never updates the model.
Wanting and having activate different neural systems. The system that makes the prediction never receives the verdict from the system that does the having. So the brain confidently anticipates this promotion / this house / this relationship will satisfy me, gets it, returns to baseline, and then — without any model update — confidently predicts the same thing about the next acquisition.
This is why “I already know money doesn’t buy happiness” coexists with continuous money-chasing. Knowing is housed in one system; wanting is generated by another that never received the memo.
Sermon edge: The pulpit assumes hearers know what they want and need help getting it. The data says hearers do not know what they want. They are running an inherited prediction system that has been wrong their whole life and that they have no internal mechanism to correct. The sermon’s job is partly to be the correction — to name out loud what the brain refuses to update on its own.
This is the empirical floor under self-trust as distance from God: the desires most confidently identified as “mine” are precisely the ones least worth obeying.