What gives us more pleasure and satisfaction: the pursuit of our desires or the attainment of them? It is the pursuit. It’s what gets your adrenaline pumping, like when a cop is chasing the suspect. It’s exiting and sweaty and decisions are made without time to think and hearts beat loud, but when it’s over, things get calm and boring. The chaos leaves. The cop misses it. The suspect of course misses it, back when he had a chance to get away. But, now the cop has attained what he was aiming for, and he’s congratulated for it, everyone thinks the best of what he did, when truthfully, he wishes he hadn’t, because he liked it.
Our deepest, most intense desires usually take the longest to achieve, and we grow so used to the chase, it’s become so routine, that we feel lost when it’s done. We feel pleasure from gaining it, but we have nothing to strive for anymore. We’ll just replace it with a new goal, and another and another. Without desires to motivate us to DO something, we’d be nothing. We’d do nothing.
We don’t always desire things that gives us pleasure. Cigarettes, for example. People have the most intense cravings for them, and get quite antsy without them, even though they can cause them cancer, make their food tasteless, and cause them coughing fits. We also pursue things that we don’t truly desire, sometimes just to be doing something, because being in the pursuit of something, even if we don’t really want it, is better than doing nothing.
Say you’re trying to lose thirty pounds. You’re so excited and proud of yourself with each pound you lose. You work out, eat kale and blueberries, quit eating french fries, stand rather than sit, and eat more celery than you can stand. Finally you reach that thirty, and after a brief bout of exited jumping and squealing, you’re back to wanting to lose weight. The more the better. You can’t get enough. You want to lose it all, because it is human nature to want what we don’t have.
If you’ve ever watched an interview with a cancer patient, you’ve probably noticed that they tend to be happy and giddy, and full of inspiration. I think it’s because they have such a big goal; to keep living. They put their everything into it, because they want to prove they are stronger than what hurts them, and they want to prove that they can be happy despite the fact that they have a major health problem. They are proof you can do anything you want, no matter what.
the problems not the problem 