A Stoic Guide To Cravings And Everyday Desires

Getting what you want can feel good, but how long does that feeling last? In this recorded talk, we explore the promises our desires make and the Stoic practice of appreciating what we already have. Learn to describe a tempting object plainly, question the story behind an urge, and pause before acting. The talk closes with a two-minute exercise for observing an everyday craving. Return when you want to examine an urge before deciding what to do.

Transcript

There's something I'd like you to think about as we begin this session. And it's a question about what you consider to be the recipe for a happy life. It's a very cliche question. So the question that I have for you is, What is the recipe for a happy life? But there's a slight twist on the question. I don't want you to tell me what you think would sound good, Because we can all come up with nice-sounding recipes for a happy, Successful life. What I'm interested in is how you actually embody this idea. If you look back over the last three months of your life, If an alien observer were to watch your daily actions, What would they believe you think is the recipe for a happy life? Okay, So it goes back to this idea. If you want to know what someone believes, Don't look at what they say, Look at how they act. All right, So we're going to get really real with ourselves. If there was a CCTV camera looking at you with no sound, Just seeing how you're behaving, What would the CCTV footage reveal about what you do on a daily basis to try and live a happy life? This is gonna be a workshop on desire, And this is a really important component of stoicism and life in general. Yeah, So it comes back to this idea that a lot of us are living life, Even if we say we're not, With this assumption that in order to be happy, We should get the things we want, Right? It's a very simple premise. I'll be happy when I get this new material possession. If you're more of a meditator, If you're more of a spiritual type of person, Maybe it's not a new car, But maybe I'll be happy when I release this trauma that's been like bugging me. Maybe I'll be happy when my concentration on mindfulness gets to this next level. Maybe I'll be happy when I read these new 10 books that are on my list. But basically we're thinking that there's a gap between where we are right now and where we want to be. And if we can close that gap, Then we will be happy. So William B. Irvine, Who's a stoicism writer, He calls it the gap theory of happiness. So a lot of us are going through life and we see this gap between where we are right now and where we want to be, And we're going through life dissatisfied. And we're always trying to close this gap and finally get what we want. So I'm not saying that working on yourself or getting what you want is intrinsically bad. The question is, If we're always chasing a state that we're not currently embodying, Can we ever be satisfied, Right? Or are we setting ourselves up for a life of dissatisfaction? And so the Stoics noticed this, The ancient Stoics noticed that many people go through life trying to attain this thing that they want. And they believe that if they attain it, They'll get everlasting happiness, They'll live happily ever after. But if you look at our lives, Have any of us figured out how to live happily ever after? Do any of us have everlasting happiness? And yet, Have we gotten things we wanted? Have we gotten relationships that we've pursued? Have we gotten material possessions that we've pursued? Have we got jobs that we wanted? And yet we still don't have everlasting happiness, Right? So the Stoics had a different method of working with desire and happiness, Which I'm going to get to in a moment. But first of all, I want to tell you about four psychological insights that the Stoics had about desire. And these are problems with desire. So the first one is false promises. Promises you something, Right? Say you desire a piece of cake or you desire a new app, Right? Say like you're setting New Year's resolutions. If I download this diet app or this weight tracking app or this exercise app, Then I'm going to suddenly have this amazing physique and then I'm going to be happier and everything's going to be perfect. And then we get it and it's like, Oh, It's nice for a week or two. And then we go back to baseline. Say there's a certain type of relationship that you're pursuing or a certain type of that you want, You put it on this pedestal, And you get all these false promises in your mind, And you get there, And it doesn't live up to this extraordinary image that you had in your mind. So desire can often give us false promises, So that's one issue with desire. The second problem with desire according to Stoics is that there's two types of desire. So we have unnatural desire and natural desire, Unnatural appetites and natural appetites. So if you think of something like food, Right? When you're hungry, You eat food, And then you feel full, And then you're good. Okay, So that would be a natural appetite. If you take something like being tired, You feel very tired, You go to sleep, You wake up feeling refreshed, You feel better. There's an end to it. If you are feeling very cold, You sit by something warm, You warm up, You feel fine. But there are certain appetites that are unnatural and that don't really have an end. Examples would be things like wealth. There's no limit to wealth. You can always earn more, Get more, Buy more, Spend more. Another one would be status. You can become popular in one social group and get respected in one social group, But there's always another group that you could build up to. You could always get more status and more status. It's a never-ending thing. And so a lot of us are chasing things like inessential things that really have no limit. There's no limit to the amount of inessential objects you could accumulate. Okay, Now the basic things, The essential things, You can get them pretty easily. You know, Like the bare basics. But then the fancy pieces of technology, The apps that you pay a subscription for, All of these different things, They're all inessential. You convince yourself that it's going to bring you happiness, But it doesn't. A good example of this was a few weeks ago. I lost my AirPods, And I didn't have them for like two weeks. And when I first lost them, I was thinking, Oh, No, I use these all the time. You know, Without these, My quality of life isn't going to be as good. Didn't make a difference. Like it didn't make a difference. I just adapted to it. The third distortion relating to desire is this idea of chasing versus having. Have you ever noticed that sometimes you've attained something you've been seeking, Or a desire you've been going after, And then when you get it, It doesn't feel very good. It feels kind of like, Okay, On to the next, On to the next thing. Well, The Stoics recognized that the pursuit of a desire is often more pleasurable than the attaining of it. Think about the anticipation or think about creating a piece of art. You finally finish it, You might even feel a bit depressed. This is a common thing. Um, Sometimes people who achieve an amazing goal feel depressed after achieving that goal. Okay. So it was the journey that was, That was the goal. That was the fun part. It's a cliche thing, Right? It's the journey, Not the destination. But a lot of times cliches exist because there's some truth to it. And then the fourth thing is sometimes not only when we possess something, Do we find it less appealing over time? We can actually become disgusted with it. So the way that it works is we put something on a pedestal before we attain it, We chase it. We give ourselves these false promises, Then we attain it. And then we start. Seeing it for what it is, You know. Maybe it's not terrible, But it's not that grand thing that we envisioned it would be. And then we start looking at other things that we could have instead. A classic example is, You know, Maybe you've got a phone, Right? And when you first have the phone, You unbox it and it's amazing. And it just feels like the coolest piece of technology you've ever had. And then a year later, You don't care if you drop it. You're looking at the next new one. You want to upgrade it. Your current phone has a bunch of features that are no longer good. Maybe you go to a restaurant and you see a couple and they're barely saying a word to each other. There's a lot of resentment in the relationship. You know, Maybe they're not getting along, But at one point they probably really, Really thought a lot of each other. But because they've become comfortable in that dynamic, They've started to grow a sense of resentment towards each other. So yeah, You think about your own life. Are there any possessions that you own right now that at one point you put on this pedestal and thought were amazing and were really excited about it? And then now you don't really care about them. You take them for granted. You want something else that's better. A lot of people when they're in university or school, They think, You know, If only I can get good grades, Then I'll have my life figured out. But something that's more true is, Well, No, When you've solved that problem, You just get another problem. Now you've got to get a job. And desires and goals can work like that. So I think goals are useful as long as you realize that having the goals is the fun part, The good part, The useful part, Not necessarily attaining it. OK so when I set myself a goal I'm not too worried about getting it. I aim at it, It's kind of like a North Star, But I also appreciate that the having of the girl is the useful part. So those are the four main distortions the Stoics noticed with Desire. So the question then is, If chasing after things that we currently don't have isn't the way forward to live a happy, Successful, Wise life, What is the solution? It's a very simple idea, It's quite counterintuitive, But it's also very simple. Live in the present because because if you break down living in the present what that really means is being okay with however things unfold. You know, Not needing to change it, Not needing to get something else. It's like, Okay, Sadness. I'm okay with sadness. Okay. Happiness. I'm okay with happiness. Just, It is what it is. It's nice. Just riding the wave. Yeah. All of these are, Are 100% linked to this idea of the Stoics. Um, So the Stoics realized that closing the gap, Is not a really good way to retain happiness because a new gap will always appear. And who says that closing the gap was even the right thing for you anyway? There have been many people that have pursued a particular desire and it's actually just complicated their lives. So the Stoics realized that rather than trying to close the gap to be happy, We should instead learn, And I say they would learn because it's a skill, Learn to want the life you already have. Learn to want the life you are already living. Okay, So rather than be dissatisfied with where you are, I want to change your life and get something else. The Stoics had a bunch of psychological techniques and tools. That they trained in so that they could learn to want exactly what they have. So if we go back to that example of having a phone that you once put on a pedestal and now you take for granted. A stoic practice might involve leaving that phone at home for a day. You're not allowed to use it. Okay, So that you can rekindle that appreciation for that object that you once missed. Another technique would be negative visualization. So if you have a relationship. And you might find yourself taking that relationship for granted, A stoic might encourage you to imagine how it would feel if this person left, If this person wasn't around anymore. And this is not in a kind of negative, Ruminating kind of way. It's more of a calm contemplation to increase gratitude. So it's from a positive frame. That's the idea of it. So there's a bunch of different techniques to do that. But that's the idea. And so what we're looking for as practicing Stoics and people that aspire for wisdom and tranquility is that we don't want to be caught up in this up and down of pleasure and pain. We don't want to be too stuck on that. And what we're aiming for is tranquility and joy. Those two things are the things we're looking for. So if you've done a really nice meditation session and you feel the sense of tranquility, And maybe you just want to smile for no particular reason after it, And you feel like a lot of warmth, That's not pleasure in the same way that eating chocolate is pleasurable. That would be tranquility. And that is something that the Stoics are really keen on developing. And so instead of your life being like this, It's a really good, And then it's not so good. And then it's really good. It's not so good. And this good thing happened to me and I felt really good. But then this bad thing happened to me, I felt really bad, And then I got insulted, And then I got complimented, And your life is just like this. A stoic would say that what you should try and do is unhook yourself from that and develop a life that just gradually getting very gradually better and better and better. And of course you're going to have peaks, You know, But there are certain types of ecstatic experiences that you can have that are more meaningful. And those tend to make you not feel so bad later. You know, Maybe you just, You went out with someone that you care about, You just had a great experience. Um, You've, You made a really nice memory and there was nothing too abnormally pleasurable about it. So that's something for you to think about. So it would be to actively learn to want what you have, To learn to actively want the exact life you're living. Which is a, It's a, It's a powerful idea. And a lot of people have resistance to that. You know, Like how could I want this life that I'm living? It's far from perfect. There's a lot of problems. Maybe there's illnesses, Relationship issues, Money issues. How could I want this life? And one way that you can learn to want this life that you're living now is to appreciate that this life that you're living, As terrible as you might think it is, Is many, Many other people's dream life. This is the invisible dream technique from Stoicism. And I don't want to get too into this in this particular talk, But there are millions of people that don't have access to clean water. There are so many people that don't even have plumbing in their house. There are people that work in the blistering heat all day to make in a month what you might spend on coffee in a week. You know, And a lot of us don't really look at that, But the Stoics would say, Well, It's important that we look at that. So that we can appreciate the life that we're living is actually someone else's dream life and to see it through that shift. And, You know, Even in your own neighborhood, Right, There are people that, You know, You might complain about a relationship problem that you've had. There are people in your neighborhood, You know, Not even people far away, That your relationship problems would be their relationship dream because perhaps they've got some serious health issue that has prevented them from ever having a relationship. Relationship, Period. Never ever. Know and so from their perspective they see you complaining about it and you know and it's okay you know like there's no judgment but it's it's a useful perspective to think about it from from their view and so you can actually start to learn to want the life that you already live another example would be I've got a young son and, You know, When he gets a temperature, For example, Or something like that, I have different medicines and I have access to doctors and it's, And it's, I often think, Like, Imagine if this same thing happened 400 years ago. I don't have the internet, I don't have antibiotics, I don't have doctors, I don't have digital thermometers. I'm just awake at night, Terrified that this young child is going to overheat. And most of human history, That's been the case, Right? So Epictetus says, Freedom is attained not by satisfying desires, But by removing them. And you'll also find if you ever, If you ever done an abstinence challenge, So you've given up coffee or sugar or anything like that, It can feel really good, You know, Because there's a sense of freedom that you can get by not being pulled in this pleasure pain kind of cycle of life. You kind of take yourself away from it and you can find a sense of joy and, And it goes back to living in the present. Next time you feel a certain type of craving, A really powerful technique to work with that is to watch it. I call it the ride the wave method, To see the craving, To acknowledge it, To ask it, What are you telling me? What do you want? What's the promise you have for me? Oh, You should eat that. If you eat that, You're gonna feel so good. Okay. Interesting. Okay, I'll wait two minutes and see how I feel. Ride the wave, Ride the wave. So I want to talk about stoic antidotes for desire, Because I'm guessing a few people here, Like us all, Have got maybe cravings, Addictions, Habits that you want to change. So there are two main methods of working with desire. The first one I've already mentioned, And that's to learn to desire what you have. Because if you can learn to find the right frame to want exactly what you have, You're not going to chase this thing that you don't have so much. If you can learn to really appreciate the phone that you have, The laptop that you have, The job that you have, Whatever it is, Then you're going to be less tempted to try and seek this other thing. And then the other way is to actively break the spell of desire. Earlier on I talked about the distortions with desire. If you can cut that, If you can cut the false promise and learn to see the false spell that is in desire, That can also be really useful. So I'm going to run you through a technique and this is a classic stoic technique and it's called object deconstruction. And the cool thing about still techniques is you don't really need to do them in like a, You know, I'm going to do it for an hour a day. These are reflections that you can do two minutes, Five minutes, 10 minutes. You can do it when you're driving. You know, You can do it when you're going for a walk. You can do it whenever, When you're cooking. I have a library of a bunch of different stoic techniques. You can do them when you're out and about, You know, It doesn't have to be sitting down in a state of meditation, Although you can do that too. And so object deconstruction is, Is a technique. The Buddhists also did this as well. It's where you break down the magical story that you tell yourself about a particular thing that you put on a pedestal. So say that you're, Say that you're craving or desiring something, And you're telling yourself that all these amazing promises that, If I have this, Then I'm going to feel so good, And it's only going to be this one time, And, You know, Oh, This is a very particular type of this thing, And it's really rare, And I really want it. You're telling yourself all these stories. What a Stoic would do is say, Well, Hang on a second, Stop. Let's break this down, This object down, Into the absolute most basic elements that it is. And so Epictetus the Stoic, He gave the example of a really precious ornament. So say there's this precious artistic ornament that you want and you want to pay all this money to have it because it's so special. Epictetus would encourage you to say the phrase, I am fond of a piece of china. Right. And to like, Think about it, Like I am fond of a piece of China. Right and to just break it down And you could do this with like, Take sugar, Right? Like I am fond. I'm very fond of these small bits of white things that when I put in my mouth, It gives me a certain kind of feeling. You just break it down. Um, You can do it with anything. You can, You can talk about even, Even, Even relationships. Um, You can do with anything. It depends on what it is, But it's a fun exercise. You can do it in a lighthearted way, But you just take this thing that you're craving or desiring and just break it down in a very matter of fact way. Just like break it into its component pieces. Try and take away the storyline. Another thing that we can do is we can analyze the thought pattern that leads to the desire as well. So like if you take the example of self-criticism, In CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Which was inspired by Stoicism, The way that it works is that you notice that you have a thought, You become mindful of the thought, And then you ask yourself, Just what's in this thinking? Classic distortions would be mind reading, All or nothing thinking, Catastrophizing, Labeling, Personalization. Alright, There's ten of them, You can look it up. Ten distortions. Well, You can do the same thing with your desire. So the next time you desire something, You can write it down, Write down the sentence, Write down the promise and just ask yourself. You know, Is this true? You know, Do I believe this to be true? And invariably, You will be able to find evidence that there are certain issues within it. I do this when I feel the desire to spend money. You know that feeling you get when you see something online, And you check it out, You just really want to get it, You look at reviews, And you just think, Well, I've got to get this thing. I'm going to be so much happier if I get this thing. That I used to just impulse buy and get it. But over the years, I've learned to just stop and ask myself, Like, Wait a second. Do I really need this thing? Like really, You know, Like really, Really, Let me think about it. What would happen if I didn't get it? What would be the cost? What would be the benefits? And just pausing and asking yourself and analyzing the thoughts that you're having. And what will usually happen is, If you wait a day or two, You'll realize that, Yeah, You probably don't need it. And if you do, After that point, Get it, Right? It's fine. But it's just using rational analysis. And then a third technique, Which is something we've looked at, Is riding the wave. The next time you feel. . . Any kind of craving. The first thing that I would do is notice on a scale of 1 to 10 how powerful it is. So notice if it's like a 5 or a 9. Identify the kind of promises and the thoughts that are going along with it. And then all you have is one goal, One goal when you feel this craving. It's a really simple goal. Wait two minutes. That's it. Wait two minutes. It's like a game you can play with yourself and see if the intensity of the craving has gone up or if it's gone down. All right. So like I've got a nine craving right now. Okay. I can feel it. You know, I'm not saying that I won't do it, But I'm just going to wait two minutes. That's my goal. I'm just going to wait two minutes and see what happens to this craving.

Reviews

‘To learn to want the exact life you are living’
That quote is so fulfilling and liberating. Thanks for this interesting talk, Jon!

I am intrigued by these concepts, Thank you. The ending was a bit abrupt?