What do you want?
I don’t mean that in a rude way, like a librarian disturbed from their crossword puzzle, but more generally. What are your desires?
I’ll wait.
And I’ll probably have to wait for a while. You have many. Even if we set aside the ones you’ll never tell anyone…
At the most basic level, you probably want to stay alive. That has further implications. To meet your desire, you’ll need food. You’ll need water. Shelter wouldn’t go amiss either. Sleep would be useful every so often.
There is nothing here that a dog wouldn’t wag its tail at. And expect its owner to provide. But we have more specifically human desires or desires we have adapted to the human world. Animals want status, for humans that means a good job and money. Some animals live in packs, we often want to be members of a tribe, whether it is a nation, a region or just supporting a football team.
But we also have desires which are more personal (not just those ones…). You may feel no particular urge to go to Saipan. At one point I did. You may lust after a specific pair of trainers. I don’t. You may feel your life will be incomplete if you don’t swim the Channel. Knock yourself out, I’m quite happy here on dry land.
We constantly seek ways to define ourselves, ways to delimit what is “us” and what is “not us”. Were we able to enumerate them, our desires would probably be quite a good way of doing so, the specific set of things we want, individuating us reliably as a fingerprint.
How we acquire these desires is probably a mixture of nature and nurture. New-born babies often make it quite clear that they are hungry and that they know exactly where to find food. My desire to visit Saipan came after watching a war documentary. You may want a particular type of trainer because all your friends have them. But how we get them matters less, for present purposes, than that we have them and try to satisfy them.
Some need only be satisfied once. If you have a need for tribalism, adopt a football team and you’ll have a life-long source of belonging (and probably heartache). Some need regular top-ups. We don’t have three meals a day because it is an aesthetically pleasing way of dividing time. Some we cannot satisfy yet. We may not currently have enough money for the shoes we lust after, we may need to go through a series of other junior positions before we get the big job we want.
At any point, therefore, we have a series of desires we have yet to satisfy. And we have an entire world to satisfy them. For events continually happen, opportunities continually arise which give us the chance either to satisfy them, or to move closer to doing so. Want some new shoes but can’t afford the ones you want? The offer of some over-time might help. Want to ascend the corporate greasy pole? The posting abroad being mooted might look good on the resume. Our desires give us a yardstick to judge what presents itself to us.
Sometimes, however, they may clash. Doing overtime may not help with a desire to spend time with family, for example. In which case, we must choose. And our choices tell us who we are. If we let them.
Often, in fact, we use them in just that way. We have an image, not just of who we are, but of who we want to be. Choices can be opportunities to behave in the way we think we should behave, to be the people we think we should be. If we want to think of ourselves as fashion leaders, we’ll do the overtime, buy the shoes and confirm to ourselves that we are what we tell ourselves.
Having multiple yardsticks raises the possibility of choosing the wrong one. If you decide to focus on your desire to watch the match, you’ll rush through your DIY project. Yes, you’ll see the football, but your shelves might well collapse. Much human misery (and more than a few criminal cases) derive from people choosing to prioritize the wrong desire for the circumstances – those who have affairs deciding to trade their wish for family stability for their need for novelty.
Buddhist adepts, apparently, reach a stage where they stop acting according to their desires and instead follow a standard of “appropriateness” – not by applying a set of rules, but by paying attention. Having, by that stage, sufficiently transcended their egos, they consider the “thing-in-itself” rather than the “thing-as-it-relates-to-us”. Which must be nice. They no longer act badly, because they have lost the desires or craving which lead us to act badly.
Few of us are there, or will ever get there.
A popular way to get to the same place without the discomfort required properly to get there is to outsource our decisions. Not to other people, but to those whom we consider sufficiently morally perfect to do the right thing most of the time. If we don’t actually know any of them (and if we’re being honest, few of us do) we can grab a figure from history and ask what they would have done in our situation. The Stoics were fond of this approach, regularly asking what Cato would do in their position.
The problem comes when we take a figure as an avatar of some general principles, and ask them (or our image of them) what they would do in our specific situation. Would there not, perhaps be some nuance which would lead them to suspend their uncongenial absolutism and find a way to do what we want? Just in this case, of course. George W. Bush was fond of asking “What Would Jesus Do?” and one day decided that the Prince of Peace would have invaded Iraq.
There is probably no solution to this problem. We are not perfect. And we are not perfectible. But improvement is possible. Being aware of what we are doing may not lead to us stopping it, but it can allow us to ameliorate it. Being aware that we are asking “What is right for us?” allows us to ask, “What is right? What would we do if we had no stake in the outcome? If it was a thing pristine in itself, not a proxy for our desires?” What if we disconnected ourselves from our desires and our desires from our decisions?
The action is important, the context indifferent.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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In the ‘civilised’ world everyone, from tiny infants upwards, now has a jaded palette and is in constant search for gratification, be it scrolling and tapping endlessly on the slave device to watching pap TV or anything else we and out ilk constantly bemoan. Of course the other dimension is hypocrisy, of which we at TNC are all equally as guilty of just by writing, visiting and commenting on this social media platform.
To paraphrase Zorba the Greek ‘I want for nothing, I fear nothing. I am free’.
The above article might have been entitled “True Desires” – since any “disconnect” between our desires and our happiness, can only come about if our desires are not rooted in our ultimate good. If we don’t have any understanding of what that means, of what IS our ultimate good, then we will always be restless and battling – as the above writer indicates – against conflicting desires of various kinds. Essentially, our “micro” desires don’t matter – whether we desire this fashion item or that one, is irrelevant and is subject to our passing whims.
However, if our “ultimate good” depends on how we manage our desires – if, for example, those “micro” desires lead to us becoming materialistic almost to the extent of hoarding belongings, or if they lead us into unsavoury dress and behaviours, then that desire for those particular shoes, outfit, whatever, takes on a whole new meaning.
Our modern world thinks it has little, if anything to learn from the past – I was recently advised by a young relative that I was out of touch with reality “like all the rest of [my] generation”; we have nothing to offer in the world of ideas. So, I’m taking something of a risk by arguing that, in my opinion, the matter of desires is dealt with perfectly in the writings of great saints and, of course, the Bible from whence they took their inspiration: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” – Psalm 37:4. And to quote (the oft-misrepresented) St Augustine: “God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give to us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one; but we are not always ready to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things out of a desire for temporal things. Ends.
Our search has to be for true desire – the only way to avoid that disconnect, that discontentedness which prevents us from truly enjoying life. In my “out of touch” opinion!