Introduction

The life we are living in our modern days is not suited to our desires. Our bodies are accustomed to survive, act and think in ways that are no longer effective; the reason for our acting; our desire is now full with highly engineered versions of pleasure. Just as animals react potently to supernormal stimuli –a stimuli which triggers a stronger response to the original impulse from which it evolved– the human is constantly creating a whole reality where everything is as perfect as it can be.

Palatable foods, well written narratives, filter-enhanced pictures and “perfect” body proportions are just some examples of how every time humanity progresses, our closeness to the ideal is more and more plausible.

Even if the economy cannot grow forever we sure believe it can; this thought –regardless if it is a cause of our neurology or the reflection of a culture that blends his ideas into reality– we also believe we can grow forever. The more outcome or goal oriented someone is, the easier it is to spot this phenomena.

“She needs to be the best, questioning what “best” is only wastes time. Why do you need to ask? Is obvious, just follow what your peers think, the greater the number of people the more profound and irrefutable the truth, if they brought a number, as arbitrary and general as it sounds, it is just exactly what you need. You should let those numbers guide your life, they are carefully calculated and you cannot question them unless you know the math or evidence to calculate them yourself”.

Or at least that is the message we implicitly receive from our peers, the figures of authority and even ourselves. Nonetheless I am going to try to go against that thinking and try to show how false it can be.

Numbers, once our tools, now our masters.

Way back in history numbers were just a way to represent reality, as Galileo Galilei said, “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the Universe!”. People, with the help of this divine language could separate reality into discrete parts, small enough to be malleable, so they could experiment and see if moving the aforementioned part actually could change the overall result in any significant way. 

Even as before we explicitly could name it, functions –these mathematical beings who give different output depending on what is delivered as input– were as natural and close to us as our own arms and legs. They were the medium in which things happened, it was the immaterial world where new things were being born; it was cause and consequence; casualty.

The mathematics that made our society progressed immensely; they brought actual and objective measurements to how things should be in every realm of human experience. This influence was so homogeneous that it was even present in realms as mysterious as the hereditary process –of which our knowledge is very recent and still very limited. 

For example, the ancient Greeks theorized that the newborn traits could be the arithmetic consequence of the characteristics of the parents. Pythagoras even used the triangle to expand this idea, being the parents the sides of the triangle and the hypotenuse the son.

We actually kind of abused this power. To try to match the perfection of numbers we actually try to transform into numbers. Our identity is deeply interdependent to the numbers we use to judge us. We are not simply the complete, holistic human being, we are also the sum of our discrete parts: we are our weight, our height, our GPA or our age. 

Trying to represent reality through our wishes rather than evidence most often than not will just make us miserable. No matter how hard we try we still have skin and bones, we bleed and we cry. We cannot be numbers but we are not too late to come to terms with them; they can be our friends once again. The only thing we need is to respect both natures, that of the wish of what we want to become (the abstract) and what we are now (the practical).

Assuming you know basic arithmetic then the purpose of your struggle should be in accepting you as a mutable human being. Use the numbers as limits to determine an area; a place where you can roam free but that also encourages safety and good behavior. All the terrain outside this area is unexplored territory: it can contain sweet fruits or dangerous animals, but to explore it without killing yourself, you need to first work and even master and comprehend your familiar area; you need to create order.

How much interval –or range of acceptable inputs– should those numbers have? It depends on the nature of what you are seeking, the more precise it must be the shorter the interval. 

Most things in life do not need to be a certain way, so it is better to have as much flexibility as you can. Even in your closed space of order you still want to leave plenty of room for any changes that might come.

For example, you need to take water, that is a closed interval, you can take more or less but you certainly need it, if you refuse to believe that you need hydration then you suffer and eventually die. Closed intervals are very straightforward, you can only go out of those limits a certain number of times before you have to face the –often deadly– consequences. 

But, as I said above, most of our lives do not need to be a certain way. The intervals we are using as walls can be built in many different places, allowing in consequence many different lives and perspectives. The main problem is that you do not know all the terrain, so your paradise can be hidden in the fog of both, your ignorance and your inexperience. That is why you leave room for change: it accepts that you still have many more worlds to explore.

Our inherited feedback machine. 

Once you have built this secure area then everything becomes easier. You can do whatever you want as long as you stay in this area. This is the quintessential wisdom of constraint: you limit the number of answers you can provide that are better by nature. If you have a good vineyard it is harder to not produce good wine.

Freedom, combined with temperance is not the end though, you still have your body, this machinery that took evolution billions of years to produce that compounded into a masterpiece. Your body has many signals to communicate to you what it needs and what it wants; it is not just highly developed it also tells you feedback.

Our consciousness, as powerful as it seems, possesses only a fraction of our overall power. This feedback and the opportunity to act on it is invaluable: it literally permits us to move this complex machinery named body without much effort. 

When you are going to act in any of your daily abilities you encounter a clear crossroad: there is the possibility to act in accordance to what your body asks, or to ignore it and find a strong rationale to override this desire. It is not a black-and-white decision, there is a situation for everything, and the effectiveness of our decisions is heavily dependent on the context.

Procrastination, for example, even as his infamous fame portrays it as an action to avoid completely, it can have its place in certain contexts. Creativity –for example– or more precisely, inspiration, is thought to be born ab nihilo –out of nothingness– but it really often comes just by letting our mind go wild, letting it explore its own interests for the sake of it. I simply cannot think of a very creative person who is always producing; artists are known for suffering repetitive and severe crises of creative stagnation.

Obviously there will be situations where desires lead us to dark, uncertain and dangerous circumstances, but not listening to them will certainly do worse. Existential struggles are born precisely from the poisonous state of lack of awareness of what we desire. How can we expect to know ourselves without listening first?

Pay careful attention to what you do, what you feel, how you feel and then find ways to act in those responses to make your life just a little bit better. Your body is your delimited area, rely on it, build on it, take care of it and use it to explore with as much wisdom as you can the unknown realms that your sight cannot see… yet. 

Conclusion

I know letting go of the imprisonment of our desires can be very frightening. Society tells us in many ways that we have to behave appropriately and follow things just as they are. I believe there is wisdom in this communal restraint: it impedes us to trample on others’ desires, freedom and rights, nonetheless there are many –I mean a LOT– of rituals that do more harm than good and are not even effective to maintain social cohesion.

Building your own limits is useful in all aspects of your life. It goes way beyond productivity and learning, it entails a safe and effective means to interact with reality. It allows you to rise below despair and destruction but above mediocrity and paralysis. It allows you to be fair, for you respect both the seek for the ideal and your limited capacity to get close to it.

If you have a strong desire and you have thought carefully about what are the limits you can impose then by all means go for it. I do not assure you it will be easy or beautiful, but it surely will be meaningful. Try as much as you can to think about the negative consequences of your actions in yourself or other people but –maybe more importantly– recognize precisely the limits of that care: you absolutely should not live for others forever.

Particularly, if you have a desire to love, please be brave enough to pursue it. As long as it is love there is no other pursuit as beautiful as genuinely caring. Maybe you will get trouble, but at least you can accomplish, paraphrasing Viktor Frankl, the ultimate resource of meaning… and also my admiration <3.

Without anything more to say, be free to share your experience while following your desires in a responsible manner. Good bye.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash