Desires and Deprivation #

Sometimes acting on desires can have negative consequences. For example:

• Eating unhealthy food
• Stealing money
• Falling into an addiction

One way to avoid acting on desires is via willful deprivation, or consciously using willpower to force oneself to not act on the desire. This crucially assumes that the desire is immutable, and focusing solely on resisting it.

An alternative strategy is to question and try to change the desire itself. Many desires exist because of supporting beliefs. For example:

• Unhealthy food makes me happier (via taste) than healthy food.
• Money will make me happier.
• My addictive behavior is healthy and makes me happy.

By poking and prodding at these underlying beliefs, I’ve personally found that my desires are more mutable than I originally thought. Instead of putting energy into the hard and failure-prone work of relying on willpower to live a better life, I have tried to instead put more energy into changing my desires via new beliefs. For example:

• Taste (and sensory happiness) is not directly related the health of food.

Categories: Mind