You can’t always get what you want

A central Buddhist teaching is that being human means living in the realms of desire, and that desire and what flows from it – attachment, craving, grasping, defending, protecting – produces suffering. Sounds reasonable, and from what I can tell, is largely inescapable. As rock n’ roller Mick Jagger told us, “You can’t always get what you want.”

The dividing line between biological need and emotional desire can be razor thin. Does thirst precede or follow desire? The Coca Cola company spends billions trying to stimulate desire in responding to that question. Overall, advertising is about stimulating desire, often for something we don’t need at all or never even knew existed. Madison Avenue wants to turn us into Pavlov’s dogs, drooling with anticipation at the mere crunch of a sour cream flavored potato chip.

Hunger, sexual urges, thirst; these all have roots in biology, so their connection to desire seems perfectly natural. Combined with memory, behavioral patterns are established that connect with the experience of pleasure, itself a combination of biology and psychology. Food, drink, and sex generate hormones and chemical agents like endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine that stimulate pleasure centers in the brain’s hypothalamus, producing the desire to repeatedly seek them out. If uncontrolled, such desires and their satisfaction can become addictive, seeking pleasure obsessively in experiences and substances that we know are not good for us, that ultimately produce suffering, and often extend that suffering to others.

Being human is an emotional experience; happiness, comfort, security, safety, anxiety, concern, and terror are just the tip of the emotional iceberg, and all of these are powerful enough to qualify as needs, at least subjectively. The Buddha was on to something, given the close connection between need, desire, and suffering. However influential our rationality, its power often shrinks to irrelevance in comparison to the power of emotion.

When desire reaches the level of need, be it the desire to consume or the desire to control, our intellect, actions, and behavior are enlisted to produce outcomes. Satisfying desire accounts for the sum total of human accomplishment and fuels our penchant for more. So great is the force of human desire that it now threatens not only our own lives, but planet earth’s entire living system.

This is not a new idea. Every major wisdom tradition, from ancient to modern, teaches of the dangers of greed and warns of its terrible consequences. Uncontrollable desire fuels aggression, violence, murder, theft, deceit, and betrayal, and unsurprisingly these behaviors comprise the lion’s share of Hollywood’s plot lines about suffering. We’ve been warned, and are still warning ourselves but the biological and emotional forces within us resist amelioration. Like Mick sings, “I can’t get no, satisfaction.”

Will our rational selves be able to overcome our emotional needs and desires in time to prevent the human race from overdosing on more, more stuff and more power? The looming ecological and climate crises may wrest the choice out of our hands. The earth is a complex 4.5 billion year old adaptive system, our place in its history just a infinitesimally tiny blip in time. If we consume ourselves into oblivion the earth will recover just fine without us. No species lasts forever, after all.

We are, presumably, the most intelligent animals that have ever lived on earth, and if we can acquire enough wisdom, we might just squeak through a few more millennia. But that’s a big if.