231. RE: trying to rid myself of material desires
Dear Misu,
I have the tendency to start up my writing again with a letter to a friend. I find it easier to respond to others' thoughts than my own. Maybe it's just because I enjoy facilitating discussion. When I write โtoโ someone, I am less tempted to perform in my writing and more inclined to be honest and just shoot the shit. As always, you always give me a point of entry, a place to stand. Sometimes I feel like I am announcing ideas into the void. But the void is Bear Blog lol.
Schopenhauer: "Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain [of unfulfilled desire] and boredom [of satisfaction]."
I also have the tendency to talk about the same territory youโre circling here. The thread that stays with me is this shared feeling of restlessness. I think I would claim that I have subtle but persistent itch for adventure (maybe subtle isn't quite the right word, but I like to underwhelm the masses). The sense that when things are calm, I want stimulation, and when things are intense, I want relief, I want stability.
I think that if you graphed this feeling of yearning for "material desires", it would look like a cosine function. This steady oscillation, except it's not quite steady. In fact, it's a little messier and a little more jagged than math would allow. Honestly, I try figure out why it feels like this certain kind of experience, and of life itself, is this endless hamster wheel of ups and downs, of happys and sads. Why does satisfaction so often dulls into boredom? Why does longing feels so sharp and alive, even when it is uncomfortable? Anyway, after all that pondering, I did not land anywhere definitive. We are still stuck! I think that's okay too.
Your boots story feels like a perfect case study in the microeconomics of longing. You had months of research, an Upper East side pilgrimage, a cash exchange like it was a drug deal (but is instant gratification just merely a quick dope?).
What's getting to me isnโt that you just bought them for the sake of buying it, but that you ran an entire due diligence operation and still desire slipped through. You did everything right! You tried them on, waited on the thought, price-optimized... Yet the lived reality of โownershipโ was different from the fantasy of โhaving.โ Sure, the toebox is too tight. The removal is too cumbersome. The look is not quite what your mind had polished it into. It is almost uncanny how quickly desire can dissolve once it has nowhere left to go.
I often have this feeling of wanting something and then realizing that things aren't so perfect in reality. When it is easy to acquire and easy to discard, commitment starts to feel optional. I do not think your frustration is really about materialism. It sounds more like exhaustion with the mental churn. The time and energy spent imagining, comparing, desiring, only to circle back to neutrality. I relate to that. Why do we keep swinging? Why is the middle so hard to inhabit?
Photo from ๐ Hedonic Treadmill by Vadim Kravcenko
I do not have an answer for you (LOL). I suspect there is no clean one. But I do think there is something valuable in how clearly you are seeing the pattern. You are not blindly accumulating. You are observing yourself in motion. You are noticing the cost in time and attention. That kind of self-awareness is not trivial. It is the beginning of agency.
Maybe the question is not how to turn desire off. Maybe it is about asking which desires actually sustain you after the high fades. Some things shrink once acquired. Other things deepen with use. There are conversations that linger, there are books that mark you, there are songs you return to, there are movies you rewatch. Those feelings feel different. They do not need resale value to justify themselves.
Also, I may add, the city might accelerate the cycle, but you are the one pausing to study it and I really think that matters. Even if we are all still a little stuck on the hedonistic hamster wheel, at least we are looking down at our own feet as we run.
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<3 K