I Find Myself Wanting

Desire Is An Endless Ache For Something We Already Have

A gentle metaphor for what my mind does to my soul: It flits like a butterfly from one object of desire to the next. I want those Japanese plates. I want that garden apartment. I want a minimalist lifestyle with only a table and a book. I want a giant living room filled with gorgeous furniture. I want to have written a novel, screenplay, a stage play, an essay. I want to live in Portugal. I want to live in Japan. I want to live on a farm. I want to live in Brooklyn, Gramercy, Greenpoint, the Lower East Side. The list, my friends, is endless, and it plays on a loop of cycling contradictions.

I was listening to a wise friend last night who said, “I keep thinking I’ll be happy once I get something outside of me, but then I remember that it’s an inside job.” Another wise friend said, “My whole life it’s been this way. I get all knotted up and then I’m reminded of where my answers are.”

What provoked this post was reading this post which was called to my attention by Samuel Lopez-Barrantes , about all the things that people want in Paris because they saw other people enjoying them on social media. The author, Farrah, saw so many things that she wanted on TikTok, but when she encountered them she found them lacking. So many things that are popular on the platform are mediocre cafes, tarted up with plastic flowers, to make them Instagrammable and TikCrapable. Great for making other people envy your life, but not actually enjoyable in and of themselves.

Bush League Philosophy

Author Luke Burgis wrote a book called “Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.” I haven’t read it, but I have read his substack. It’s grounded in the philosophy of Rene Girard who, as I understand it, said that we really only desire things that we see other people desiring. He made up a word for this: Memesis. But there was a phrase for it before he came along. It was “Monkey see, monkey do.”

Now, I haven’t read any of these books. I’m one of these guys who reads about books and then talks about them as if I’ve actually read them. I want to have read them, not to read them, so I read about them instead. But I do have tremendous and deep experience with wanting things. I’m something of an expert when it comes to longing.

A Movement Is Coming

Since Buddha, (Again, I haven’t read anything the Buddha wrote, I’ve just read stuff about stuff about him.) we’ve learned about attachment to things as a cause of suffering. Wanting stuff makes us miserable. But we’re deluded into thinking that having stuff will make us happy. That’s the trap! And it seems like, at different times in history, we’ve gotten closer as a society to understanding that.

But right now, with social media, we’re trapped in a multi-screened funhouse of desire. Everywhere we turn, we see curated videos and images of people desiring things: People eating staged plates of pasta, jumping into pristine lakes, taking in a view at some skyscraper or natural wonder. The internet is a crop duster of desire, spraying the ache of craving like manure over the troughs of our fecund minds.

In her post about TikTokers taking over Paris, Farrah mentions driving for hours to get something she saw on social media only to realize that it was dumb. Then she saw all this madness through new eyes. She became disillusioned with her own desire. Which makes me wonder: How many times does desire have to break its promise before a person realizes that happiness is an inside job? When do we say “enough” to not having enough?

For me, breaking free from the delusion that I’m one tailored shirt away from being who I’ve always wanted to be is a constant process. I get there, only to fall back into it with some other empty promise of salvation. Desire is a shape-shifter. It’s clever and seductive. But it’s not actually that smart. I’m incredibly gullible when it comes to the false promises of desire. I want to believe. I’m an easy mark.

Here’s one of its tricks: “It’s not the stuff, it’s the experiences!” Remember that sales pitch for shifting desire that came out a few years ago? In a pseudo-spiritual pique, people began reallocating their discretionary spending from material possessions to fancy trips. It was positioned as a more meaningful way to live. I bought into it, because I buy into just about everything. I’m a sucker.

But then I realized that highly-curated experiences, especially experiences that involve hotels and restaurants, are just another way to commodify the stuff of life. It’s simply another asset class in the diversified portfolio of desire. Experiences are wonderful. But must they cost as much as a sub-zero refrigerator? When I see other people having experiences that I want to have, I’m doing it again.

I think the bottomless wanting that fuels an attention economy of swiping through desires is going to force us to rethink the entire premise that happiness can be bought. I’ve been watching the cycle play out from a distance with dating. I’ve been married for a long time, so I never experienced the horror of the dating app. But from what I see, people are disenchanted with the way human connection has been turned into a digital marketplace. They seem to be searching for new ways to meet and connect.

Perhaps we’re hitting bottom on the promise that having consumer goods will make us happy. Now, I’m not talking about basic needs. A smarter person than I will have to parse wants and needs. But I do know this: It’s not whatever crap is going to turn my head today as I wander from work to home. I don’t know what it’ll be yet, but I’m certain it won’t fix the thing deep inside me that jumps up and down like a little kid that has to pee and screams “Gimme that! I can’t live without it!”

Instead, just for today, I’ll say no to the garish carousel of wants and spins through my mind. I won’t ride that frozen horse up and down. Instead, I’ll do something for someone else. I’ll hold open a door, offer a smile, give up my seat on the subway, check in on a friend, and feel a momentary release from the panic that I am not enough.

Desiring your happiness,

I am,

Sean Sakamoto