Desires; To embrace or let go?

Desire is a tricky thing to understand. You need to think hard about the desires. There are desires for which you can be patient because those are your true desires, and you can work for the long haul to get them. And then there are desires which are simply impulses.

Discard your impulsive desires. And try to satisfy your actual desires as fast as possible.

The impulsive desires diverge. True desires converge.

As soon as you satisfy your impulsive desire, you'll want more things. You'll want to upgrade all the aspects of your life, at least to a point that you have spent equivalent money in all the aspects. You won't really appreciate the things you have, instead will have the itch to chase anything and everything that you find. It’s the curse to your life. Because once you have an impulsive desire on your mind, you can’t certainly see anything clearly. Your work suffers, you are mentally present in any conversation, and even if you are, then you try to drift the conversations towards those impulsive desires.

Whereas, as soon as you satisfy your true desire, you'll feel relaxed, you'll feel satisfied. True desires will make you do things that you've never done before, will make you socialise with the kind of people you never socialised before with. You will have to become a different person and a better person to be able to achieve your true desires. True desires make you focused on one thing for a long period of time. Once I satisfied my desire of owning an iPhone, the idea of which I started thinking about two years ago, I didn't really feel the urge to buy something else the next day. I started desiring a watch because I've been reading about watches since a couple of years. Now that I’ve purchased it, I just desire a life where I can sustain golfing, regular upgrades of the equipment, can eat delectable food every day, and publish books. To satisfy that, I have to become a person who has at least half a million-dollar business running. I've to learn to build a polished tech product. I mean, I’m a good developer, but thinking about the product from a customer’s perspective, doing product management, setting deadlines, and making a few potential customers to try this out for their workflow are new to me. They won’t necessarily be difficult, but they sure are daunting, and can hinder you from achieving true desires.

Fulfilling true desire, grows future desires in value

If you are really fulfilling true desires, your next true desire will be bigger and harder to get, whether you talk about monetarily or spiritually.

When it is about materialistic desires, people just want to upgrade everything that they use, unto the lifestyle that their income can afford them. But when you truly care about something and have mental clarity, even something like desiring a luxury watch can make you do incredible things. Because if you really have gained clarity, then you won’t just want to save up and buy the watch. You’d want to increase the value of your time such that the watch can be bought with the least amount of work done. You wouldn’t want to spend three months of income on a watch. Likewise, you’d want to increase the value of your time, so that you can buy a luxury watch with income from three, four, or maybe five days of work. Once you get that, you might want something else, but this time it’ll be much more valuable thing. And going to that level you’ll have to become a better person. You’ll have to evolve.

That's it for this blog post and if you feel that you've something to add to this or you have a different perspective then share it and discuss it on r/StoicHuman or go to the Reddit discussion post for this blog post linked down below.

Stay healthy, Stay safe!

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