What Is Living Without Desire?
The complex nature of living and desire
The complex nature of living and desire
Life is nothing but an ephemeral link of experiences, entangled and encapsulated with immense emotion, connections and romances. We are nothing but a blimp of existence when faced with the sheer volume of the universe and its forever-expanding cloak of time. Just like every other morsel involved in nature’s fabric—we fester, rot, decompose, decay. What is the point of it all? What is it that drives us to continue persevering through each day and pursuing tomorrow?
Desire, it is the root of all evil and the soil that nourishes affection. Desire is a covet, a longing for the intimacy of another subject. It’s what drives us. It forges and fuels us to chase the minutiae.
My life in desire
I have spent a ridiculous surplus of my time on this Earth in desire. I’ve yearned and searched for something new, something to stimulate my mind and give me reason to adventure. Although it has led to some incredibly amazing highs, there have been incomprehensible lows.
I have found that chasing my own desires has provided the foundations to build amazing connections, projects and partnerships— although, this pursuit has led me to reconsider many of my life’s decisions. What would be the outcome of this if I had stayed put? Would my silence have led to satisfaction? Why didn’t I just stay put?
I spend a lot of time in my psyche, repeating this thought over and over and over and over again. This broken chain of ideas and rhetorics that plague me have undeniably wounded me, but I don’t regret the pursuit.
The pursuit of desire
Desire is absolutely fundamental to the human experience. What is our purpose if not to search for it, to long for something more? An interesting set of research from Hofmann et al. (2015) highlights the vigorous impact of desire on everyday life, exploring a range of ideas from sex to shopping. For those seeking to understand the concept of desire in further depth, I have provided a link to all related documents and citations at the end of this essay. Let me just spew my self-proclaimed propaganda first.
Controlling the pursuit
As mentioned above, in my own experience- and I’m sure throughout your own- this pursuit of desire has brought me joy and fulfilment, but at times it’s seriously screwed me over. As Freud emphasises throughout his psychosexual stages of development and general assumptions across his psychological career, we have an innate sense of desire. After all, desire is evolutionary. It’s something which we have, over time, learned to accept in order to maintain both physiological and mental states of being.
Yet, a fixation on desire, or perhaps a feeling of despondency as a result of this appetite, can lead to severe mental and emotional consequences. When we can’t fulfil our own desire, what motivation is there to seek more? What is the purpose of pursuit if you’ve crashed and burned already?
There’s something to think about.
Allow yourself to feel absolutely everything. Engage in the pursuit of something more but do not be disheartened when things underdeliver. Do not set expectations of what will be, and stop injecting cancerous thoughts into your mind. It doesn’t matter what could’ve been, you’re wasting so much time right now even considering it. Find that balance between desire and contentment and learn to accept what is and what isn’t.
REFERENCES + CITATIONS
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307560126_Desire_and_Desire_Regulation
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-32212-000
Hofmann, W., & Nordgren, L. F. (Eds.). (2015). The psychology of desire. The Guilford Press
In book: The Psychology of Desire (pp.61-81)
needed to hear this actually! I loved this piece