Impossible Fantasies
We desire an infinite number of things, sensations and experiences that we cannot have: our impossibly fantasies. I’m speaking of unobtainable wants — why we want to achieve the unachievable, and how tempting this is for our brains to fantasise about in never-ending loops. These fantasies are illusions — the epitome of the gap between expectations and reality — and it is very difficult to go about our lives without day-dreaming about some of them.
The most common impossible fantasies may seem obvious to you: to cheat death and live forever, to have superpowers, to win the lottery and become extremely wealthy, to instantly achieve sustained world peace… All are pipe dreams. All these fantasies represent is our inability to face our fears (in the case of the examples above: death, weakness, poverty, and war).
However, the root of these fantasies emerges from a very human trait: to want what we cannot have.
- We crave stability — when it is amongst the rarest things in existence. Everything is in a constant state of change, and sometimes all we want is for time to sit still for a moment, for us to feel a sense of stability in our lives.
- We crave satisfaction and calmness — but our minds are never silent, and never without wants. As soon as we get what we want, our expectations change once more. We always desire something that we do not have, and so dissatisfaction becomes seemingly inevitable.
- We crave inner peace and the minimisation of our own needs and wants — we want a period absent of desires, where we aren’t distracted by any pressing matters. We want a period without thoughts, characterised by profound silence of the mind. And we cannot have it — and if we do manage to have it, even for a moment — we cannot sustain it.
Even though some of us might not know that we want these things — we all do. All humans crave stability, calmness and inner peace — and they do so more than ever, as in modern cities we have become surrounded by change, stress, anxiety and daily struggles.
People have tried to achieve the impossible before, and some have even gotten close — but reality is inescapable, and sooner or later, even those who achieve the impossible will have new unfulfillable, unsatisfiable wants. In fact, the one guarantee that you will desire more and more difficult-to-achieve ambitions is success — especially if you think you’ve succeeded by already achieving the “impossible”. Success and over-confidence are the most prevalent pre-cursors to a gap between your expectations and reality.
Stability is temporary. Satisfaction and calmness are temporary. Inner peace is temporary. So, appreciate these sensations when they reveal themselves to you, and accept them for what they really are: short-lived breathes of calm, simple, refreshing air; rare in our always-changing, confusing, complicated lives.
Remember that stress is also temporary. All of the emotions we feel in our lives are temporary — from the deepest pains and fears, to the longest moments of tranquility and happiness. We must begin to accept the emotions we are feeling as valid, yet temporary — so that we can internalise them, learn from them, and move on to our next human experience. We must recognise that all emotions are temporary, but that they can also be equally valuable to us, if we deal with them rather than avoiding them. By avoiding our unwanted emotions, we are not only giving them more energy in our subconscious mind, but we are depriving ourselves of crucial self-analysis, and the potential for life-changing self-development.
Appreciate the moment, rather than day-dreaming. Try to spend less time fantasising about the “impossible”, and more time focusing on how to make the “possible” a reality. Face your fears and face yourself — and get to the root of why you have a gap between your expectations and your reality. Dream realistically, and hopefully your dreams won’t remain dreams for too long.
