When you are driven by other people's choices and desires, your level of happiness or fulfilment wane. And the best answer i have for how to identify it is time. The thing that gave you energy in the first place wasn't the act that you're doing or the decision you made,. It was the person you were imitating in making that decision. This is rene gerard's memetic theory, which has been popularized by peter teal. All of us are plagued by memetic desire. We need to understand that it exists, and we need to understand how to identify when our decisions are made based on imitation verses intuition.