Instead of Gratitude Meditation Consider Seething
(One day I want to attempt the writing trickshot of never directly saying what I’m pointing at, and instead only gesturing to the edges of the hypermeme in the hopes that you glimpse the pattern. I did this for the opening of Twenty-Seven Years At Macy’s; perhaps when I am old and bereft of fucks to give, I will make it My Whole Thing. )
1.
There’s an entire class of people who are competitive and desire prestige. They are usually smart and scholastically accomplished; driven, you might say. These folks are always hardworking, and sometimes drift towards medicine (if they have a desire to help people) or drift towards law (if they are moved by the beauty of civics), or finance (if they watched Wall Street at the wrong age). Like a mule pulling a plow, somehow their desire to Accomplish and Be Yourself has gotten yoked to these very standard societally-acceptable presentations.
But who on earth, if thinking from first principles, would decide to be a doctor or a lawyer or a Finance Douche? Who would choose that shape for themselves? No, these bundled positions are handed to you as package deals; storebought.
(Consider modern political parties. The positions they hold are somewhat insane and inconsistent. Why would we expect animal rights and fetus rights to be on opposite sides? Yet via path-dependent historical shenanigans, we find ourselves here, with strange hodgepodge coalitions that, if we were allowed to pick our precise political issues a la carte, almost no one would actually want.)
Imagine the bisexual woman who would, indeed, like to try fucking ladies, but she doesn’t really know how to go about doing that and besides there are all these nice men flinging themselves at her and there might be complicated societal opinions if she draws society’s attention in drifting from “straight woman” to “bisexual woman”. And so she just, never does it.
If you try to query within within yourself and ask “what do I want” you will often find a big vague Meh. And then, suspiciously tardy, you may notice your brain shoving out a few suggestions; “uh, a big house, millions of dollars, the respect and love of my peers—”.
Those are not your real desires.
I respect the fetishist. At least they’re honestly looking at what they want, and not flinching away when they find it.
2.
A case of True Love redeems a person, because when you want someone with one hundred percent of yourself then you will find all of your inner psychological parts aligning like iron filings in a magnetic field and moving without effort towards whatever path you honestly believe is your best bet.
In the process of seeking that path you will take stock of who you are and whether that is who you should be. You will refactor your life and find yourself doing things right because they have gone from something you “Should” do to something which is instrumentally important to your real goals and this will burn you clean because the love is totalizing and brooks no profligacy.
And a case of True Curiosity in which a person really wants to know the real and actual answer can force a person to discard the delusions which that they have on some level identified and shift from a sort of low-effort signaling game of trying not to get fired or trying to signal caring or otherwise trying to try; into a state of wanting something specific out of this world and thereby making the actual attempt.
So do I think that locating and following a True Desire is quite purifying for the soul and it actually doesn’t matter that much what the object of your desire IS because the act of truly truly wanting and seeking will carve you clean, will bare your actual self, the elephant from the marble. People become who they are meant to be by following their desires no matter where they lead.
But you must not fall prey to parasites of manufactured desire.
3.
This is the age of parasites.
Our bodies contain numerous anti-parasite mechanisms which, in the modern absence of parasites, occasionally go berserk in an autoimmune way. One of the solutions is eating dirt.
In that vein, I wish I could eat dirt to stop having such friendly feelings towards Dr. Pepper.
Look at this. I am a goddamn monkey who did not evolve to deal with this shit. A single modern nacho-blasted Dorito contains more flavor than the medieval peasant would experience in their entire life. Corporations occupy slots in our Dunbar rings. There were no fae to tempt us with gardens of violent delight so we invented them ourselves.
Parasociality. Humanist branding. Relentlessly optimized twitter dunks. Meme wars. Gamification of debt. Onlyfans for writers. Politics is the mind-killer. Wokeness. Signaling. Asian parents.
Our motivation circuits are operating in the most hostile environment of competitive superstimuli ever to exist, and so it is hard to want something when you are being relentlessly bombarded by suggestions of things to want and subtle or not so subtle intimations of what you (a good person) Should want. And we cannot fall back on the animal desires in their purity because those too are corrupted by fast food and soft beds and photorealistic virtual reality gangbang porn.
So I am afraid I must ask you to introspect.
Look within yourself and really squint at your desires. To live is to want. If you can find your actual desires then you will find you have positive goals in addition to the negative. You are a leaning tower of wants, pockmarked like caves upon your surface.
I will be gentler here. Discovering what you want might hurt badly. It will hurt, if what you find is that there’s a strong yearning desire within you which will never be fulfilled. It would be a dark world, that. You may have to learn to actually usefully clear your grief. You may have been hiding it from yourself for a long time via a fan-dance of rationalizations such that you need a precise anti-koan to hit you just right.
Because the alternative is to never live. To live *is* to want. Buddhism is wrong. We’re all adults here, we can admit this. Buddhism is a cheat code for avoiding suffering in this world by preemptively surrendering to whatever happens. There are other ways to be.
I am asking you to seethe and suffer. You will come to learn the contours of your own desire. You do not, in the end, want a shiny car. There are realer things you want, really. You will dig deep through the many layers of basic ape drives and the many layers of commercial parasite load and the layers of societal expectations and parental pressure and in the end only you will remain.
Have courage.
This does not have to be a grim, teeth-gritted process. Simply follow the gradient of what you want, casting aside the pale, two-dimensional shadows of desire placed within you by advertising. Have courage. Parts of you know how to do this. You are still in there.
The alternative to finding your true wants and acting on them is to die a gray and timid soul never knowing victory or defeat. Have courage. You have to live your fantasies, or else you won’t have lived them.
Look inside, and listen! Do not round off your desires too swiftly! Do not be afraid of what you might find. That is who you are! That is who you are.
And of course, for half of the audience: forget seething, have you tried gratitude meditation?!