Pursuing my desires vs. Understanding them

Yesterday, someone shared with me how his work fills his life with perpetual stress and doesn’t leave any time for things he wants to do for himself. I asked him an example of such a thing.

“Meditation.” He added, “However, as soon as I sit to meditate, either I get work-related calls or those thoughts keep swirling around in my head.”

My natural or subconscious response was to say, “But I have all the time in the world to do things that I want to do.”

Perhaps I wanted to say so because I wanted him to know that such work is possible and because I wanted to motivate him to find such work for him and not resign himself to his current situation.

However, my impulse to say so was also borne out of a desire to hear from him “Oh man! What a fantastic life you have!”

As I reflected on the incident today, I asked myself, “Why do I have this desire – the desire to win his approval?”

How will his saying that I have a fantastic life help me?

Will this help me by making me believe that I ‘indeed’ have a fantastic life?

If I believe that I have a fantastic life, I feel better. In other words, my belief that I have a fantastic life moves me closer to having a fantastic life.

And my belief depends on what others think.

Thus, I constantly try to make others think in a particular way about me.

They think I have a fantastic life -> I believe that I have a fantastic life -> I move towards having a fantastic life.

However, this constant striving to make others think in a particular way about me deteriorates my quality of life and keeps me from having a fantastic life.

Thus, overall, this way of moving towards a fantastic life doesn’t seem very effective.

What I did above was analyse why I had a particular desire (to impress someone or gain his approval). The analysis itself was satisfying and, I believe, is expected to improve my life experience much more than pursuing that desire.

However, in the past, I have focused a lot on pursuing my desires. Perhaps, I need not follow all my desires. I can understand them and then decide which ones are worthy of pursuing.

This post was originally posted here.