Perhaps I meant to ask: Why do we desire the things we desire?

It is a terrible secret no one would dare reveal - their deepest, repressed longing. But I would argue that we seldom are even aware of what it is that we desire most deeply. Most of those surface desires we satisfy are a result of some usual craving, like food, water, shelter and sex, perhaps even company. But after satisfying these, we never ask ourselves why all of it is insatiating. We are just as empty and desirous as we were previously when we were hungry, cold or lonely.

However, we are all deeply of conscious of this. Having the luxury of boredom, we are most intensely sensitive to this unfulfilled lack to the point where we distract ourselves with menial cravings. We are relieved by descending, as it were, into a haze of unconsciousness, because to become sensitive to the pain is to accept anxiousness and the freedom of possibility completely and utterly.

Who’s Desire?

What if we stopped just for a few moments to think about our desires? We would realise quickly that most of them are for the gratification of the Ego. But what is the Ego? Is it not just an indwelling of the zeitgeist, seeking to remove all semblance of personality and all individuality?

If what we desire defines us, in the way in which we orient our lives in pursuit of it - what would it mean if our desires are not even our own? What are we living for?

The True Culmination of Desire

Most of us, outside of all the busyness of life’s menial cravings, feel this ‘emptiness’. When we feel it, we become anxious and instintually strive to avoid it. This feeling is the freedom of possibility.

If only we lean further into this strange, limitless feeling - how our relationship towards desire would change! Those things which we succumbed to so compulsively would no longer be so significant, because the spectrum of our desires has been widened!

What I am really trying to say is that we are not ‘desiring-machines’ as Deleuze and Guattari doom us to be. We don’t only have to desire what we see, and what we have been offered. We are more creative than that! Most of what we distract ourselves with are merely shiny objects, comfort, and quick, terse pleasure.

But what if we desire hardship? What if we desire difficulty? Look at what Nietzsche writes:

“Even today you have a choice: either as little pain as possible, in short, analgesia – and in the end, socialists and party politicians cannot in all honesty promise their people more – or as much pain as possible, as the price of a luxuriance of subtle and seldom-tasted joys and pleasures! Should you decide in favour of the former, should you want to mitigate and assuage human suffering, well, you must also moderate and diminish the human capacity for joy.”

Perhaps our real desires that lie beyond the surface ones we are so accustomed to, will only reveal themselves through the roughness of refinement, and through the embracing of those necessary, painful tasks. For how else would we come towards true inward reflection? St Paul speaks of being saved as ‘though by fire’ (1 Corinthians 3:15). I will never pretend to understand biblical scripture, but purification of any kind is always performed under intense pressure, intensity and heat. But to purify is to come closer towards the true, original, and intented purpose for which a thing is made. And so we also, by desiring pain and suffering - not for its own sake, but for the sake of renewal and refinement - come closer to knowing who we are deep within. This is the true culmination of desire.

By rejecting hardship, we are rejecting the chief cornerstone to our soul’s architecture.