Our sense of “winning” isn’t entirely up for grabs: we prefer sensory stimulation to its absence, we prefer novel stimulations to boring old ones, we prefer to avoid protracted pain, we generally prefer living in human company rather than on desert islands, and so on.
In one manner of thinking, our sense of “winning”—considered as a set of statistically reliable facts about human beings—is definitely part of the territory. It’s a set of facts about human brains.
“Winning” more reliably entails accumulating knowledge about what constitutes the experience of winning, and it seems that it has to be actual knowledge—it’s not enough to say “I will convince myself that my sense of winning is X”, where X is some not necessarily coherent predicate which seems to match the world as we see it.
That may work temporarily and for some people, but be shown up as inadequate as circumstances change.
Yeah, most desires are part of the territory, and not really influenced by our beliefs.
As a child I was very drawn to asceticism. I thought that by not qualifying any of my natural desires as ‘winning’, I could somehow liberate myself from them. I think that I did feel liberated, but I was also very religious and so I imagined there was something else (something transcendent) that I was fulfilling. In later years, I developed a sense that I needed to “choose” earthly desires in order to learn more about the world and cope with existential angst. I considered it a necessary ‘selling-out’ that I would try for 10 years. All this to explain why I don’t tend to think of desires as a given, but as a choice. But I suppose desires are given after all, and in my ascetic years I just believed that being unhappy was winning.
I believe asceticism is just another human drive, and possibly one not shared with other animals. In any case, it needs as much examination to see whether it fits into the context of a life as any other drive.
I have a similar take on the desire to help people.
Our sense of “winning” isn’t entirely up for grabs: we prefer sensory stimulation to its absence, we prefer novel stimulations to boring old ones, we prefer to avoid protracted pain, we generally prefer living in human company rather than on desert islands, and so on.
In one manner of thinking, our sense of “winning”—considered as a set of statistically reliable facts about human beings—is definitely part of the territory. It’s a set of facts about human brains.
“Winning” more reliably entails accumulating knowledge about what constitutes the experience of winning, and it seems that it has to be actual knowledge—it’s not enough to say “I will convince myself that my sense of winning is X”, where X is some not necessarily coherent predicate which seems to match the world as we see it.
That may work temporarily and for some people, but be shown up as inadequate as circumstances change.
Yeah, most desires are part of the territory, and not really influenced by our beliefs.
As a child I was very drawn to asceticism. I thought that by not qualifying any of my natural desires as ‘winning’, I could somehow liberate myself from them. I think that I did feel liberated, but I was also very religious and so I imagined there was something else (something transcendent) that I was fulfilling. In later years, I developed a sense that I needed to “choose” earthly desires in order to learn more about the world and cope with existential angst. I considered it a necessary ‘selling-out’ that I would try for 10 years. All this to explain why I don’t tend to think of desires as a given, but as a choice. But I suppose desires are given after all, and in my ascetic years I just believed that being unhappy was winning.
I believe asceticism is just another human drive, and possibly one not shared with other animals. In any case, it needs as much examination to see whether it fits into the context of a life as any other drive.
I have a similar take on the desire to help people.
I think there’s a lot of variation. Some people choose very stable lives, and I don’t know of anyone who wants everything to change all the time.