The Paradox of Desire: how what you want most keeps you wanting more.
They say if you want something badly enough, you’ll get it. But how do you know it’ll ever be enough?
The Void of Wanting
Think about something you’ve always wanted in your life.
Something that, if you achieved it, you are certain it would manifest the ideal version of life you’ve been fantasizing about for ages.
Now let me ask you,
Has wanting that thing so badly brought you fulfillment, peace, and happiness?
Or has it only created a void and constantly reminded you of what you don’t have?
The Roots of Our Craving
Many of us who crave the most deeply understand what it’s like to have the least—often in some area of our lives during childhood.
Financial struggles left your parents barely making ends meet, with you often going to bed struggling to sleep as your stomach growls.
Emotional deprivation left your soul yearning for something undefined, a void you carried into adulthood without knowing how to fill.
Struggles in school carved a hole in your ego, leaving you perpetually questioning your competence and battling imposter syndrome.
The list goes on…
These experiences can leave a deep abyss inside us, giving us the hunger that leads some people to be successful.
But at what cost?
For The Love of the Underdog
There’s true merit in the underdog story.
That’s why it’s so popular and timeless in our culture.
There’s respect and awe in witnessing someone overcome the odds and achieve something remarkable, there’s no doubt about that.
I want to see everyone that has an underdog story succeed.
I’m not writing this today to try to get you to work less and sing Kumbaya around the fire more.
This is deeper than that.
I want to talk about what desire really means and how it can actually work against us to get what we want.
The Power and Danger of Desire
“ When we are at the effect of desire, we are no longer free. We are controlled by it, enslaved and led about by the nose of it.”
- David R. Hawkins.
The definition of the word desire is the following: feelings that impel one to the attainment or possession of something.
The word 'impel' is key here. To be impelled to do something requires conditions like drive, urgency, and the application of force to make it happen.
In our culture, a common belief about the meaning of life and its purpose is that these forces—applied to doing things deemed worthy—are positive and even necessary to achieve the highest potential we’re meant to reach.
The Entrepreneurial Trap
We see this belief most strongly reflected in the case of the entrepreneur.
It’s rooted in the idea that aligning these conditions with the mind and soul is what fosters true independence and sovereignty of self.
This belief is rarely questioned and when it is, is often dismissed as laziness or ignorance.
If you ask a workaholic about the meaning behind their actions, they’ll readily virtue signal with grand ideas and beliefs that are hard to dispute.
“Fair enough” is the convenient and socially acceptable response to these virtues.
We can’t knock someone else’s hustle, right?
Maybe not, but for us, the constant inner bustle, deserves to be questioned.
Desire as a Double-Edged Sword
“The pursuit of desire is endless, for to desire is to acknowledge lack.”
– Plato
Something profound I’ve learned recently is that the act of desiring is rooted in a deep subconscious awareness of what we don’t have.
When we survive the struggles I mentioned earlier, our subconscious minds often remain stuck in that heightened state of arousal—a relentless drive to fix our circumstances considering there was much to fix for an extended period of our lives.
This constant pressure pushes us to chase stability and attain what society considers 'normal.'
How Lack Defines Our Identity
This way of living—after enduring a long period of involuntary lack—creates a mindset where:
Positive self-esteem is tied to what you have.
Negative self-judgment stems from what you don’t.
Having vs. not having is often the first way we tend to measure our quality of life.
If I have more I am more.
If I have less I am lesser.
We are subconsciously dependent on validation through external means which by default severs our ability to be independent.
The Smaller Self
Within each of us exists a version of ourselves called the 'smaller self.'
This smaller self is the source of our unhelpful, self-sabotaging emotions.
Desire—and the constant awareness of what we lack—activates and feeds this smaller self, allowing it to thrive on the negative emotions that arise from feeling like we’re not enough.
When we desperately want something, when we attach ourselves to a specific outcome, the smaller self punishes us relentlessly when we don’t have it.
It floods us with:
Guilt.
Resentment.
Envy for those who already have what we want.
Frustration over our perceived inadequacy.
Anger at our circumstances.
Hopelessness when the goal feels out of reach.
Yet, our ambition often overpowers these emotions, enabling us to live in active denial of their presence, or even justify them as simply 'par for the course.
The Entrepreneur’s Reflection
In entrepreneurship, one thing I hear often is that many of the problems within a business aren’t actually about the business—they’re about the entrepreneur.
For me, the desire to be an entrepreneur has often been so intense that it created a tunnel-vision lifestyle.
I sacrificed many things that, ironically, could have made me a better entrepreneur.
The True Cost of Desire
One of the most important things to understand about the negative effects of desire is how it robs you of the ability to be present and authentically grateful for life as it is.
Which ironically takes away from the entire point of striving for your goals and the positive emotions that arise from that journey.
Desire is contradictory because it makes it harder to value who you are and reminds you of who you’re not.
Who do you think you could be if you weren’t trapped in this constant psychological cycle?
The Path Forward
Rather than focusing on what you have or don’t have, it might be more powerful to focus on who you are.
Becoming a better person—on the inside—naturally brings the abundance you crave, without the need for endless striving.
“There is often a lack of understanding in the function of wanting and desire. The main illusion is seen in the statement “The only way I’ll get what I want is by desiring it; if I let go of my desire, I won’t get what I want”. Actually the opposite is true. “
- David R. Hawkins
Letting go of desire brings the abundance we’ve been seeking all along.
If we step out of the reality of 'not having' and choose to have something with clear intention, we can attain it—not because of desire, but in spite of it.
Desire, at its core, is telling ourselves, 'I don’t have it.'
This mindset creates a psychic distance between us and what we want—a distance that becomes fertile ground for the smaller self to thrive, generating all the negative emotions that leave us feeling miserable and inadequate.
When desire dominates your psyche, the cycle of suffering is endless.
Like chasing a doughnut on a treadmill.
As soon as you achieve what you desire, a new desire will emerge—perhaps even stronger than the first.
This happens because you’re driven by an incessant state of 'not having.'
There is always something missing, something else that you could get.
You believe that getting all of these things truly matters, or will make a meaningful difference in your life.
You convince yourself wholeheartedly every time that something is worth sacrificing everything over to achieve ( this process is amplified especially if you have ADHD ).
The truth is, 99% of us already have what we need. We have so much of it that our constant state of wanting is often less about necessity and more about seeking an alternative to boredom.
Due to cultural programming, we’ve tied our sense of value to perpetual 'productivity,' believing that if we’re not always busy, we’re not valuable or worthy.
This, too, is a construct of the smaller self—the part of us that insists we must create or produce something external to prove our worth, because it believes that, on our own, we are not enough.
Practical Steps to Break Free
So, what is the solution to the problem of desire?
How do we navigate the world without constantly chasing and clinging to a north star that always seems out of reach?
Firstly, I’m not gonna be dramatic and tell you to stop wanting things altogether.
But I am going to suggest that you stop attaching yourself to what you want and turning it into a need so critical that failing to achieve it has the power to destroy your self-esteem.
Here are a couple of ways I’ve been working to release myself from the shackles of desire and lack. You can try them too:
1. Truly believe that no matter what happens, you’ll be alright.
Part of freeing yourself from desire’s grip is understanding that your situation does not define your worth or the value of your life.
You can want something, but you don’t have to need it.
This mindset—this detachment and self-belief—relieves many of the negative emotions tied to desire because you’re no longer dependent on an outcome to feel satisfied.
2. Develop yourself to increase self-awareness and invite abundance.
The more knowledge and wisdom you gain, the more you understand how forces like desire work on you—both for and against you.
This self-awareness gives you the tools to navigate life with intention, breaking free from the hopeless cycle of blind optimism and endless wanting.
When you develop yourself, you don’t just hope for things—you embody the kind of person who naturally attracts what they want.
It’s not just about what you do, but about who you are.
The Fallacy of Desire
When you’re driven by desire, is it truly of your conscious independence? Or are you a slave to it?
Don’t confuse the busy work of satisfying your inner compulsions with genuine freedom. They are not the same.
In a lower state of consciousness dominated by the smaller self, the world feels like a stingy parent—never giving you what you “deserve,” always keeping what you work so hard for just out of reach.
It’s not the world withholding from you.
It’s your own perceptions and self-esteem creating these reactions to the world around you.
Everything starts from within.
You don’t have to fall for this trap.
You don’t have to buy into the belief that the world is cruel, only rewarding those who endlessly suffer for its benefit.
Your Mindset Is Your World.
If you believe you don’t have enough, you’ll never feel like you do—no matter how much you get.
If you believe your worth is determined by what you do, you’ll never feel like you’re doing enough—because you can always do more.
But if you choose to believe the opposite…
If you develop yourself psychologically and physically into a person who simply is what they want to be—without needing external validation—that’s when everything changes.
That’s how a person becomes unbreakable.
That’s how abundance is cultivated.
End The Suffering Of Desire
It’s the act of foregoing what you want and instead embracing and developing who you are that brings you what you’ve been seeking all along—without the psychological torture.
If you already are, what is left to want?
Nothing. And the man who wants the least has the most.
So, instead of asking yourself, “What do I need to get?”
Ask, “Who do I need to become?”
“Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough. Those who strive beyond this, who are mastered by their desire for more, find themselves poor—not because of what they lack, but because of what they long for. A poverty of desires, then, is the truest wealth. For he who is content with little wants for nothing."
- Seneca
Thanks for reading.
How has desire shaped or affected your life?
Comment below!