to address the fundamental unhappiness that comes from wanting something at all.
I think your whole comment, and this clause in particular, comes from what I refer to as a very “enlightenment-oriented” frame.
That is, the thing that matters is feeling good (or not feeling bad), and the goal is to get to that.
There’s another perspective, that I like to call the “heaven-oriented” perspective, in which the thing that matters is achieving a world where all needs are met and nourished, and the goal is to get to that.
I have heard people coming from a more heaven-oriented perspective say that people who think they just want to be happy are making a fundamental category error, and not in touch with what they actually care about.
I have heard people coming from a more enlightenment-oriented perspective say that people who think they want to achieve a state of the world are making a fundamental category error, and not in touch with what they actually care about.
My take, having worked with dozens of people and guiding introspection into fundamental motivations, is that both of these are true for different people. My current frame is that these perspectives are more like fundamental dispositions that people have, to lean more towards enlightenment or heaven (with some at the extremes and some at different places along the spectrum), although it does get a bit more complicated because they may lean in different ways in respect to different needs.
In general, the type of advice I’ll be giving in this sequence will tend to be more useful to heaven-oriented individuals, although I encourage people who are more enlightenment-oriented to follow along and take what they’d like from it.
What would it be look to strive for perfection in your process of choosing how much effort to put into each process?