I don’t trust what I want, because I don’t really trust what I want ‘with’. The reason? It doesn’t know what to want, except in the contexts I have become habituated to inhabit. In short, the part of me that desires lives in a far too limited and not entirely real world of my habits, expectations, and declarations.

I want you to mistrust your own desires a bit, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. And part of why I want you to come with me on a journey of mistrust is that the incredible convenience of our modern lives, at least for many of us, relieves us of our felt sense of the power of directly expending effort. Which many of us think we do not really want to do. But that’s because most of the common ‘benefits’ of having done so seem insufficient, or insufficiently euphoric, perhaps. There are some forms of effort we generally do find compelling, but we do not want to do that which is boring, or a lot like work. And yet many of the most profound rewards absolutely require this.

And it’s not fun.

And I desire to have fun. Right?

Well, not precisely.

Why should I trust my desires when they were formed in contexts I participate in mostly by obligation? Why do I think I know what to want? Hilariously, I want you to ask the same questions, deeply. And yet, I trust that particular desire, at least in this context…

In the media, we often hear authors extolling the virtues of acquiring that which we desire. It’s not an uninteresting proposition; after all, we actually desire what we desire.

But suppose, for a moment, that very few of us are in contexts that would elicit the desires we carry more deeply than those that ordinarily intrude upon our consciousness or awareness?

Suppose that the »really good desires, the ones whose fulfillment makes what we ordinarily desire appear ramshackle and perhaps even fraudulent, are hidden by our experience of expectations and probability thoughts. Suppose that, just for the sake of an experiment, we do not know what to desire because the contexts we are used to participating in not only fail to elicit our actually held desires, they replace them with ‘more accessible’ imposters. And we become used to this, over time, so that we ‘forget’ the profound desires of our human form and nature, and acquire instead various simulacra.

I mean, after all, no one can actually see into time, and so we are blind to the vast plethora of consequences that emerge from relationships with our desires, whether inhibited, fulfilled, pursued or what have you.

Essentially, I wish to suggest that we do not really know ‘what to want’, because we have been trained to think about what is accessible, and we have trained ourselves whether we go for the minor reward near at hand, or the substantial reward in the future. Of course, some profound rewards are always near at hand.

To return to my original thread, I like to encourage people to take up practices, and actually expend great effort, experience pain, and do things that do not really make sense to desire. I would like to encourage myself to remember this, and to participate completely in the practices I pursue, to expend effort, to suffer, to learn. And to maybe think less about what I desire than how to improve that with which I desire, and, perhaps, its origins in my mind and experience.

I suggest then, that we actually work hard at learning and development, and become willing to mistrust our desires, which, more often than not, are misfounded. This may require that we find contexts that support this, or, failing that, invent them. Hopefully together. With and for each other.