On Wanting
As I lie awake at 2am, unable to sleep, I think about desire. It’s the thing that drives us to do everything, from inhaling and exhaling to chasing our dreams and texting our exes.
Like ogres, desire has layers.
Inescapable physical desires — these are the things we are driven to want by our physical body, whether we want to want them or not. Our lungs need oxygen to keep us alive, we want to live (again, whether we want to want to or not), and so we take our next breath. Similarly, we feel thirst and hunger and tiredness and take the necessary steps to alleviate those feelings of want and stay alive. If those steps are difficult to achieve, it becomes difficult to achieve (or even want to achieve) anything else.
Inescapable psychological desires — people and community and being cared about by others equals safety. Isolated, we are vulnerable. We want to survive, and so, even if we think of ourselves as loners or introverts, we want someone to be there to help ensure our survival. In modern societies, the protection that community used to provide is now often provided by our governments, to varying degrees, as a kind of impersonal, distant community of sorts. If I end up on the streets, some branch of a branch of the government is supposed to interfere and make sure I don’t die, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling alone and scared and desire (real) community, warm bodies to sleep near, people to share meals with.
Escapable physical desires — sex isn’t necessary for our individual survival, but it’s still something most of us experience desire for in order to ensure the survival of the species. Craving specific foods (or craving too much food), cigarettes, other addictive substances — these are responses we’ve developed through experience and habit even if they aren’t conducive to our survival. They can usually be escaped through effort and discipline, and often have roots in the fourth type of desire.
Escapable psychological desires — these include almost everything else, from the career paths we choose and the passions we follow to the relationships we seek. There is usually nothing forcing us to act according to these desires, but we do it because we hope it will bring us happiness.1 They are shaped by everything we have experienced and witnessed throughout our lives, making them inherently complex and often contradictory. You may decide to become a lawyer because you want to please your family, while your actual dream is to join a circus school. These are the desires that often cause us the most trouble in life, but are also the most malleable and escapable.
All our desires are involuntary and irrational. We don’t choose to want one thing over another — the desire simply arises, and all we can do is choose whether or not to act on it. If we have decided to act on it, as rational creatures, we will try to rationalise it for ourselves. I want to study engineering because that will help me get a well-paid job and build a fulfilling life, which is my ultimate goal. Many people have fulfilling lives without well-paid jobs, and many people get well-paid jobs without studying engineering. What desires, thoughts and beliefs are behind this type of life being your “ultimate goal”? It is no more rational than saying I want to study English literature because it’s something I’m passionate about and it will increase my chances of getting a job in the field, allowing me to make a living from my passion and have a fulfilling life. One person has a stronger urge to follow their passion, while the other has a stronger urge to follow a more secure life path; both of them are guided by a desire to be happy/fulfilled, they’ve just developed different beliefs around how to achieve that according to what they’ve seen and experienced.
Neither one of them is certain to actually achieve happiness.
Many of our desires lead us down uncertain paths, but what bothers me most is this: why do we desire things we know will hurt us? These are desires that we keep hoping will bring us happiness, although experience has shown the opposite over and over again. Every time I text my ex, my wounds re-open, my stomach hurts, whatever he says haunts me for weeks, and yet… the urge never really leaves.
An alcoholic has developed a desire for alcohol that overpowers almost all other desires. He may have been driven to alcoholism by the culture he lives in and the family that raised him, or by trauma and lack of adequate care leading him to self-medicate, or simply a series of bad choices influenced by the people around him, further driven by genetics — or, most commonly, a combination of the above. At a certain point, alcohol becomes the default desire for improving any situation. Had a good day? Celebrate with a drink. Had a bad day? Drown your sorrows. Lonely? You can always meet someone at the bar. Woke up hungover? Feel better with, you guessed it, another drink.
With time, of course, other things he is supposed to care about in life start to fall apart. His health declines, his relationships suffer, it becomes difficult to hold down a job and, essentially, the alcohol stops making him feel happy. And yet, he continues to want to drink more than he wants everything else in his life to improve (until, hopefully, at some point he doesn’t anymore).
Can every harmful, pervasive desire be analysed and treated through the lens of addiction? Although my pursuit of unhealthy relationships hasn’t directly threatened my survival (yet)2, it still causes me to suffer, and though I have built up the strength and resilience to mostly refrain from acting on it, the desire itself remains, waiting for any signs of weakness.
And so I’m left pondering, lying awake at 2am (although I am now sitting and it is almost 3am), why we desire the things that cause us pain. What is it that we hope we will heal by constantly wounding ourselves again and again? The easy (and probably true) answer is trauma. Something from my past rewired my brain to believe that love was supposed to hurt and be something I had to work for. That my value as a person hinged on convincing someone who didn’t really want to love me to love me. The way to true fulfilment and happiness is to run into a wall over and over again until it finally bends to my will. Every time I had an experience that positively confirmed that belief (e.g. the happiness I felt when a relationship I was “working on” was going well), the desire to repeat that experience became stronger. Every time I had an experience that negatively confirmed that belief again afterwards (e.g. the devastation caused by every micro-rejection, every time my partner was unable to meet my needs, every time I felt abandoned), it made me run into the wall even harder.
I want to be happy. It’s just that, somewhere in between the escapable and the inescapable, the physical and the psychological, I keep wanting to reach that happiness in a way that is irrational and improbable.
I can feel my body finally desiring the sleep I rationally know it should (see? I can’t force a desire on myself even if I know it’s good for me). Thank you for humouring my late night thoughts, wherever and whenever you are. See you next time.
Strangely enough, if something was forcing us to do those things, they would likely become less desirable. The desire for freedom often supersedes all other desires.
Actually, I’ve had more than one boyfriend who was a reckless driver. And I kept getting into cars with them. So I might be lying about that.