Desires, Models, and the Pull for More
Using temperance in a world of constant desire
Welcome to another week of Monday Meditations!
A few housekeeping items before we dive into this week’s Meditation.
Congratulations to Aaron A. who is the winner of our free copy of Tim Lebon’s and Kasey Pierce’s new book, 365 Ways to Be More Stoic: A day-by-day guide to practical stoicism. For anyone interested in a great new read on Stoicism, I highly recommend this book. If you enjoyed Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s The Daily Stoic, then you will love this.
I will have more giveaways like this in the future so keep your eyes open for more chances to win a free philosophy book.
Also, as a reminder, Substack has rolled out “Notes”. Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. Download the Substack app here to start following.
This week’s Meditation at a glance:
We all have desires in life. Sometimes these desires are incredibly strong. But where do these desires come from? And how can we manage our desires so we are pursuing the proper things in life? This week we explore the virtue of temperance and dive into where desires come from.
One of the most important virtues the Stoics preached was that of self-restraint. To control oneself, both in action and desire. Marcus Aurelius, for example, spends much time within the Meditations talking to himself about restraining his anger or his temptation to do actions he deems non-virtuous.
This idea of self-restraint is one of the main virtues Aristotle lists within his Nicomachean Ethics. What both Aristotle and the Stoics stressed with temperance was the idea of finding the proper balance, the art of not being insufficient in self-control, but also not being overly restrictive to the point of enjoying nothing. Aristotle goes so far to call people who are overly restrictive “boors” and “insensible.”
Desires are born out of basic necessity. Or at least that was originally where desires were born out of. Much of what we needed and desired was to stay alive and thrive. As humans moved from hunter-gatherer tribes into modern societies, the necessities of life began to fade away and “luxury” desires began to take root within us.
The psychologist Jonah Berger describes today’s desires as “social influence”--it is the pull from those around us that influence our behavior and what we desire.
“Where we grow up, and the norms and practices of people around us, shape everything from the language we use to the behaviors we engage in… Whether making simple decisions, like which brand to buy, or more consequential ones, like which career path to pursue, we tend to do as others around us do.”
The philosopher René Girard described this pull, these desires based upon others as mimetic desire and the people who have what we want as models.
"Since modern man has no way of knowing what is going on beyond himself, since he cannot know everything, he would become lost in a world as vast and technically complex as ours, if he had really no one to guide him. He no longer relies on priests and philosophers, of course, but he must rely on people nevertheless, more than ever, as a matter of fact.”
As Luke Burgis wrote on Girard:
“Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn--through imitation--to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.”
When we are pulled for something, when we have strong desires for the need or want for something, how often do we turn and reflect on why we desire it? On where these desires may have come from?
The author Milan Kundera summarized this well when he wrote, “We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”
Marcus worked to find restraint within himself by writing reminders if he did not have something that others had, there was no need to desire it--it was non-existent to him.
“Treat what you don't have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you'd crave them if you didn't have them. But be careful. Don't feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them - that it would upset you to lose them.”
To fight back against the constraints of desire, Marcus focused his attention on wisdom, on learning to better himself. Through wisdom, he and the Stoics believed, we would live our best lives. In book eight he writes:
“People find pleasure in different ways. I find it in keeping my mind clear.”
Later he reminds himself of what he is after, “stillness,” something always lacking in a world of chaos and desire:
“Do pain and pleasure have their hooks in you? Let the senses with it. Are there obstacles to your action? If you failed to reckon with the possibility, then that would harm you, as a rational being... No one can obstruct the operations of the mind. Nothing can get at them - not fire or steel, not tyrants, not abuse - nothing. As long as it's "a sphere...in perfect stillness."”
External pulls toward desire will never go away. Aristotle and Girard both agree that humans are the most “imitative” creature in the world, and that our need to imitate drives our desires, to have the same purse as someone, to drive the same car, to own the same house or live in the same neighborhood as others. These are all the models that shape our desires every day, constantly working to nudge us one way or another.
It is only through recognizing these models and understanding how they pull us can we begin to temper our desires, to use temperance to our advantage. But the first step in understanding what is driving us. Once this is recognized, we are better equipped to start reframing what we truly want out of life.
Once we figure this out, we can start to form new models for desire.
Three Bullet Summary:
Temperance is the virtue of self-control which helps us to find a balance between excessiveness and deficiency.
The desires we have are based upon the people around us as we are creatures of imitation.
By properly recognizing the models for desire each of us holds, we can begin to take the appropriate steps reframe our models and pursue better ones.
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo