On our way to happiness (more on that later), we very often confuse aspirations and desires by referring to them as what we want. While our aspirations, as our long term goals, tend to generate what we face as what we need to do, our desires acquire the charming facade of what we want to do. That leads to a phenomenon called “I have friends who complain they either can achieve nothing or they can, but are unhappy with their lives”.

I’ve heard countless times youngsters (yes, I am fully aware I am one of them, but not really) say that they lack discipline. I’ve even heard that if what you do is not a pleasure you shouldn’t be doing it at all. That is a dangerous thing to believe in. I feel appalled by the possibility of having to wander among grown babies that whine all the time and demand that their every whim and need is met, and that are incapable of shutting the fuck up a bit in order to actually do something worthwhile. Those so called worthwhile things usually take time and effort, you know. For instance, you may want to get thinner and healthier and all that crap. But right now, all you want is to stuff your hugely fat face with chocolate. How can you want both if doing what you want now (and probably at several other times in the future you chubby sneak) will prevent you from getting what you want for your future? Having discipline means understanding what we want is represented by these two temporal tendencies, and that we should prioritize what is most important to us according to what we really want and who we are. Easy enough, uh? I didn’t think so.

How to set priorities when we don’t really know who we are or what we want? Delaying that knowledge leads to procrastination and we all know the drill when it comes to that. We avoid doing what we need to do and do not do the things we want to do, because we’re too guilty to do it while we’re supposed to be doing something else. As a result, we end up doing something entirely different and utterly useless instead. Not to mention the void we create in our lives by ignoring and therefore missing all the clues that point to the answer to the one-million question “who am I?”. Said void is created because we forget there is no answer to that question. We build who we are everyday, with all of our actions and thoughts, in a never-ending process (it actually ends with death, yeah). As Stuart Murdoch sagely chanted: “If you work for much very longer/ You’ll be known as the boy who’s always working”. True story.

I do not want to venture into self-help or advocate self-awareness here, no need to close the tab in annoyance just yet. What I am saying is that not acting upon our aspirations, only upon our desires, will lead solely to immediate pleasure and that is fine as long as that is all one seeks in life. I’m also saying that we should probably try to reconcile acting on our aspirations and on our desires every now and then, otherwise we’re gonna become bitter and an utter pain in the ass. Finally and definitely, what I am trying to convey is that by not knowing how to differentiate both tendencies and by denying them, or even worse, not investigating what our desires and aspirations are, we are fated to become people we don’t want to be, trapped in lives we don’t want to live.