may 21st, 2022
life should be guided by "desires"
desires should be considered as separate from "wants"
a desire
a. is essential, true, & humane. it has total authority. it may be repressed, but everything secondary to it is still, ideally, in submission to it
b. may not be a commonplace thing, but something intensely clouded & difficult to reveal & embrace, hardly ever making itself known in day-to-day life. this is because it may be supplanted by an elaborate network of "compensations," & some of these may have come to feel fundamental to oneself. this is not part of a desire's nature, but a widespread pathological exception to it, a notable condition imposed on it
c. is the only unfettered expression of a person's will
a want
a. is merely a value-neutral impulse representing the next step towards achieving whatever more articulated
thing a person is currently bent on doing, for better or for worse. it can be in service of a desire or against it
b. is a day-to-day thing
a compensation
a. is the primary means by which a person's wants are mobilized against their desires
b. is a general pursuit, a receptacle of daily wants, that is not in service of a desire but meant to
take the place of a desire for which a person has settled on an excuse that it is not worth pursuing
c. is, crucially, a pursuit that a person ascribes to their will rather than imposed necessity. but, being at
odds with their desires (which have total authority), it cannot actually be an expression of their true will
a want can be qualified as in line with a desire only
if it is completely liberated from compensations
FOR INSTANCE:
if a person wants to purchase an upgrade to their computer, this can be in line with desire only insofar as the things that
they do with their computer are not compensation for things they would rather be pursuing, this preference being repressed
the stipulation of "complete" liberation is meant to account for the extremely
frequent case where a compensation acts as the foundation for a new, more
insular compensation based on its logic & nested within it, & this can
further abstract into a network of interdependent compensations
FOR INSTANCE:
the person may purchase the upgrade to optimize their performance in a certain online game, which hosts a
subculture that gives rise to its own ecosystem of wants that can be better satisfied if the game performs better
these diverse wants are, at the most superficial level of their examination, rooted in the personal stake that has been placed in the game
at the least superficial level, they are rooted in... perhaps whatever the person would rather be doing than using their computer
in an immediate sense, but maybe we can trace back deeper, to something unseen which precedes even that layer, perhaps
going back a hundred layers. or occupying a particular position in a matrix of interconnected layers! use your imagination.
perhaps a network of circumstances compels them to live in a house in a suburb in which this activity is all that is put on offer
so, the repression & forgetting of a person's desires can culminate in a self-sufficient system of wants, & this system is
altogether separate from any considerations of desire. ideally, the person becomes something effectively without desire,
knowing only compensatory routine that they regard as the natural limit of what life can offer, even if it is unsatisfying
these wants service a network of interrelated compensations, an ecosystem whose
potential complexity & subtle dispersion throughout life & society cannot be overstated
this networks' stability is maintained by the convergence of these various compensations at all kinds of excuses for
why one does not have to reasonably expect the realization of the desires that the compensations are supplanting
perhaps these excuses are interrelated, or culminate at larger junctions which could perhaps even
culminate at one central grand excuse. maybe one could envision a sort of node graph of excuses, &
floating above it is a network of compensations with each one being linked to one or more excuses
-
a given want is only completely liberated if it does not play a part on any level of any network
of compensations, & it is this stringent requirement, that it be so completely sanitized, that can
make desire such a hallowed thing whose true manifestation in day-to-day life can be so rare
while legitimate pursuits of desire can hypothetically coexist in a person's life
with pursuits that are only compensations, the extreme ideal of this system would be
that all pursuits they can conceive of are ultimately nested in one or another system of
compensation that exists at a sufficiently fundamental level to escape their consideration
a person must negotiate with themselves about the standards against which they measure their pursuits
to decide if they are authentic expressions of desire, & what must be done to bring them to that state
some conclusions may be personal & modest, where a person feels they can enter into alignment with their desires
through a small & considerate adjustment in their mind. some conclusions may be external & extreme, where a
person feels that the society they live in has replaced all of life with compensations & has to be overthrown
~
may 29th, 2022
i see immense value in having fully honest dialogue with myself about my actual desires. the irony, though,
is that i feel very impeded from putting this into practice because i feel such persistent needs to archive
things, to preserve familiar objects & routines & arrangements of furniture, to not break objects
for instance, i feel like i cannot just demolish all preconceived notions in my mind of what my bedroom looks
like & simply ask myself, in total vacuum, with absolute creative lease: what do i want my bedroom to look like?
i cannot do this because, in my overfamiliarity, it is hard to separate the facets of my room that i can't conceive
of changing from the ones i could part with. i am always making compromises with the force of preservation
i feel like i am always battling with layouts, arrangements, patterns, & tendencies, at varying levels of detail
in my life, that are constantly taking shape & freezing into place as i develop unnoticed attachments to them.
i cannot tell how much of my life is just frozen preservation of forms that were mere happenstance long ago
maybe i like being a bricolage of what life has brought my way ??
june 20th, 2022
where, except in a world where people are for the most part completely resigned to having all of their desires
pre-emptively replaced with things designed for them to settle for, would you actually encounter widespread
phenomena such as people turning into jerks because they replace their senses of humor with just
saying the opposite of whatever they actually think, & then getting carried away with it