This entry proposes a sociocultural approach to wishes and wish-making, distinct from existing psychoanalytical and cognitive discussions of this phenomenon. It considers wish-making as part and parcel of everyday life and one of the main ways we have to engage with the future and attempt to construct it according to our needs and desires. Wishes are not signs of intrinsic irrationality, nor markers of pathological functioning; instead, they are embedded in human action and connect us to the possible, to others, and to the world. The entry starts by reviewing research into different types of wishes before considering in more detail theories and studies of wish-fulfilment and wishful thinking. It concludes with a reinterpretation of wishes as having their own scope, rationality, and as being intrinsically related to the ethical.