Desire
The idea of desire bombardment - you want to want -
“The modern man is always claiming a self-sufficiency which he is unable to achieve. He constantly compares himself with other people and, afraid that they might be superior, he secretly copies their manners and borrows their desires.”
Leo Nasskau • René Girard, mimetic desire, and society's biggest rat race
Expected elation. Society has built a world that defines what's appealing and what's not. What success should look like. I spent years chasing this idea, and achieved it. And never felt truly happy. Why? It seems so obvious, there are a million songs and movies about how wealth and fame aren't the end all be all for human states. Yet we pursue it... See more
"Ideas start out small, weak, and fragile. In order to grow, ideas need financial capital. But they also need emotional capital - good energy, positivity, and resilience. The best way to control your emotional capital is to fine tune your internal monologue and replace your hunger for approval with a desire to grow."
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What is your relationship to objects and their connection with desire?
What impresses you? Why? Money? Cars? Fitness? Abilities? Intelligence? Influence? I often find myself feeling impressed by something and desiring it, and have worked to build in a self check on this - why am I feeling this? Is it an authentic feeling I should embrace and nurse - inspiration? Or is it a feeling instilled by consumerism that I... See more
Noam Chomsky - What We Really Want
youtube.com1. advertising induced wants. marketers realized they were not able to reach children, so advertising introduced nagging behavior to get their parents buy them stuff. but material things are not core to human nature.
2. people crave dignity and self-worth of doing something significant. Jonathan Rose has studied the reading habits of the British working class in the late 19th century. they were better educated than than the aristocrats. many efforts made to drive this out of people.
3. the natural thing for humans is to want to be independent and creative. mean maybe you work on a you know the fixing up old cars in your garage in the weekend instead of sitting in the watching television. you want to do something that's significant, that's worthwhile — maybe even if it's a ugly horrible job like going to coal mines instead of taking a government handout because people want dignity and a sense of self-worth and a sense of creating and doing something important. that's what we are.
4. huge part of the economy is devoted to trying to drive these things out of people's heads to make you think that all you want is more commodities so you should go shopping instead of reading/
5. wage labor is not very different from slavery.
6. market economy is supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. but that'd if there was an ad it would be an announcement by
say Ford Motor Company here are the characteristics of the cars I think that's nice,here's what consumer review says about them—that would create informed consumers making rational choices. but it's not what you see. there are huge efforts to try to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices to undermine market economies and turn people into people who believe that what they want is to sit on a couch and watch television.
