You Can't Always Want What You Want

In online gaming, we see people who become obsessively attached to the idea of gaining some particular reward — in other words, who burn with desire for a nonexistent object in a nonexistent environment.

They’re easy to laugh at, but we shouldn’t, because our own desires are much the same as theirs.

“What would answer the hollow ache of the heart?” asked Buddhist author Steve Hagen. “Money? Fame? Sex? Learning? Power? Life in the fast lane? Luxury apartments in Paris and Manhattan? A quiet cottage by a running brook?”

“What we do know is that everything we can think of never satisfies us,” wrote Hagen. “If we satisfy one craving, another arises to take its place.”

So where is satisfaction to be found? We can find it in the step we take backward from what we desire, in the mindful moment we take to reflect on the fleeting, ephemeral and often surprisingly shallow nature of the impulse that gave rise to the desire. How often do we spin in the rat wheel pursuit of obsessions that were born in a hormone, a twitch, a long-dead childhood fancy?

‘Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants,” observed the Greek philosopher Epictetus. “It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.”