Tracing Your Desires

Why do I want what I want?

Why do we desire to have what we desire to have? We live in a consumerist world. Following the world wars, the creation of a massive American middle class in the U.S. led to a new age of advertisement. Desires could not simply be met anymore, they must be created. People might naturally continue to desire the truly important and valuable things in life, but those desires don’t keep a massive economy afloat. For most things in our life, we are told what to want by the things we see around us.

In the past decade, desire-creators have received a powerful new innovation: personalized ads. Now, through the modern tech that commands our attention, we receive targeted ads. This results in a dynamic I find very interesting as someone near me is led to fiercely desire something (a product, a lifestyle, a character quality) that I have no desire for since I am not being surrounded by the same influences. One person might have their screens consistently filled with a particular upcoming film that the next person has no idea exists. The innovation of targeted ads has incidentally revealed the artificial fabrication of surplus desires. This phenomenon gives further proof to the fact that you will desire what you are surrounded by. 

This is, in fact, not a strength but a weakness for desire-creating machines; desires are limited by the eco-system you build around yourself. If you surround yourself with a group of friends who talk about reading books all the time, you will likely read more books. If you join the “bad kids” on the school playground (not all my examples are targeted toward the same age group), you will likely be influenced by their behaviors and desires.

Tracing a desire back to its source, and honestly asking the question, “Where did this desire come from?” is always a helpful practice whether that desire is sinful, righteous, good, productive, helpful, harmful, expensive or anything in between (Phil. 4:8). 

I find it fascinating that people rarely desire things that haven’t been created yet. If I’m honest with myself, the material possession I most want is my own personal spaceship. But that’s ridiculous. Personal spaceships do not exist. We go through our lives not caring a lick about things that our descendants, even just a few decades in the future, will be absolutely obsessed over. It is as if we already beat that desire, but we didn’t even try to repress it. 

Similarly, our ancestors really didn’t care about many of the things we are told to desire. No one wanted a Netflix account or to binge a show all day before Netflix or shows were invented. Were they really worse off than us, or were they just as happy going without?

Ironically, I think this commercial does a great job of revealing how fabricated our surplus wants are. 

There are plenty of applications here: think on whatever is good, surround yourself with some positive influences, temper your desires, simplify the things in your life, limit advertisements' effect on you. But I have been thinking about my own brand new child, a little boy named Augustine who is just 4 months old.

Augustine still has no idea what age he was born into. For all he knows, he could have been born to a Norse viking family where he would be perfectly happy braving the cold, fishing from a long boat, and going completely without TV, cell phones, legos, video games, sugar, and a myriad of other potential temptations that he currently has no desire for; he does not know they exist just like I do not know what will exist 100 years from now nor do I desire it. 

Now, it is difficult to limit your own desires and curtail the ecosystem of advertisement around yourself (indeed, big tech spends trillions of dollars to try to capture our attention; we never even had a chance). However, it is easier to impose on someone else, and I currently control nearly all of Augustine’s surrounding ecosystem. So let’s see if we can build a little robust viking warrior in the 21st century. Surrounded and encouraged by the good while lacking the temptations of the bad. 

It's an interesting project that is sure to fail and contain its own unintended consequences. Censorship is both necessary and fruitless (while also being potentially harmful). Once Adam bit into that fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, innocence was no longer natural to humanity. In a similar vein to the catch phrase “Brexit means Brexit,” the Fall means the Fall, and attempts to isolate oneself from the world are simply unchristian. Yet, this conundrum calls for wise balance, not premature surrender. At least for now, Leila and I still control Augustine’s ecosystem, something which is both an incredible opportunity and an immense responsibility! I will keep you updated on my progress of creating a little Norse monster-fighter–ready to push back the curse wherever it is found–in the modern age.