What’s Revealed At the End When You Create the Roadmap to Happiness
A written exercise on how to grapple with my desires and what it means to live well
The idea of desires has always kind of troubled me.
Life has inevitable suffering, the cause of this suffering is desire, and to stop suffering, we must stop desiring. — First three of Buddhist Four Noble Truths
I had come to understand desire as a necessary evil, and that as long as I stood to want something, my life would be full of unhappiness. Even the desire to not suffer is a desire in itself, but if I wanted to live a good life, what should I do? To not want anything, ever?
It’s a question I’ve grappled with almost my entire life, and I’ve found that many religions and philosophers have developed different answers to how to approach it — but they all seem to agree, our desires play a big role in defining our good life, and we should reflect on them.
A reflective exercise to get to the root of my desires
A few weeks ago a professor of philosophy at my alma mater introduced me to the exercise he described as desire…
