Human Desires: How to Deal with them to Live a Better Life?

I have been reading this book titled "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want" by author William B. Irvine. As the title suggests, it is about human desires, the science behind desires and how to deal with them.

I still haven't finished reading it completely yet but one of the facts that hit me hard is that there is no end to human desires. We might think that once we achieve the next best thing, we will be happy but when we reach there, we realize that we were wrong.

The next thing comes up and once we achieve that, the next thing and the next thing and this goes on forever until one day we die unsatisfied. We end up living in the tomorrow instead of experiencing the today and realize that life has passed us by.

Desires could be created from two things: the emotions and the intellect. Emotional desires have a good chance of getting fulfilled but intellectual ones have very less chance by itself.

To give you an example, eating that juicy burger is an emotional desire. You automatically get it when you are hungry and you fulfil it to eliminate hunger and feel good.

Intellectual ones, say you want to become a billionaire but you may or may not achieve it unless you desire the same emotionally. Emotions are what gives you drive to achieve it.

So, how do we hack it??

Our intellect has the capacity to use one emotional desire against another emotional desire to achieve its goals. This might sound confusing but it's simple.

Let's take an example:

You intellectually desire that you want to build a good body but then you get a craving to eat a donut (emotional desire). You know it will make you fat and not help you in achieving your intellectual goal. You cannot defeat it with your intellectual desire alone.

Instead, what you can do is, when you get this craving you can imagine what having a good body will do for you: You'll look physically attractive, you'll be respected by your peers, etc which will make you feel good (emotional desires).

What you are doing here is you are smartly (intellect) using one emotional desire (to look good and be appreciated) to help get rid of the other emotional desire (to feel good). That's the only way to do it.

If we try to suppress it, it'll not work. It may just backfire. If you notice, you'll see that whenever you have overpowered an emotional desire, it was always with the help of another more powerful emotional desire.

All these are simple and obvious everyday things that we are rarely conscious of because we just want to live in the tomorrow or in the yesterday.

When you think about it, there is no yesterday or tomorrow. It's all a mental construct of our memories. If we had no memories, there would be no yesterday or tomorrow, but only here and now. And that's the ultimate truth.

Let's not allow our memory fool us and live our life fully today.

Cheers!