Selflessness in Stoicism

When you look in the mirror, are you looking at your reflection, or is the reflection looking at you? John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903, detail inverted by the author (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) (Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain).

We as a species are caught in a predicament. We want to eat delicious food, have sex with beautiful people, be admired, acquire property, and increase our power over others.

But, no matter how much we achieve those things, it never satiates the constant yearning for more.

Why? Because desire is advantageous in the light of natural selection, but the feeling of being satiated is not. If our ancestors were totally satiated and content and never felt that yearning, they’d likely not survive to pass on their genes.

Understanding this mechanism doesn’t make it disappear. But understanding something else loosens its grip: our very sense of self as a cohesive and unitary whole is just a convenient fiction.

Desire needs an object — food, power, property, procreation, but it also needs a subject. That subject is the locus of pleasure: the self, advantageous for our ancestors — or at least the genes sequestered in our ancestors’ cells. The self is the vessel of yearning.

If we actually understand that our true identity is not a unified and coherent subject that stands apart from the world, but rather as something that is inseparable from, or braided into, the Cosmos as a whole, our cravings and disappointments lessen and could disappear entirely.