Unsatisfiable Desires

Modernity has given us abundance. Abundance allows us to easily satisfy many of our desires. When we are hungry it is easy to get food. When we feel cold we can turn up the thermostat or put on a sweater. When we feel hot we can turn on the air conditioning, or perhaps just sit in the shade with a cold drink. Few of us do hard labor for a living any more. We don't come home exhausted after a long day's work in the fields, or after a long day out hunting. We don't have to worry much about being physically attacked by animals or other people. We have homes that are safe, comfortable, and convenient. Most of our basic desires are satisfied.

Yet, we are not happy. Abundance has not made us satisfied, even though it has made it easy to satisfy many of our desires.

The desires that we can easily satisfy just fade into the background of our lives. We still feel hunger, but it isn't a major driver of our thoughts or actions because it is easily satisfied. When we feel it, we simply eat and it is gone. We don't experience the depths of hunger that our ancestors experienced, and we also don't get the joy that they did from a full stomach. Hunger has become a minor detail of life. The same is true of many other desires that dominated the lives and minds of our ancestors. They have faded into the background.

The desires that we can easily satisfy with material abundance are those related to survival, or in other words, homeostasis. The human body needs a finite amount of resources to sustain its existence. It needs food, water, temperatures within a certain range, the absence of fatal and debilitating diseases, and protection from violence inflicted by other humans or animals. Given those conditions, most human beings will develop properly and survive for a long time. The desires related to survival are like thermostats: they are stabilizing.

However, the biological purpose of life is not simply to live. It is to reproduce. Survival is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Not all of our desires are related to survival. We have other desires that are related to reproduction, and those desires cannot be satisfied with a finite amount of stuff. We desire power and sex, to put it simply. Power is also a means to an end, but the desire for power is open-ended. The desire for sex is also open-ended, especially for men. These desires are open-ended because reproduction itself is open-ended. There is no ideal number of offspring, beyond which further reproduction is maladaptive. Thus, we evolved desires that cannot be satisfied, desires that will always drive us to act in the world.

The desires related to power and sex are destabilizing. They make us dissatisfied no matter what the conditions of life are. There is no way to satisfy them for an individual, although there are practical limits. For a man with a healthy sex drive, perhaps a different beautiful girl every day would be enough, or maybe two, or maybe a harem of a thousand women plus a new girl every day... Something along those lines would bring about sexual exhaustion and reach the practical limit of the sex drive. For social power, perhaps a trillion dollars, or being the ruler of the world would be enough. But maybe not. Power can always be strengthened and consolidated.

Also, sex and power are zero sum games, at least after a certain basic level is reached. If one man has a harem of a thousand women, then other men must have no women. An ugly man might want to have sex with a beautiful woman, but she might not want to have sex with him, making it impossible to jointly satisfy both of their desires. If some people have high social status, others must have low social status. Desires for sex and power are intrinsically unsatisfiable in the aggregate.

What does everyone in the modern world dream of? Fame. That has become the standard life fantasy since the 1960s. If you are a man, fame means you can have sex with lots of women. If you are a woman, fame gives you attention and power. Everyone wants to be famous, but by definition only a few can be. Only a few people can realize their dreams. The rest will be stuck in a frustrated state, pursuing their dreams but never attaining them.

In the developed world, we have reached a kind of limit to economic growth: the limit of economic progress in satisfying human needs. We have reached a level of production at which everyone's basic needs for food, comfort and security are met. Beyond that level, most production is just used to compete over sex and power. Individuals are still motivated by that competition to produce more, but that additional production does not advance the collective in any way. It is wasted on internal competition. We have pretty much reached the end of the material progress that can be generated by economic growth alone.

Modernity has generated abundance, but it has not created a utopian condition of peace and happiness. Instead, it has created a social condition that is dominated by the struggle for sex and power.

Comments

  1. This is a good post, And iv'e actually came back to it few times. In general I think your blog is really underrated compared to the quality of its ideas. I think you have some issues with your signaling-marketing: mainly some unnecessary edginess and the fact you manage your blog on Blogspot and not Wordpress.

    ReplyDelete
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    1. Thanks. I don't think you can really market this kind of thing. I'd have to dumb it down to appeal to a wider audience.
      I'm curious what you think the unnecessary edginess is.

      Delete
  2. Why did you delete my comment? Didn't you say you were curious what the unnecessary edginess is? I provided a good example, you deleting it out of vanity (?) should serve as another :^)

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    Replies
    1. No, I'm tired of your bullshit. I don't have time to waste on you, so I'm going to delete your bitchy little comments from now on. I'll post a comments policy soon.

      I offered you a voice debate, but you're too much of a pussy to do that, so I'll just delete your comments from now on, rather than waste time responding to them.

      Delete

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