The Objects of Our Desire
Desire is constant, but many of the objects of desire are not. You have probably deeply desired many different things over the course of your life that you don’t even think about anymore. And some of the things you want now would have been unimaginable to your childhood, teen, or 20-year-old selves.
The development of your body and your brain, along with the different experiences you’ve had, has changed you in lots of ways and affected your tastes, your preferences, and the things that give you pleasure.
You couldn’t have known who you’d fall in love with before you met that person. And you couldn’t have predicted you’d develop a passion for the Nam Sod at Orchid Thai restaurant, hiking the hills of Pt. Reyes National Seashore, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fiesta Ware (which is referred to as “kitchen crack” for a reason), Sonny Rollins on sax, Wes Anderson films, and Campari and grapefruit juice on the rocks.
OK, those are a few of the things I’m passionate about. It was pretty much love at first bite, sip, sight, or listen with each one, but most of those first encounters didn’t take place until I was at least in my 20s. I can’t imagine my childhood self proceeding past the first taste of Nam Sod. I was “a picky eater.” Ditto the Campari. And I grew up in Michigan, which is very flat, so the concept of hiking in any hills would have been an alien one if it had even come up. I might have liked Wes Anderson, though.
I was once such a fanatic about the Detroit Tigers that I took the day off from work to watch Mickey Lolich pitch game seven of the 1968 World Series, beating Bob Gibson and winning the Tigers a championship. Many years later, when I lived in the Bay Area, I was even more fanatical about the San Francisco 49ers. I mean attending-as-many-home-games-as-possible, rattling-off-arcane-stats, and screaming-at-the-top-of-my-lungs fanatical. I still remember how elated I felt when they won and how utterly devastated when they lost.
I derived a considerable amount of pleasure from the time and energy I invested in following those teams. Now I don’t care about sports at all. So it’s a great example of how the targets of desire wax and wane. And of how desire, aka dopamine, motivates us to take action—to move us toward different targets at different ages and stages of our lives.
Normally we don’t make conscious decisions about what we’re going to become passionate about—what we’re going to desire. It seems like decision and desire exist in two different domains. Passions arise. We just kind of go along for the ride because we’re wired to desire. It’s automatic. We don’t stop to consider where the ride might take us.
My partner’s mother, who I lived with for a short (though not short enough) time, had a handful of African violets. She constantly boasted about how much skill they took to maintain. When he and I moved out, I bought half a dozen of the plants because I wanted to see for myself exactly how temperamental they were. Neither my partner nor I could have anticipated we would end up dedicating an entire room of our home to African violets and their relatives (such as the streptocarpus above), join the San Francisco Gesneriad Society, and win ribbons for the plants we entered into competition.
Desire is much more than a feeling. It’s a motivator that compels us to take action to get—or get more of—the objects of our desire, whatever they may be: the opportunity for a vicarious victory, a new variety of streptocarpus, or the next taste of Nam Sod. The fact that we usually don’t direct it doesn’t mean we can’t.
You can shift the direction of desire away from one thing and toward something else. You’re not simply at the effect of desire or the objects of your desire. But in order to shift the direction of desire, you need to use conscious (System 2) attention. As with anything else involving the brain, it’s a matter of learning how to use it instead of letting yourself be used by it.
Dopamine, which drives desire, is extremely powerful. Letting it operate unchecked can be exhilarating, terrifying, and occasionally life-threatening. Learning how to direct it, however, is truly empowering.
At the next Monthly Meeting of the Mind (& Brain) we’ll explore the difference between wanting and liking and figure out how we can use wanting instead of letting wanting use us.