On desire & week 18 of 52

intrinsic and instrumental

Photo by Tim Mossholder

What do you desire right now? Is it personal? Professional? Romantic?

Grappling with one’s desires seems to be a foundation of many religions and spiritual practices. Discipline and personal responsibility help us dodge corruption or destructive temptations. But while personal responsibility is important, denying our desires is boring and unreasonable.

Since desire is a part of the human condition, let’s look at it from multiple angles. We don’t only desire consumption or power or sex. Desire can make us want to love others, do good in the world, develop our minds, and connect in a way that goes beyond mere physicality.

It’s a TRICKY emotion. We could probably turn it over in our hands, holding it up to the light to see desire in a thousand ways, but let’s begin with five.

1. Desire can be a catalyst when the feeling is detached from expectation and met with patience.

If you tell me that you desire a fig. I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen. —Epictetus

2. To treat desire as though it were avoidable or suppressible is to deny the human condition and set ourselves up for failure. There is a famous marshmallow study in which children’s willpower around sweets is linked directly to their quality of life and academic success later in life. But this study is controversial and followed by another study that suggests we can use up our willpower in one aspect of our lives, only to sacrifice another.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge. —Plato

3. We might not even know what we want.

There is an invisible strength within us; when it recognizes two opposing objects of desire, it grows stronger. —Rumi

4. Our desires might cloud our ability to see the beauty that lies within our current existence.

“Oh, how I wish I were tall enough to go on the sea,” said the fir-tree. —Hans Christian Andersen

5. Sometimes we don’t know what we want, or we want what we don’t fully understand.

“Sometimes the most dangerous thing of all in matters of love was to be granted your heart’s desire.” —Alice Hoffman

Philosophers break desire into intrinsic or extrinsic/instrumental desire, meaning we have desires motivated by a larger life goal or by seeing what/who we want as a means to an end.

Either way, even the best intentions can only carry us so far. Desire often leads us toward the unexpected. Consider the unexpected, the lack of guarantee, for a moment.

It might be a strong enough argument to see the value of exploring what we want right now and making that exploration of our desires a practice. True compassion means not judging, which I’m suggesting here. It is a healthy self-study to question our desires and ask if they’re even ours. Do we want something because we think we should? Because we’ve been conditioned to react in a certain way?

I am writing about my personal and professional desires—exploring how they line up with reality and where their abstract nature taunts my rational mind. It’s an oddly beautiful process because the path turns in unexpected ways. I invite you to do the same.

AYTL/writing prompt: What do you most desire right now? Is it intrinsic or a desire for things to go well, so you can feel […]? How does that desire feed you or feed on you? What does it suggest about your self concept now?

Creative prompt: Write about a desire realized, despite all odds, and its outcome (good, bad, or in-between).