What you want is never a thing

But it would help us to remember that what we really want isn’t the thing itself. What we want is the experience of ease and unfettered enjoyment that is promised, falsely, by the thought of acquiring the thing—the restaurant meal, the cruise, the raise, the loving relationship—even though everything comes with its own pains and complications and r... See more

Getting what we want, or think we want—in those brief moments when we actually do—always seems to be more complicated and fraught than what we pictured.

Simply getting better at acquiring the things we want does little good. We suffer whether we get the thing or not. If we don’t get it, we suffer the loss. If we do get it, we still suffer because we know we will lose it.

The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy, and happiness you deserve, is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from, including me. The mistake over and over and over is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,” whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we

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Most people have a faulty way of motivating themselves. They’re motivated to get whatever they want—money, romance, status—because they feel they don’t have enough already. This feeling of lack is a powerful motivator, but you pay a huge price for it. That price is the ongoing feeling that there’s always something missing. Even if you get something

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Instead, he believes it’s how we want that matters. Our well-being hinges on whether we grasp at our desires, doing anything to relieve the feeling, or whether we can instead coolly recognize our desires as they really are: little bubbles of impulse that perpetually form in our awareness, tickle us for a bit, then float away.