Fleeting Desires

Transcript

Welcome, beautiful thinkers!

I was just thinking about something about fleeting desires.

I was reading this book.

It’s called Alan Carr’s Easy Way To Quit Smoking.

And if you’re thinking about quitting smoking, or if it crosses your mind to quit smoking, this is an excellent book to read.

It goes through and breaks down the different challenges, the different justifications that people have for smoking, and explains cleanly the process of addiction.

And how you can work your way out of that by thinking about things in a different way.

It’s a powerful book, towards the end of the book, it talks about after you’ve given up smoking, or after you’ve said, “Alright, I guess I’m smoking my last cigarette.”

In those following weeks or months, you probably have this idea that pops up,

“Hm, I want a cigarette.”

And maybe there’s even an impulse, or feeling, an emotion that goes along with it.

And Carr says that you don’t have to worry about these things.

These things are normal is just a kind of mental habit.

And the thought that you want a cigarette doesn’t actually mean that you want a cigarette.

And I think about this in a lot of aspects of life.

Like I wonder how many times we have those impulses.

And we believe that these are actually our true desires that we really do want these things, that these are actually something a bit different, these are fleeting desires.

And those these are just fantasies, they don’t really have much to do with what we really want.

Discovering what we really want, takes a bit more time and effort, exploration and experimentation.

I think so, so often that fleeting desires satisfaction of impulses might make us happy, is very rarely true.

And I released that video years ago now, on YouTube, it was called anxiety mastery.

And I was talking about coping mechanisms and thriving strategies.

I didn’t have a better term for it, I’m still not sure if I have a better term for it.

Coping mechanisms are the things that we do somewhat mechanically, like if we have an impulse, and we just follow through on it, like Pavlovian response or something similar.

Well, that’s not quite the right term.

But it’s like when we see the trigger, when you experience that trigger, then we do that action, and we complete it.

A lot of the time our coping mechanisms are like that.

They’re not necessarily entirely conscious behaviors.

And so many things like this.

These are the things we think we enjoy, like smoking a cigarette, or going to the fridge to see what’s to eat, even though we’re not actually hungry.

Somebody said, I think it came up on Tik Tok the other day is like, people have this expression in Japan, they say, “My mouth is lonely.”

Or in Mexico they say, you know, “I get a little craving”, “Se me antoja algo”.

Something gives me a little craving.

And this is like you’re not actually hungry.

Your body doesn’t want food, but you still want to eat.

Like experiencing some comfort, looking for the kind of comfort that comes from having those sensory experiences, but we don’t really want these things.

Likewise with masturbation, that’s also a common one that people use to suit themselves is not necessarily healthy for us.

It can rewire our brain, especially in excess, rewire our brain.

So a way that we think that this is something that that’s giving us satisfaction.

And this is the things that the dopamine response, it’s connected to, to being alone and experiencing self love and unnecessarily in a healthy way, is actually rewiring your brain to think while doing nothing.

Literal masturbation is somehow going to please us, in the long term would really want brings us deeper happiness is things like facing challenges, experiencing challenges, overcoming challenges, or being quiet with ourselves, not not having to do something in order to look, look for, a yes, a sensory experience, that’s going to give us pleasure, but instead finding the inherent pleasure of the moment, the joy of being, the excitement, and relaxation, of just experiencing what we really are.

If we do have those fleeting desires, those pieces come up in our minds.

We can simply say, I know that this is not my true desire.

I know that my true desires go deeper.

And when we observe the thought, we observe the feeling behind the thought.

You start to find very quickly that these things do not have power over us.

That in some sense, we are in control, not the impulses, not our whims, is us and we can choose when to follow through.

When we choose something different, something more subtle, more peaceful.

That secret silence within us.