Desire machine
The two questions that seem to anchor all of life, that I’ve been forced to face over and over again, are:
What should I do next?
Why do people act in the ways that they do?
On the second question—the usual explanation is that everyone has these things called desires, or needs. Each person has preferred material and psychological conditions, and the mind is a machine that invents strategies to attain and maintain those conditions. This seems superficially correct; if I miss a meal I often find myself walking to the grocery store for a particular brand of semi-sweet chocolate chunk cookies. In college I naturally preferred activities with even gender ratios (sorry, Pokémon club), except when I wasn’t single (although I still skipped Pokémon club).
Then, the obvious follow-ups: if people are desire-fulfilling robots, seeking love, resources, and homeostasis, why are we so bad at it? Why does attaining a goal often feel empty? Why do mostly-happy relationships end? Why the trope of mid- (or quarter-) life crises, the traveling, the seeking? Why do some people desire excessive wealth, when less would suffice? Why am I so bad at holding a job? Why does perfect safety feel so suffocating? Why is skirting death thrilling? Why do we put so much stock in narratives and stories, even when they diverge impractically from reality? How is it that nearly everyone in one of the most stable and materially abundant civilizations of all time has anxiety, yet the nomads of the northern Sahara can spend their lives tracking from oasis to oasis, never knowing if the next has run dry?
And the answers, oh so many answers: people are hurt and traumatized, everyone is competing for scarce resources, the modern world is vastly unlike the conditions the mind evolved in. Too much optionality, capitalism, moral decay, social media, gut dysbiosis, overstimulation, testicular microplastics, atheism.
Well, I have an answer too.
People are not desire machines. The mind does not seek some exalted, terminal, desirable state; in fact, to cease to change is a kind of death. The mind seeks transformation and transcendence; it aims not to optimize its surroundings but to rise above them. In past transformations we find gratitude, and in future transformations we find hope. No condition provides a final, encompassing happiness; the joy of living is in reaching a vantage point and noticing for the first time the indistinct serrations of still greater peaks beyond.1
So, to answer the first question: try something new, descend into ravines deep and chasms dark, fall over, brush the dirt off, check the map, climb back out, hold hands, keep walking, melt in the sunlight, and… just imagine the view from the top.
cf. hedonic treadmill
this is essentially correct i believe (rare)
I like your writing.