Flirting with Desire

Exploring the thin line between virtuous longing and destructive indulgence.

It's strange what desire will make foolish people do.
Chris Isaak

In relationships, we want others to feel for us the same level of desire that a vice unlocks on them. We want them to make irrational things, proving us that their desire transcends logic.

A fleeting note, by yours truly on a train ride.

Recently, I had a conversation with Jonas Kielker, a guest on my podcast, Limbo. One of the topics we covered was our relationship with desire, which inspired me to write this piece.

There are a lot of different philosophical approaches that aim at the absence of desire. Something along the lines of: “If I don't want anything, then, I'm satisfied with everything”. This, in my view, makes life feel somehow flat.

Sure, you'll never feel the depths of despair that come with having something you want being taken away from you, but you also don’t get to experience the rush, the highness that comes from getting something you desire.

However, as Chris Isaak beautifully explained, our desires make us do stupid things. Sure, he merely mentions “foolish people,” but have you ever met a human that escaped that condition in all areas? I don’t think so. We’re all foolish in our own way.

Desire is, indeed, a key element for human beings.

Think about it in the context of relationships.

Esther Perel’s books are such a good source to understand how important other people’s desire for us is. We long for it. We want to see it in their eyes. In fact, I would argue that a lot of people want others to desire them as much as they desire a particular vice.

In “Mating in Captivity”, Esther writes:

“The smaller we feel in the world, the more we need to shine in the eyes of our partner. We want to know that we matter, and that, for at least one person, we are irreplaceable.”

I would go as far as saying that, for most people, no matter how big they feel, there’s still a part of them that longs for that uniqueness.

It’s through what Chris Issak calls “the foolish things”, actions that flirt with the irrational and dangerous, that we get the confirmation of how much desire someone has over us.

Not love, as Esther would put it, but passion and desire. After all “unconditional love does not drive unconditional want”.

However, regardless of what we desire, there’s a chance that we won’t get it all the time. In relationships, sure, but throughout life in general. This is why we need to be careful when handling our relationship with desire. You don’t want to remove it from the equation but you also don’t want it to become the only driving force in your life.

We want to use desire, not be used by it. We want to flirt with danger without actually getting hurt. We want to open the possibility of feeling on top of the world, without descending, unarmed, to the bottom of it.

Desire is responsible for both pain and pleasure, ambition and apathy. It all comes down to the way we use it.

If you’re able to navigate the thoughtful use of pleasure and desire, of both vice and sobriety, you’ll have a great life.

However, sometimes, we let ourselves be guided merely by desire and pleasure. Do it for long enough and, eventually, vice and addiction will come crawling. When hedonism is your only lens to look at the world and your actions, you quickly get trapped in a prison of your own being.

Last year, I read “Fire in the Dark” by Jack Donovan. There are a lot of ideas that I disagree with in that book, but as a young man who has seen his “boyish” philosophy fade away, there were some things that resonated.

One of them was the figure of “The Lord of the Earth”, a symbol of someone working as a bridge between the world of men and the world of gods. He does this by indulging himself in the pleasures of men, as a way to create a stronger relationship with them, while never forgetting a higher realm that we should be focused on.

No matter how highly I think of myself, I wouldn’t say that I’m capable of being a “bridge between man and gods”, but I do enjoy the idea of being able to navigate the pleasure of life, connecting with others, without letting go of something “higher” than that.

Some of my fondest memories involve the pleasures of life! They are populated with great food, phenomenal wine, loud music, ecstatic dance…Enjoying these moments and actively looking for them does, to me, more good than evil. And yet, there’s an argument to be made that I’m inviting gluttony and degeneracy into my world.

Am I?

I don’t think so.

One may be animated by appetite without overindulging, no?

There’s a great book by Roger Scruton, the late English philosopher, called “I Drink, Therefore, I Am”. In the book, he explores the philosophical relationship we hold with wine.

In the final chapters of the book, he explores the way human beings relate to vices, using wine and the human experience as examples. He claims that most people don’t make a distinction between a virtuous and a vicious desire. This is, I believe, the best way to articulate the point I’m trying to make.

Regardless of how people perceive it, the intention behind a certain desire matters. Being filled with “lust” for the person you married 20 years ago is, I would argue, a good thing. Wanting to enjoy a delicious meal, with a very good bottle of wine and the company of those you love is not gluttony, it’s living. These are, in my view, virtuous desires.

Shoving your face in 2 pizzas, garlic bread and caramel ice cream because you want to feel “the sugar rush” is gluttony. Cheating on your partner multiple times with other people is lust. Betraying your friends or business partners in order to make some extra cash is greed.

You can understand the difference, right?

I feel like a great inspiration on how to use desire and not be used by it can be found in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”. He argues that the right thing to do is not to avoid anger completely but to acquire the right habit of use.

One must be able to feel the right amount of anger, towards the right person, on the right occasion, for the right length of time. I mean, even Christ used a whip to drive the money changers and merchants out of the temple.

You control the anger, you’re not controlled by it. True Virtue is in moderation.

This, I believe, applies to all vices, hence, all desires.

In “Lessons in History”, Will and Ariel Durant pointed out that, probably, “every vice was once a virtue”. My own twist on this is that every vice if properly controlled, can be a virtue.

The big challenge is, then, developing this capacity, without creating a narrative that binds us to hurtful behaviors while believing we’re “just enjoying life”. Educating ourselves to be able to navigate such balance and become virtuous is extremely hard.

But what are we humans if not growth-striving beings?

“The Garden of Earthly Delights” – Hieronymus Boschion

When thinking about this, there’s a part of me that finds a possible solution in Courage. You see, I believe most people are able to reason about their own desires in a way that allows them to know the difference between a virtuous and a vicious desire. In a lot of cases, it’s actually easy to make this distinction.

We’ve been over this.

Wanting to have more intimacy and sex with your partner is virtuous. Spending 4 hours a day looking at pornography, not so much. Wanting to enjoy a slow-cooked Osso Buco and a great bottle of wine is very different from binge-eating a bunch of fast food.

Now, most healthy people understand this at an intellectual level. It’s not that part of them that’s missing. It’s whatever makes us act upon what we know is right instead of what we know it’s easy. Personally, I would call it Courage.

If you ask someone to conjure images of courage, there are a bunch of different things that may come to mind. Most people, I imagine, come up with something “heroic” like firefighters entering burning buildings or any other kind of Herculean effort. Maybe some envision a very uncomfortable conversation, or standing up for something against the status quo.

I would argue that courage is a Spectrum, with heroic feats at one end and small, daily choices on the other.

You can claim that certain acts of courage are “superior” to others, and they probably are. However, I find value in this idea of every act of courage being a point in a spectrum, getting away from the claws of what Timothy Gallwey calls an “achievement-oriented society.” It’s ok to feel courageous by engaging with small, daily stuff. I would say that it takes a tremendous amount of courage to abandon hedonistic pleasure in your day-to-day to develop a thoughtful use of desire.

To go about doing this, an enormous self-awareness and nuance are needed.

The easiest thing for you to do is to succumb fully to the addictive nature of pleasure. The next alternative, slightly harder, is to completely remove certain things from your life and have a stoic discipline about them. The hardest thing is Harmony. It demands more of you.

Temperance - Piero del Pollaiuolo (a woman mixing water with wine)

Moderation demands self-mastery of body and mind, understanding if the desire is vicious or virtuous, and acting accordingly.

I understand that I’m constantly faced with a set of tradeoffs, each decision opening some doors and closing others. It's up to me to decide which relationship I want to have with pleasure and desire.

Let’s assume that you, like me, want to develop this nuanced view about desire. I would say that, if we’re looking for this change is because we’re either on level one (being consumed by vicious desires) or level two (we are missing the pleasures of life).

Whatever the case, what I’ve come to realize is that the key theme here is change. The question is, then, how can we manage change in a way that’s aligned with the particular relationship with desire that we want?

A hypothesis can be found in the way people manage change in organizations.

This started when I listened to an interview by Tufan Erginbilgic, the current CEO of Rolls Royce. Most of you, I would assume, associate the brand with luxurious cars but most of their revenue comes from the aviation industry, which, in early 2023, wasn’t the hottest industry.

Hiring Tufan was an attempt to have someone experienced in managing cultural changes in a company. All entrepreneurs can learn from his approach. Fortunately, so do we, as people interested in change.

Imagine that each individual, pretty much like all companies, has a specific culture dictating behaviors, beliefs, and values. There’s a certain “natural evolution” that’s just a result of compliance and coherence with the culture. Well, there are moments when we want to contradict this evolution, hoping for a specific behavioral change, much as we would when trying to build a better relationship with desire.

In the case of Rolls Royce, that was exactly what was necessary.

His approach is to filter all changes based on how closely resembles the current culture.

The first type of change, one that’s already aligned with the culture, doesn’t require willpower and it doesn’t offer much resistance. In fact, it’s easy to integrate into the current chain of behaviors.

You wake up every day and take a bottle of water from the fridge before drinking. You add a small box with supplements and place it near the water bottle, reminding you to take them in the morning. This notion is very close to “habit stacking” by James Clear.

Whenever the changes Tufan wants to implement fall into this category, he’ll share them with the team and then let it go. In his words:

If I’m doing something aligned with the culture, I let it go because culture will take care of it.

But about the other scenario? When change is not aligned with the current culture?

This is where he’ll bring consistent performance management, making sure the behaviors alter. You do it for long enough and “the culture itself will change”.

Different systems and metrics related to the particular change he’s looking for are designed and implemented, creating a fast course correction protocol, implementing the change across all involved parts.

We can follow the same principle and start asking ourselves: what system can I design to alter the way I relate with X? What are the metrics that matter to me?

There is a certain aesthetic difference between this “technical” approach and the one described by Roger Scruton. It’s way easier to fantasize about a life where, through pure reason and resolve, we find a way to bring about the change we’re looking for. It’s also easy to get lost in the weeds of tracking, making our life feel more like a spreadsheet than an actual adventure. OKRs are a great tool to deal with this issue, and I’ve talked about them in my summary of “Measure What Matters”, which you can find here.

So, once again, we’re presented with a choice: a philosophical approach to change or a data-obsessed one. And once again, moderation is the skill we want to develop.

A lot of people will lean heavily into the idea that “tracking data is the only solution.” Even though I see enormous benefits for doing so, I will say there’s a certain transformation that’s only possible through a philosophical approach.

Regardless of the method (or combination of methods), it all starts with meditating on the idea that “every vice was once a virtue” and trying to clarify what moderation is for you.

It is, as we’ve established, a hard thing to cultivate.

Overindulgence or complete abstinence are easier paths. Otherwise, you may end up constantly questioning your progress while trying to develop moderation since you don’t yet have the awareness to evaluate a certain vice as virtuous or vicious (hey, there’s a reason why my podcast is called “Limbo”).

Personally, I’m still struggling with developing a worldview that makes me filter desire and pleasure in a way that I feel is always positive. I get it wrong often, failing to see virtuous desires in the middle of vicious ones and vice-versa. But I know it’s part of the journey of self-discovery and calibration, waiting for the harmony between pleasure and discipline.

However, I believe that life is alive in that harmony, which, in itself, makes it worthy of pursuit.

Thus to combine action and art is to combine the flower that wilts and the flower that lasts forever, to blend within one individual the two most contradictory desires in humanity, and the respective dreams of those desires’ realization.

Mishima