Desire Tracking
Naval Ravikant has a famous quote:
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
I find this statement to be very true. I think most of our struggles and frustrations can be traced back to some root desire.
The problem is that throughout our lives, we adopt so many desires whether unconsciously or consciously, and we rarely take the time to fully audit them.
And the more desires we have that we can’t or are unwilling to put the effort and time towards, the more likely we are to be frustrated about it. Until a time comes when we just feel sad or down, and yet can’t explain why.
This is where desire tracking can help.
Desire tracking is just what it sounds like, tracking your desires. It’s a muscle that we need to build.
We are wired as humans to want things. It’s fundamental to our prosperity as a species. We wanted better food, shelter, medicine, and clothing, so we kept building better versions of those or whatever else we wanted.
Even as technology and AI accelerates our ability to satisfy our desire, one constant seems to remain, that there will always be some new human desire, and there will always be better problems. It’s just that it’s very hard to predict what that desire will be, or what those problems will be (in hindsight it will be obvious).
While adopting desires is ingrained in us and our society, desire tracking is not, and so all the more reason we need to make a real effort to practice it.
I think the best way to track your desires is to be mindful and question your feelings.
For example, if I find myself feeling down, or frustrated, I’ll question myself. Why do I feel that way?
Usually, I find that I can trace that negative feeling back to some desire I have. From that point, I can start to bring back control over the desire. How did I pick up this desire? Do I want to keep it? If so, what am I willing to do to achieve that goal (of fulfilling the desire)? If I want to keep it, but I’m not willing to commit a lot of time or effort to that goal, then do I really want that goal? Or is there another goal I would rather be focusing on at the moment?
This questioning assumes that you have a desire that you can do something about.
There are certain desires that you can’t do much about. And these are the desires that you must either remove or reframe in some way.
For example, you may want a specific person to take a certain action (buy something from you, come visit you, etc..). How do you reframe the desire to bring control back to you?
You reframe the desire as doing everything you can, to the best of your ability, to get the person to take that action. And you ensure some strategy in the case that the person doesn’t take that action (e.g. learn from it, work harder, or generate more options). That way, even if the person doesn’t take the action you wanted, you are not left upset. You transform your fragile desire into a robust one by shifting your perspective.
Antifragile
Now, you could argue that reframing your desire to a robust one lessens your drive/aggression toward that desire, which makes it less likely that you will fulfill that desire.
Knowing that you are fragile in this desire, and refusing to reframe it to a robust desire, makes it an antifragile desire. It can be more effective than a robust desire, as long as you don’t let the pain ruin you.
With desires, just like with all of life, you want to avoid being fragile.
If you’re aware that you have a fragile desire, and that you will benefit from the pain of not fulfilling that fragile desire, then you’ve made yourself antifragile. However, if you don’t make that realization, you stay fragile.
Of course the key component of antifragility is staying in the game and avoiding ruin. So when it comes to your antifragile desire, you want to make sure that your approach doesn’t burn you out or ruin you in some way.
Conclusion
Once you’ve audited your desires and questioned them, you can then put together a plan for each desire you have. Or maybe you realize there’s one desire that trumps all others for now, and you just want to focus on that one desire for now.
How you approach your desires and how you frame them can make a drastic difference in your overall well-being.
Next time you feel upset or frustrated, ask yourself why, and see if you can trace it back to some desire you have.
Question that desire further, until you can find the deeper desire. Once you understand that desire, then you’ve taken back control and can decide whether you want to remove it, reframe it, or approach it differently.
I’ve created a set of questions to help you think about your desires and track them, you can take a look here: https://sauna.chat/decks/3.
Thanks for reading!
