[TheMentat]

Kinda reminds me of this article I read yesterday. Not really into the meditation camp thing, but this guy still hits on some good points:

Three Things We All Need to Know About Desire

The Main Street strip in Mount Pleasant, Vancouver, is a mile-long stretch offering every sense pleasure you could think of. Craft beer. Sushi. Third-wave coffee. Trendy clothes. Pizza and burgers. Ergonomic furniture. Artisanal ice cream.

Last month, on my first night back in civilization after a seven-day silent retreat, I spent most of the evening slowly walking that strip.

Still hyper-aware and hyper-patient from the retreat, I kept noticing something my mind usually only does in the background. Maybe fifteen or twenty separate times, I noticed myself getting really excited about acquiring something—a slice of pizza, a book, a dessert, a coffee—and then I noticed that feeling dissipate.

Each of these cravings came and went in turn, and the experience was the same every time. There were five or ten seconds of really intense wanting—Yes! That! I could have that! Then there was a minute or so of lingering enthusiasm, maybe some money-related rationalization about acquiring the tweed-faced notebook or blueberry-lavender ice cream in question.

But if I just kept walking past the storefront, the feeling ran out of steam very quickly. Five minutes later, I could remember it, but the emotional pull was all but gone.

Desires begin vanishing as soon as they arrive, yet our responses to them can have far reaching consequences. What we tend to do during those pivotal seconds can make all the difference between good health or poor health, retiring at 40 or at 70, and being generally happy or generally miserable.

It’s not much of a stretch to say that poor “Want Management” skills create virtually every problem in society—corruption, addiction, violence, debt, corporate amorality, crappy products, environmental destruction and every other lamentable thing in your newspaper.

Given that wants and cravings essentially drive society, it’s quite astonishing that we don’t get much training in responding to them, or even recognizing them when they’re happening.

The false choice we learn as kids

As children, the adults in our lives tried to manage our desires by simply telling us that we can’t have the thing we want. The candy, the toy, the TV show that was going to come on next—they said no, we can’t have it, and if necessary, physically prevented us from having the thing.

We suffered quietly, or loudly, every time. Our young minds quickly determined that every desire produces one of two outcomes: getting the thing, or suffering over not getting the thing.

Then we grew up and began to earn our own money, and now Aunt Sally can’t stop us from buying all the candy we desire. Our tastes have usually changed, however, to more costly things like clothes, furniture, cars and booze.

We learn only very slowly, if at all, better skills for dealing with—or even recognizing—this endless torrent of emerging wants. Some wisdom develops over the years, partly through run-ins with credit card debt, health scares, addiction, and other dark learning experiences.

Just acknowledging a few easy-to-overlook realities about desire goes a long way towards helping us create healthy, life-improving habits. It can get a lot more sophisticated—Buddhism is essentially a 2,600-year study of desire management, and it’s no accident that my experiences on Main Street came on the heels of a silent retreat.

That may not be your cup of tea, but there are at least three things we all need to know about the nature of wanting.

1) Desires appear constantly

You’ve experienced millions of desires and there will be millions more. Yet we operate as though we only want a finite collection of things, and life is a quest to obtain those things so we can finally relax and feel stable and happy.

But something’s fishy there—if you were to write down in a journal all the things you find yourself wanting, the result is obviously not a list of the things required to make you happy. “50th Anniversary Commemorative Sergeant Pepper jigsaw puzzle” is not a vital ingredient to my well-being.

Even listing a single day’s worth of wants would make it obvious that desire is just an evolutionary function set on permanent overdrive—More security! More stimulation! Fat and sugar! Sex! Status! All the things! Clearly there’s no plan here, no roadmap to well-being, just a monkey with a megaphone and an endless list of demands—each of which costs something to fulfill.

2) Desires are a kind of pain

We often think of desires as pleasant, because we associate them with our fantasies about acquiring the thing in question.

But if you pay attention to wanting itself, it’s a tense, breath-shortening feeling, one that makes the present moment a lot less tolerable. In consumer societies, we often relieve this tension habitually by paying the desire off—going ahead and acquiring the thing, sacrificing some measure of money, health, or self-respect to do it, even if we know better on some level.

If you want to see the pain of desire, separated out from soothing expectations of actually getting the thing, tell your child you’re going to get ice cream, then tell them you’ve changed your mind. The child hasn’t gained or lost anything, but simply putting that desire in her little mind, without the promise of relief, creates so much distress that it’s clearly a cruel thing to do.

Also notice that at some point the desire subsides, even if the ice cream was never delivered. All tantrums end, no matter our age. But the suffering is real, and once we hook our little hearts on some appealing object, the pain can stretch from moments to hours, and by that point it has nothing to do with ice cream.

3) Desires don’t last

This was obvious during my post-retreat saunter in Vancouver, but normally it’s hard to see: desires don’t last very long. They are very-short-term spasms of the mind, and this is a vital point to recognize if you want to be financially stable, healthy, principled, and able to keep a manageable schedule.

Imagine you’re home with your partner, on a super-ordinary night, watching Weekend At Bernie’s on Netflix. During a particular scene, you feel a surge of excitement as you’re struck with an idea:

Hey! *I* could have a boat! I could be cruising the waves, wearing a white captain’s hat, lit up by golden-hour sun rays.

Without recognizing this idea for the momentary spasm it is, you decide “Yes! I will have that! I can swing it. Fred has a boat and I make at least as much as he does.” Later, still excited, you Google boats, prices, and read a Boat Owner’s FAQ.

What could have been a 90-second mental digression during an ordinary Tuesday movie night instead became a years-long saga of financial pressure, including a much later retirement date. Only very occasionally does this situation deliver some of the idyllic (but unnecessary) wave-cruising pleasure you daydreamed about randomly that time on the couch.

We might think our desires for big, costly things must arise from correspondingly deep, meaningful needs, but really, it’s just the mind going “Yes! That! I could have that!” for the millionth time.

By remembering any of these points during that initial flareup of wanting, we can avoid the extremely costly “appeasement” route. You can notice that you want something, and instead of slipping into negotiations mode—how great it would be, how you can justify it—you can go, “Ok, desire #10223235 has arrived. It won’t be here long, and in the mean time, I will not let it shake me down.”