7. The anatomy of desire

What do we really want when we say we want happiness? In this episode of Becoming Übermensch, we continue our deep dive into Nietzsche’s conception of happiness—not as a passive state of pleasure, but as something dynamic, something earned through overcoming and self-overcoming.

We examine again the hidden structure beneath our desires discovering which expose them as mere proxies for deeper, more fundamental impulses. We explore Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs and uncover its limitations—challenging the idea that fulfilment is a linear ascent to transcendence. Nietzsche had his own vision of what lies at the root of all desire, and in this episode, we begin dissecting it.

We’ll also examine how resistance and struggle determines value, why success so often feels anticlimactic, and the inescapable cycle of wanting, striving, achieving, and adapting. Is true fulfilment possible, or are we doomed to perpetual longing?

Join us as we strip back the layers of human motivation, redefine what happiness really means, and prepare to go even deeper into the anatomy of desire in the episodes to come.

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Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Music choice: Soma Centre by The Ishmael Ensemble

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Transcript

Hello and welcome, one and all.

Today we will be turning again to that important topic, happiness. But first a couple of notices:

Someone on social media suggested the female voice was AI - it’s not AI. It’s Kelly, who you might be hearing more from. Don’t be fooled by her perfect diction.

And then I just wanted to say something about spring, which is showing its first signs right now, at least where I live, which is on the south coast of England

Spring - Dionysus. The buds, the crocuses, the snowdrops, the daffodils

Days are getting a little longer, the skies a little less grey - at least sometimes 

At least for those in the Northern Hemisphere, which seems to be most of our listeners to date

Spring is the season of Dionysus, the god of rebirth, fertility, of vegetation and abundance, though you will find that Dionysus is the god of many, many things - sometimes diametrically opposed things, and that is apt because he’s the god of contradiction and paradox too.

I think we’ve been pretty philosophical in our podcast thus far, empirical even, and Nietzsche’s thought you will discover is naturalistic, actively rejecting the metaphysical and supernatural, so what’s all this talk of Dionysus. It may seem a bit incongruous, right?

Well, one of the most remarkable things about Nietzsche’s philosophy is that is marries a rigorous, sceptical scientific ethic with the realms of art, myth, and deep spirituality. In my experience this is what makes it so utterly unique. A spirituality without any spirits - Nietzsche’s philosophy makes the whole world sacred, but without the fictional trappings of religion. And especially without the moral trappings that cause guilt, shame, and self-denial.

So yes, Spring is a special time of Dionysus. The sap is rising, nests are under construction, and you won’t be surprised to hear that Dionysus is the god of sex too. More on that in a future episode. The spring equinox is next month on the 20th March, and aligning one’s self with the seasons and celebrating seasonal landmarks is an effective way of aligning one’s self with the Dionysian current and living more gratefully, re-enchanting the inert materialistic world that modern science presents us with, living more in tune with Nietzschean affirmative philosophy. If you want an image of Dionysian celebration, imagine people, like nymphs and satyrs, naked, with flowers woven through their hair, dancing and laughing in a secret woodland grove, drinking wine, the liberation sacred to Dionysus.

So I’ll recommend you a practice nearer the time. Perhaps not quite that, but something.

In the meantime, enjoy the days getting a little longer each day - at least if you are in the Northern hemisphere.

In previous episodes, we started our discussion of happiness, that one thing we all want and strive for inescapably. I pointed out that not only is it difficult to achieve, it’s actually pretty tricky to define. I promised to unpack Nietzsche’s definition of happiness and I introduced the idea of overcoming and self-overcoming as key to Nietzsche’s conception of that most intense variety of happiness, joy. So today and in the next show, we are really going to take this apart until we isolate exactly what happiness is as Nietzsche conceives it. In that way, we can start to think about how it is best secured.

If you tried the practice I recommended, interrogated your own list of stated desires by asking why you want each thing over and over again, you will have realised that just about everything you want is a proxy for a deeper, more fundamental desire..

Most, and perhaps all, desires, goals, or aspirations can be broken down into smaller parts, each with their own justifications and we eventually reach a point where the questioning must stop. We talked about the reasons you might want a promotion at work and there were potentially many reasons. Let’s say one might be financial security and safety. 

But what’s so good about security and safety, for example. Safety is something we all value to some extent, but why? On the surface, it seems self-evident: safety helps you avoid harm, danger, or death. But we have to push further. Why do you want to avoid harm? Why do you want to avoid danger? Why do you want to avoid death?

The answers might seem obvious: harm is painful, danger is frightening, and death is final. But keep going: why don’t you want to feel pain? Why don’t you want to feel fear? Why don’t you want to die?

Eventually, you’ll reach a point where the only possible answer is that these things just are bad, you don’t like them; you don’t want them. Why not? Why don’t you want to feel bad? It’s the same as saying, why don’t you want what you don’t want? The question itself becomes nonsensical. It’s not something that is susceptible to rational justification; it’s something you simply experience. Feeling bad is bad, full stop.

On the other hand, when you arrive at a positive motivator—like enjoying the company of loved ones, achieving something meaningful, or savouring a slice of pizza—you’ll notice the same thing. Why does spending time with loved ones matter? You might say it strengthens your bond with them or brings you closer together. Why does achieving something meaningful matter? You might say it gives your life purpose. Why does eating pizza matter? You might say it tastes delicious.

But keep pushing. Why do you want to feel close to your loved ones? Why do you want your life to have purpose? Why do you enjoy the taste of pizza? At some point, you’ll find yourself saying, just because it feels good. And there, again, the reasoning ends. You want what you want because you want it. It’s good because its good.

This is the irreducible, self-justifying good feeling we’re talking about. Once you reach it, you’ve hit rock bottom—or so it seems. Surely, there is no deeper “why” to ask, because the experience itself carries its own answer. Good feelings are good because they are good. They need no further explanation.

This process—digging down to the bedrock of your desires—is where the real insight lies. You may think you want safety, money, or success for their own sake, but when you peel back the layers, you’ll discover that these are proxies. They’re scaffolding, built to serve something far simpler and more primal: the pursuit of good feelings and the avoidance of bad ones.

If this just sounds like navel gazing, believe me, its significance will become clear later, because for Nietzsche there is something that all these good and bad feelings have in common, and they are not the foundation of your desire. We can go deeper. And over the next couple of shows, we will start to go deeper.

But, before we proceed, it will be helpful for us swap out the word “happiness”, which suggests a somewhat inane state of mindless, hedonic stupefaction with something more appropriate. Instead we will mostly use “fulfilment” instead of happiness, as it suggests a more nuanced and complex idea of what it might entail.  

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was a prominent psychologist best remembered for his highly influential hierarchy of needs, a model of human motivation that is so simple and intuitive that it has found its way into many fields beyond psychology, including personal growth, education, industry, marketing, economics, politics, healthcare, cultural studies, and even town planning. Ostensibly, everything humans want and need can be mapped onto Maslow’s model.

The hierarchy first appeared in Maslow’s 1943 paper called ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’ and it is usually depicted as a pyramid with five tiers, though he later expanded this to seven. Do look it up before you continue, if you don’t know it, and I’ll put a link in the show’s description. 

The most basic needs are at the bottom of the pyramid and the most exalted, as seems apt, are at the top. Here, in effigy, is a mountain that must be climbed to achieve total fulfilment, with the needs at each tier normally needing to be met to some degree before proceeding upwards to the next.

The first tier addresses our basic biological and physiological requirements: air, food, water, warmth, rest, and even sex. The second tier is dedicated to safety, encompassing protection from environmental hazards (including other people) and material security—the assurance that one can put food on the table and maintain shelter. At the third level is belongingness and love, which adds emotional security to the practical security of the previous tier. This includes fulfilment through family, friends, connection to the community, and meaningful relationships. The fourth tier concerns esteem—self-respect, respect from others, and recognition of one’s qualities and achievements. This is followed by cognitive needs: the pursuit of knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Next are aesthetic needs: the appreciation of beauty, form, depth, and complexity, whether in art or nature. The penultimate tier, self-actualisation, involves realising one’s full potential and becoming everything one is capable of becoming. Finally, capping the pyramid is transcendence which, as the word implies, involves going beyond yourself. This is often interpreted as the experience of identifying with something larger than oneself, helping others, moral callings to create a better world, or spiritual pursuits which transcend one’s self-interest. 

In Maslow’s opinion, the apogee of human fulfilment resides at the summit of his pyramid: that vague, somewhat mystical abstraction, transcendence. Nietzsche would concur, though he might disagree with Maslow about what fulfilment through transcendence entails.

You might like to review your list of desires and goals and try to place them on Maslow’s hierarchy. You should find that this is a simple matter. 

They say there’s no accounting for taste so, as an example, let’s imagine you covet a gem-encrusted, platinum Rolex. Entranced by this glittering bauble, its acquisition might satisfy your desire for pretty possessions which would mean it corresponds to the aesthetic needs tier. Or perhaps this gaudy status symbol speaks to your esteem needs—an affirmation for yourself and a signal to others that you are some kind of big deal.

How about something more abstract: let’s say you want increased confidence. This could be considered an esteem need, but might also be a form of, and a contributor to, self-actualisation. Indeed, as a good thing in itself and a means of acquiring other good things, confidence can relate to several tiers. It can make it easier to form relationships and can even be instrumental in getting your most basic, bottom-tier material needs met—after all, the confident candidate is more likely to get the job and the girl.

It seems that Maslow’s model is comprehensive; you probably have little trouble placing your desires or goals, although some of them may straddle multiple tiers. The model seems sound: one satisfies the needs at each tier and, presto, fulfilment is achieved—the needs are means to the end that is fulfilment. But I contend that there are real human needs that are not properly represented on Maslow’s hierarchy. 

Maslow acknowledges cognitive needs, but where is curiosity and the drive to explore? Humans don’t simply seek understanding; we crave novelty, the thrill of discovery, wonder—we indulge morbid fascinations. Similarly, where is play? Play must be one of humanity’s most fundamental instincts. Humans just want to have fun! Is fun really encompassed in those dry categories? Even fear—far from being purely negative—is oftentimes a source of excitement and exhilaration. Terrifying fairground rides turn a good profit, adrenaline sports have their legions of devotees, and horror remains one of cinema’s most popular genres.

Maslow also overlooks the human need to occasionally lose control—a drive expressed in drunkenness, drug use, and other forms of release. And what about the need for pure pleasure: the sensual enjoyment of a hot shower, a cold beer, or rich food—when we eat it is rarely just to nourish ourselves. What about dancing, found in every human culture and, as such, something fundamental to the species—where is dancing on Maslow’s model? Where is culture itself?—one of the most distinguishing traits of the human animal. Culture could conceivably be broken down into aesthetic, cognitive, and belonging needs, but this reduction misses something, I suggest. Can the different needs that Maslow identifies even be properly separated? Culture is the foundational reality-building tendency of our species, closely associated with it is that other endemic appetite of humanity, the need for myth. With myth the world is enchanted, with myth existence has meaning, and meaning is something more than a paltry “cognitive need’, it is the guarantor of the significance of life. You imagine we moderns live without myth?—think again. 

There’s also a need increasingly salient in the contemporary world: connection to nature, to the cycles of the seasons, a desire for living in harmony with the environment—that deep feeling of biophilia. The profound need to nurture also seems under-expressed: not just caring for children, but caring for animals, or tending a garden. 

Lastly, but not insignificantly, there are human proclivities we prefer not to acknowledge: greed and the drive for acquisition that exceeds any material necessity; the compulsion to dominate and subjugate others; cruelty, violence, conflict, and the othering of out-groups. These are not anomalies; history demonstrates they are deeply embedded psychological drives. Many political parties cynically lever the natural animus of the masses to further their own purposes. Entire industries cater to our darker impulses, from media entities that thrive by peddling fury, resentment, vengeance, and schadenfreude to our modern colosseums of violent films, video games, and bloody combat sports. Actual physical violence may be a relative rarity in many modern societies but our fascination with it remains unquenchable. 

And then there is war. While war is often motivated by the needs found on Maslow’s hierarchy—safety, security, resources, living space etc.—an eager adversarialism is sometimes apparent alongside such practical considerations. The First World War, in which up to 20 million people perished, was not triggered by disputed territory or famine or any direct imperatives of survival but by ambition, competition, rivalry, and a European ethos of militarism.

I could go on: - ritual, the desire to serve, self-denial and asceticism, masochism and self-destructive behavior, the urge to martyrdom, and suicide. Where are these human realities on Maslow’s model?

Maslow’s hierarchy is not without value. It is a noble effort, but does it really identify the most fundamental human motivations? It fails to recognise that human needs and desires aren’t always as noble or as palatable as we might like to believe and they are frequently in tension with each other. Its linear logic jars with lived experience—how many artists wait until their lower tier needs are met before they pursue aesthetic expression and self-actualisation? How many mystics do so before they seek transcendence? The model is too tidy, too sanitised, too neutered, too humanist (yes, Maslow was a humanist). It is a scheme of human needs that has been corrupted by morality, if you can believe that. Human motivations are less decorous, more paradoxical, and often much darker than Maslow could bring himself to admit. We must look beyond his hierarchy of needs and recognise that humanity craves not just connection, but domination; not just security, but danger; not just order, but chaos; not just rationality, but madness.

Human needs appear multifarious, complicated, sometimes difficult to distinguish and occasionally contradictory, but in Nietzsche’s analysis their source can be traced down to a single primal impetus—something way more basic than Maslow’s taxonomy. What is this fundamental drive—the desire hidden behind every desire? Whether it be a dollar for a soda, revenge on a lover that spurned you, or a college education for your grandchildren, what makes all these things worth wanting? Why does everything you long for promise happiness? Is there one desire that all desire converges on and, if so, how does it relate to that ultimate ideal of transcendence at the apex of Maslow’s model? To answer these questions, we need to carry out a vivisection.                                                                             

Desire. Let’s break it down then. When we desire something, what occurs? It’s possible to discern four distinct phases: 1) wanting, 2) trying to get, 3) getting, and 4) having. You want a job, you try to get one by submitting your résumé to various companies and attending job interviews, if things go well you are successful and you get a job, and then you have the thing you wanted and the wanting is over. At least until you start wanting a better job.

1) Wanting:

Wanting is the incitement for the desiring dynamic: you feel an attraction to something, which is to say you value it as “good.” Not “good” in the moral sense, of course—though it could be, but there are many desires which society forbids and so, not all desires are beyond moral reproach. “Good” here just means something you deem of value and worth pursuing: you want it because it’s good, and it’s good because you want it—or as Nietzsche sometimes puts it, you esteem it. In his notes, Nietzsche writes, QUOTE “‘Alive’: that means already esteeming:—/ In all willing is esteeming—and will is there in the organic.” UNQUOTE So being organic means esteeming, valuing, wanting, desiring, which means willing, being attracted to things, which translates into motivation. Valuing is what puts the animate into the animal. 

Naturally, there are organic lifeforms that are not mobile in the way animals are—plants, fungi, and so on, but they are never entirely static: they spread, or grow, seeking resources or space or reproductive opportunities, they reproduce and metabolise. Stasis is death. To be inanimate it to be dead, right? 

Valuation precedes motivation—we might even say valuation is motivation. For a plant this valuation is not a matter of consciousness; its valuing is designed into its physiology, the way it behaves, if we can use that word.

Animals are simply the most obvious instantiation of the valuation is motivation principle because they run around trying to get the things they want, chasing each other and being chased. So, to be alive, it to be valuing and pursuing that which we value. In TI.v.5, Nietzsche claims QUOTE: “life itself forces us to posit values, life itself values through us, when we posit values.” UNQUOTE. To be alive is to want stuff.

Wanting is an experience of lack, a sense of niggling agitation, anxiety, deficiency, of being unable to rest until a glaring absence is addressed—nature abhors a vacuum. Hunger is a salient example of wanting: a demand which will not be quietened until it is satisfied. However, most of your desires are not like hunger: hunger is overriding and, if ignored, becomes ever more urgent culminating, at the extreme, in death. More typical desires like the acquisition of new possessions, the achievement of personal goals, or sexual attraction towards other people—these don’t necessarily intensify over time, and can wane, and you are unlikely to die if they go unfulfilled. However with all desires, to one degree or another, you are afflicted with that unpleasant feeling of lack. 

Desire comes in negative forms too, where it is not about addressing a lack in order to gain something, but about mitigating a risk in order to avoid loss, harm, or detriment. This is the feeling of actively not wanting something. It is same valuation-is-motivation dynamic, but transposed. For example, you don’t wish to be beaten and mugged, so you avoid strolling around bad neighbourhoods after dark. This desire not to be brutalised can also be expressed affirmatively as wanting to be safe. While fulfilling this desire to be safe may not give you a thrilling sense of achievement, it helps you avoid the pain and distress of failing to fulfil it—and that is valuable to you. So, it’s not just pleasurable rewards that motivate you, but also the possibility of unpleasant consequences.  

The desirability of any good thing—its measure of value and thus its motivating power—doesn’t reside solely in the object itself or its utility to you. It also depends on a range of contextual factors. For instance, desirability is strongly determined by how pressing your need is: so, water is most valuable to you if you are dying of thirst. 

Desirabilty is influenced by the feelings of reward and satisfaction that you anticipate—for example, when running a gruelling marathon you are spurred on by imagining how impressed people will be when you complete the distance or, alternatively, the unpleasant feelings you anticipate if the object of your desire is not secured, for example, imagining the shame and ignominy of dropping out of the marathon without crossing the finish line. 

Most crucially, as Nietzsche observed, the intensity of the pleasure derived from fulfilling a desire is shaped by the resistance that you must overcome to obtain it. This can stem from factors like dire need, scarcity, competition with others for the same thing, or the practical difficulty of securing a thing—basically, the same sorts of “market forces” that affect value in economics. In short, the greater the challenge and the slimmer the chances of success, the more intense your pleasure in achieving the desired outcome. Basically, the harder it is to get something, the greater its value, because the greater your satisfaction is in attaining it. 

The added-value affect of resistance has its limits, of course. Desire also takes into account the possibility of success and failure. If your chances of success are effectively zero, because the resistance is too great, your motivation will be minimal or absent: the average man in the street may desire a supermodel wife, but he knows his chances are almost nonexistent and so his desire remains minimal and hypothetical, hardly stirring him to any action at all that might secure such a spouse. 

Still, in the absence of any realistic chances of success, we all daydream—an understandable preoccupation for an animal whose purposive mind is always fixed on the goal of a better future. Desire, in its essence, may be characterised as the experience of suffering from a lack, but in our imaginations, we can conjure a pale, thin semblance of satisfaction—a girl can dream, right? The rub is that these pleasurable fantasies often exacerbate the pain of not having. Yet just for that reason they can be useful in building our motivation. 

Dreaming big is dangerous. Inflated ambitions carry the risk of equally inflated disappointments. But dreaming big is necessary if we are to achieve anything significant. The desire that is cultivated, nourished, and intensified becomes a growing reservoir of energy—one that can be put to work in pursuit of its object. Whether we ask much of life or little, we all live in an inescapable state of wanting—of lacking. This suffering is what gets us off our arses to do something about the situation, moving us from a state of mere wanting to one of. . . 

2) Trying to get: 

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”—so said the great 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume. If wanting is a matter of torrid passions, trying-to-get is where the whip is cracked, pressing the slave of sober reason into service. This is because getting what you want often involves problem solving. You want money but it’s not the kind of thing one finds lying around. Therefore some thought must be given to the methods of its procurement. 

As your most desirable goals tend to be the ones where you encounter the greatest challenges, it is here that the demands on your reasoning are most significant. And so you have to think about how to get what you want. You reflect on your learning from similar experiences in the past, assess current barriers to success, strategise, hatch your plans, hypothesise about your options for taking action and their potential consequences—including outsmarting any competitors. The effort you put in is proportional to the desirability of the thing—its value to you. 

In our striving towards our goal, we get hedonic feedback: that is to say— positive feelings if we are making progress; negative feelings if we find our goal slipping further and further from our grasp. In the former and happier case, our excitement will build as we close in on our goal. In the latter case, we may end up so discouraged that we eventually quit, resigning ourselves to living without that particular object of our desire. At least for the time being.

3) Getting:

Occasionally your investment of effort bears fruit, and you obtain the good thing you’ve been striving for—oh happy day! Depending on the scale of the success, this moment can ignite in you a cascade of gratifying emotions: contentment, satisfaction, relief, validation, vindication, pleasure, euphoria, joy. It is here, in this precise instance, that all your work, struggle, and sacrifice seems worthwhile. This is the moment when your desire finally undergoes transformation into fulfilment. All resistance is definitively overcome and the painful tension of unsatisfied longing dissolves into gratifying feelings of success. 

This moment is not static: it is dynamic, a transition, a movement from a state of yearning to a state of satiation. It is not just the attainment of the object itself but this emotional metamorphosis that epitomises—that sanctifies—this experience. We might say that this hedonic transition—the shift from the pain of wanting to the pleasure of getting—is the true focal point of the desiring process. It is this powerful emotional reward that drives the entire chain of desire. In this view, whenever we desire something, what we really desire is not the object itself, but the feeling that comes from obtaining it for ourselves—an idea we explored already when we analysed our own desires in the previous two episodes. 

In this view, the object is simply a means to that end—a trigger for the emotional payoff of fulfilment. 

Nietzsche acknowledges what we might call this hedonic self-centredness, if in a different context, when he quotes another writer:  “We love neither father nor mother nor wife nor child, but rather the agreeable feelings that they give us.”  [HH.133]. The insight suggests that it is not the things in the external world that move and motivate us, but our own inner emotional activity evoked by these things. Actually Nietzsche’s view is a little more complicated but let’s go with this for now.

4) Having:

To our chagrin, the agreeable glow of all success fades over time. The satisfaction of achieving our goal or possessing the thing we desired inevitably diminishes. Not that we are necessarily indifferent to what we have gained; far from it. Rather, it no longer kindles in us the delight it once did. This fading can happen slowly and gradually or surprisingly quickly; indeed, sometimes success is an immediate anticlimax, falling short of its promise.

This phenomenon, known as hedonic adaptation, is the process of integrating achievements and acquisitions into our everyday expectations—a process of normalisation. Human beings, it seems, can get used to almost anything: elevated status, deference from others, a better quality of life, and even the most indulgent luxuries. Hedonic adaptation is the return of our level of happiness to its normal baseline. Unfortunately, that baseline is not usually a state of serene contentment. Dissatisfaction seems to be the default psychological state for humans. And so, new desires must inevitably arise and new struggles must begin. 

Hedonic adaption has significant implications for us: if it is the feeling-experience of wanting turning into getting that we truly seek and this feeling-experience can only ever be fleeting, can the pursuit of anything we desire ever fully satisfy us? Or are we destined to repeat this cycle ad infinitum, forever chasing the next pleasurable hit to provide temporary relief from our discontented lives?

We’ll find out in the next show. But let’s turn to this week’s music choice…

Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of art, of the aesthetic, of feeling, and so I recommend a track every week that, in my view, reflects the emotional moods of this Becoming Übermensch project—tracks that have some significance, tracks that have something of the Dionyisan. Remember, sometimes the lyrics are relevant, sometimes not so much, it’s more the feeling that’s important. 

I can invite you to have your own feeling experience, framed within the project we are exploring, while listening to Soma Centre by The Ishmael Ensemble. Links in the show’s description. 

Do share your thoughts on how this track made you feel—I’d be really interested in hearing about your impressions. Also, feel free to speculate on my reasons for choosing the tracks I do with regard to the work we’re doing here. 

I have an experiment you may want to try. But here’s an important reminder…

Importantly: as with any and all experiments or exercises I share with you, it’s crucial that you take full responsibility for your choices and your experiences. I don’t recommend them to you because I don’t know you, so if you decide to try these things, that is a decision you must take full responsibility for.  If you can’t take full responsibility for yourself then I strongly recommend you don’t try them. If you can’t take full responsibility for yourself, then you may not really be ready for Nietzsche’s teachings.

That being said, this is a fairly benign experiment, as these things go, but personal responsibility is utterly essential for Nietzschean personal growth and transcendence.

Over the next week, I invite you to undertake a simple exercise: observe your experiences of success and failure, no matter how minor, and explore the feelings that arise from them. But the rub is, this is not about thinking or analysing—it's about pure feeling.

As you go about your week, notice moments when you succeed or fail in even the smallest ways. This could be anything—finding a parking spot, missing a bus, completing a task, or forgetting an appointment.

Pause when these moments occur and allow yourself to feel the emotions they evoke fully. Don’t label or judge them—simply observe.

Shift your focus gently but firmly away from thinking or rationalising why you feel the way you do. Instead, immerse yourself in the raw texture of your emotions. What does success feel like in your body? What does failure feel like? Is there warmth, tightness, lightness, or heaviness?

The challenge is to avoid using these words or any words. Questions will pop into your mind, like “how do I feel?’ Or ‘do I like this?’ These are exactly the kinds of mental processes you are trying to suppress. 

When your mind begins to explain or interpret these feelings, gently bring your focus back to the sensation itself. 

You may also notice that observing a feeling changes it, maybe even chases it away—notice this too if it occurs.

If you wish, you may journal about these experiences at the end of each day. If you do, notice how words tend to compress, simplify, and even deaden an experience, unless you have some considerable poetic ability. Language, in its efforts to make experiences communicable, necessarily misrepresents our experiences.

This exercise is not about drawing conclusions or achieving a specific outcome. It’s an investigation and a preliminary exercise on the path to something we might be able to call transcendence.

So to summarise, we’ve reminded ourselves that with our personal desires, most are proxies for deeper motivations, ultimately rooted in the pursuit of good feelings and avoidance of bad ones. We’ve seen that Maslow’s model is a useful but incomplete framework for human motivation. It overlooks fundamental drives like curiosity, play, the need for chaos, and even darker impulses like domination and violence. Beyond Maslow, Nietzsche identifies a single fundamental drive behind all desires that explains all of these things. Perhaps you may even be able to guess what that is? 

Also, we’ve broken the dynamic of desire down into a four-phase cycle—wanting, striving, obtaining, and adapting—driven by valuation and motivation. We’ve seen that resistance plays a enormous role in Value: The harder something is to obtain, the more valuable it is perceived to be, which intensifies the pleasure of achievement. And we’ve talked about Hedonic Adaptation & The Problem of Fulfilment: No achievement or acquisition provides lasting satisfaction, as we quickly adapt and revert to new desires, raising the question of whether we are condemned to an endless cycle of pursuit.

Next time we will continue this exploration of fulfilment, asking if humans are dissatisfied by design? We’ll ask the question, what makes good things good? And we will identify what we might call the prime directive in all organic life, the one imperative that we are all compelled to obey.

If you like the podcast please do remember to like, follow, subscribe, comment, review and all that good stuff. That kind of encouragement really does make a difference to the sustainability of this enterprise. If you like it, support it, in whatever we you can. 

So, that said, join me next time for episode 8, Wanting and getting. Until then, live dangerously.