2 Types of Desires That Always Cause Disappointment

Some desires are set up to disappoint you no matter what you do. In this lesson I name two of them, what I call impossible desires and slave desires, and show why both leave you suffering even when things go your way. Once you can spot them, you can form intentions that do not quietly set you up to lose.

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Transcript

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Think back to the last time that you felt frustration. You know, something happened and it just stressed you out. Maybe you got disappointed or thrown off, angry. Usually, when this happens, there is a desire of some kind that we have, and then reality comes in and thwarts the desire. Let's just say I have the desire to visit a place at 1 p.m. and it's five minutes until 1 p.m. and I'm stuck in traffic. Desire that I have is now being opposed by reality. Frustration kicks in. And with this insight that our desires, our self-generated desires, play a key role in the equation of suffering of many kinds, it's worth looking at desire in a little bit more depth. So, first of all, we can say that it's worth developing a sense of tranquility when things don't go our way, right? So we don't change our desires, but when our desires are not met, when things don't go our way, it's worth practicing letting go, right? This is the dichotomy of control. Oh, this is not up to me. The traffic is not within my control. Okay, it is what it is. Let go of it. That's fine. But then there's something else we can do, and that is modify our desires to begin with and be careful in the way that we generate them. In chapter 14 of the handbook of Epictetus, I've decoded it and found two different types of desires. These are my own labels, but I think they'll help you understand these different types of desires as well. So there are two different types of desires that Epictetus references. One of them I call impossible desires, and the other one I call slave desires. So the first one, the impossible desire, I think of this as an unrealistic, impossible expectation about a reality that inevitably leads to disappointment and frustration. We're going to get into this in a little bit more depth, but I'm going to give you the short version to begin with. The second type I call slave desires. And for a slave desire, the outcome of the desire is not up to us. And so unknowingly, we enslave ourselves, our emotions, to something outside of our control before we've even pursued the thing. And you might be able to guess if we want to live a tranquil existence, not having impossible desires and not having slave desires will be an important step in getting there. So, very simply put, if you want things that are impossible to attain, one could argue that that's foolish. Now, when I talk about wanting things that are impossible to attain, I'm not talking about what you say you want. Because if I ask you, what do you want from life? In a conversational setting, you're probably going to say a bunch of things that sound somewhat reasonable. Not always, but very often. But a more important thing to investigate is what are our implicit impossible desires? The things that we want, but maybe we don't say that we want. And so let me give you some example. Many of us want our children, our partners, our friends, and our parents to live forever. Now, if I engage you in a philosophical debate, you might say, well, actually, I don't think immortality is a good thing because nobody should live forever and see everyone they love die. So you might give that proper answer, but you don't act as if that's true. There's never going to be a time in your life when you want the people that you love to die. Or if that does happen, that's going to be kind of a rare event. There's really a time when you actually don't want your partners, your friends, your family to live forever. In fact, we desire this immortality for our loved ones with a passion. But it is an impossible desire because we can't make people live forever. We can't make people invincible and invulnerable to disease and illness and tragedy and pain. We don't have such powers. And even if we could do that, if I gave you that ability, you'd probably make a mess of it, as most of us would. You know, we're not meant to have such power. We can also bring this idea of impossible desires to a more trivial and ordinary plane of existence. So let's just say that we're in a relationship. We have a partner, maybe we feel a bit jealous. Maybe our impossible desire here is that our partner never, ever flirts with the opposite sex, ever. You know, I desire that they never laugh or joke or smile or find other people attractive. In fact, that's my impossible desire. I don't want my partner to ever find anyone else ever attractive. Or another one would be: I don't want my friends to ever gossip about me, ever say a bad word about me, ever think anything bad about me ever again. Or I don't understand why people do bad things in the world. Why do people steal and do acts of violence and kill? They shouldn't do that. I don't like it, I don't want that. On the one hand, you could say that these intentions are nice intentions, right? It makes sense why we would want these things. Problem is when these intentions become desires, when we can't separate the ideal that we have from the desire that we have. Cicero had this distinction between choosing something versus desiring something. And I like this distinction. He would say that when we aim at the ultimate good, we shoot our arrow. We choose to hit the target, but we don't desire it because we know that anything could happen between when we fire the arrow and when the arrow actually hits or doesn't hit the target. And so it's okay to choose these things. Oh, in an ideal world, yes, I'd like that. Do you desire it? I don't, because I know that that's kind of impossible. My parents are not going to live forever. Evil does exist in the world. People will do quote unquote bad things for various reasons. And my partner is human and won't always behave perfectly. This is the way of things. And instead, the ultimate desire that we should try and form is the desire to avoid becoming disappointed by our impossible desires and ultimately to cease to have them. So rather than desire your girlfriend or boyfriend to never flirt with anyone ever again, you can desire that you stop having such a desire and embrace their humanity, embrace the messiness and the chaos of life, embrace that perfection doesn't exist. And if you can't handle that, as they say, if you can't handle the heat, you can get out of the kitchen. If you have a very social partner and they talk to a lot of people, instead of trying to control them and stop them being social, stop them being themselves, stop them being the version of themselves that you were attracted to in the first place, simply ask yourself the question: do I actually want a social partner? And if the answer is yes, then you have to learn to accept it. If the answer is no, I can't handle it, I'm too jealous, you can always walk away. The exit is always there for many things. So instead of having this desire of, I don't want evil to exist, I don't want my partner to flirt, I don't want my parents to die, instead have this possible desire. The desire of I want to not become disappointed by these desires. That's the thing that I'm working on as a practicing stoic, as someone who's pursuing the path of virtue and wisdom. And the next type of desire, slave desires. So in life, we are always at the mercy of the thing or person who controls the outcomes of the things we desire. And sometimes it's a thing, as I've just said, and that thing would be fortune or nature. I want it to be sunny tomorrow. Tomorrow it rains. Okay. I was at the mercy of nature. I didn't get what I wanted. But sometimes you're at the mercy of a person, and a person is also part of nature, as we all are. But to help us understand this, we could say that tomorrow I want my boss to give me a compliment, and tomorrow comes and they insult you. Tomorrow I want to get a pay rise, and tomorrow comes and you don't get a pay rise. Okay, we are at the mercy in some sense to this other individual's decisions, which are outside of our control. And that's okay, but just acknowledge that when you give away your well-being to another person, to something external, whether that be nature, the weather, another person, you're a slave and you're not free. Just like when someone goes to prison, they are told what to do, where to go, where to sleep, what they can eat. Their freedom is limited. We can actually lock ourselves up in our own emotional prison by giving a power away to the external world. Hey you, you can have my happiness. You can do what you like with it. Hey you, you can have my self-esteem, and you can tell me if I'm gonna have high self-esteem or low self-esteem tomorrow. That's another type of prison. So let's use an example. So one desire that we could have is I want to meet the love of my life this year. I really want to meet the love of my life this year. Is that up to you? Is that actually up to you? Can you do that? It's actually not really. You know, you're kind of giving your power away to fate, to fortune. And so we should try and modify this desire slightly to bake into it this idea of removing the slave element. So we can say that I desire above all to not be a slave, because that desire is within my control. If we do actually want love and we want to meet the partner, what we can say instead is I want to meet the love of my life this year, but I'll accept whatever fortune decides, even if I wouldn't choose it myself. And that slight modification can make all the difference between crushing, devastating defeat and depression, and pursuing a goal through choice rather than craving and desire. And when you succeed, you'll appreciate it, and when and if you fail, you'll be better equipped to handle it. And so just two concepts for you to think about slave desires and impossible desires. In terms of practicing and working with these, because I love a skill-based, practical, implementable approach to stoicism. What I would say is to start expressing out loud what your desires are, even to yourself. Right? So you're driving down the road. Let's use the example of you want to get somewhere by a certain time. I want to get to this meeting at 1 p.m. All right, you say that, and then you ask yourself, well, is this an impossible desire? It's not an impossible desire. Is it a slave desire? Well, someone or something could intervene, right? Maybe this road works, maybe there's been an accident. And so a very simple modification of this could be I want to get to the meeting by 1 p.m., but I understand that anything could happen between leaving and getting to the destination, and I'll accept whatever fortune brings, even if I wouldn't have chosen that myself. Appreciate you listening to this stoic handbook lesson. If you'd like to learn more, you can check out the links in the show notes to this episode. And I will see you next time.