Monday, April 2, 2018

Revisiting Desire

Revisiting desire, one finds that, perhaps the most pertinent desire that many of us maintain is the desire to be better. Lebron James desires, nay, endeavors, to be a better basketball player at all times. And yet, a perfunctory glance at efficiency numbers, real plus minus, and more, shows he has mostly been playing at his otherworldly peak for over a decade now. While he has, say, improved at his 3 point shooting, his defense and stamina has taken a step back with age.

I use this example because nobody would criticize a world class athlete, surgeon, writer, etc., for desiring to be better. Without denigrating the work, effort and drive to be better, and the fact that, for many, this journey is a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself, one must wonder, then, if the desire to be better is reinforcing. That is, we desire to be better in a way that is hard to achieve. Given that practice accounts for something like 15% of success, and given that success often only creates a desire for more success, one finds that the apathetic shrug of a black sheep family member, who, say, never got married, or never 'achieved' what others did, might be the most enlightened amongst us. A conversation with my mother many months ago, for instance, in which she spoke of how she worked 70+ hours a week to go from lower-middle class to middle to upper-middle, was used as an argument for work being the great equalizer. A probing question - what if there had been an injury, or sickness, or natural disaster, relegated her to the admission that her success probably would not have been achieved. This is uncomfortable to admit, because it gives a preponderance of significance to luck in terms of what drives our success. Bill Gates was not at all the first to invent a GUI, and Apple probably to this day has older former workers who curse his name in vain, but through a series of coincidences, breaks, talent, and yes, some hard work, he became the wealthiest person on earth for a two decade period.

To bring this back to the point, while also staying within the realm of sports and tech, people like Lebron, or Jeff Bezos, and others, appear to be attempting to achieve constant, continual improvement. They desire to be the best, have the most wealth, and then when they achieve that, only want more. Given that this overwhelming desire can affect even the very top 0.001% of athletic human beings and the world's wealthiest, one does wonder if desiring to be better is a cycle that will never resolve itself. We desire to be better, in order to accrue more of what we desire, which will never meet our desire, so we desire to continue to be better. Lebron James once dropped his warmup clothes at the feet of a kid whose job was to collect them from teammates and offered to grab them for him, Jeff Bezos built a company in which thousands of workers require food stamps, pass out in overheated warehouses, pee in bags in their delivery vehicles to save time, and are denied breaks of any kind. Their desire gave them the ability not just to suffer, but to bring suffering to those around them.

The 'lazy' family member (and the present author is increasingly convinced laziness is a coping mechanism, or survival mechanism, and not an innate trait or learned trait or any trait at all) may be chided by family members and friend for their lack of achievement. But as they sit at home happy, content, absolved from employing people who shit in bags in cars and have heat stroke in warehouses where they work 12 hour shifts, perhaps there is something to be learned.

The lazy family member desires a nice meal, and goes out to eat a place they can barely afford. They stress over bills and employment in ways that Bezos or Lebron never will. Perhaps that's the lesson. No matter what we do or don't do, the fact that safety and comfort is a desire guaranteed by no social order or government and that we fail to free ourselves from it in any way leads us to put ourselves in positions where we can self-sabotage, perhaps the only innate trait we most commonly share.

That the present author writes this and continues to wish to be a better writer, friend, person, singer, etc., and more, in ways entirely unachievable, is not an irony lost amongst anyone.

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