desire & overwhelm

current mood: there are too many things

Don Quixote once said he was “too confused to feed a cat” - I thought it was funny

I’ve been feeling overwhelmed. 

I want to start training BJJ again, learn photography, pick up a guitar. I’m fascinated by breathwork and trying to maintain my meditation practice (guided? unguided? transcendental? silent retreats?) and I want to do more cold exposure and yoga, maybe hot yoga, and also workout to build strength and go for at least three runs a week.

There’s an ever-expanding list of books/essays/pdfs to read. I want to keep up with the readings in my book club (I was supposed to start The Count of Monte Cristo last month!) plus go back to read Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, because they’re some of the best books ever written apparently, and definitely more of the classics, but also do deep dives on different authors. 

I have approximately seven new books on writing, plus I’ve never read The Artist’s Way which seems pretty life-changing and I’ve had The Creative Act recommended to me a million times. And Rilke told me to read Jens Peter Jacobsen because his books are full of "splendors and depths" whatever that means. Plus, I get great book recommendations from smart friends all the time.

I also want to read more poetry. And keep up with all the excellent Substack essays that pour into my inbox every day. And have you seen how many high-quality interviews/lecture series/documentaries are on YouTube? 

There are so many cool courses I could take, look how good their reviews are, wow. And Write of Passage. How could I not do Write of Passage? Also I kinda quit podcasts but there’s this really good one I found called Philosophize This! that summarizes the ideas of history’s greatest thinkers with like 180 episodes. I know so little about the Western Canon.

And I heard about co-living recently and Sam Altman told me it’s important to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people. Maybe I could organize meetups in Toronto or something. 

Toronto is cool and all but I’ve heard living on the West Coast is nice. Or New York City. People seem to love it there too. Plus there are so many cool hikes I haven’t done yet. Never mind the cities I’ve never seen. 

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Feeling overwhelmed is like coming out of a movie theater on a bright summer day. My eyes wince, failing to adjust to the blast of sensory input. Processing the world feels like too much.

I’ve learned my spells of struggle are synonymous with my spells of overwhelm. Overwhelm comes from a realization of all that I could be doing but I’m not (but I should be!) which leads to a growing fear I’m not living as well as I could.

Overwhelm is the overflow of desire. There are too many things I want to do/see/learn/experience. More than I could possibly do in a lifetime. None of which I’m currently doing. 

And desire is dangerous. It’s the exact opposite of happiness. 

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Why do we want the things we want?

Rene Girard believed desire is mimetic: People don't have logical justifications for their desires. Instead, they look at what others desire and adopt those desires as their own. Almost always without being aware of it.

We all emanate desire. And we all absorb desire from our surroundings.

The places and people we’re surrounded by instruct us on what to value, what to prioritize. They make us believe some things are more sacred than others. It explains why 80% of business undergrads want to go into finance or consulting.

I struggle to disaggregate what I actually want versus what I imitatively want.

When I’m with interesting people doing interesting things, and raving about them, it’s hard to decipher if I’m genuinely interested in doing that thing myself (and they’re just a spark to catalyze that interest) or if I’m just mimetically absorbing that desire (and doomed to fail because I’m chasing someone else’s gifts rather than surrendering to my own).

With wifi, we can absorb desires from anyone and everyone. Social media is a mimetic machine.

And desire is limitless. I don’t get my fill then stop at some sensible level. I absorb the interests, the recommendations, the advice from every interesting, seemingly fulfilled person I meet… and think I should do all of it. 

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Maybe I’m too open-minded, curious. Maybe I should be more ignorant. Maybe I take recommendations too seriously. I’m too spongy, sensitive.

Life would be easier, simpler, if I desired less. If I was more sure of myself. If I was more content with what I had.

I come back to that idea from Satre that freedom is both liberating and debilitating. That humans crumble under the anvil of the near infinite potentialities they could actualize, but never will. 

I feel an immense personal responsibility to live a good life. To use my time well, prioritize the right things. To make something of myself. And if my life isn’t impactful and terrific and adventurous, then it was not lived well.

Sometimes I get sick of all the talk of finding purpose. 

What if being kind and plain and simple was magnificent in itself? What if I devoted less time to myself—my ambitions and wants and to-do list—and devoted more time to others? What if my north star was just to do some good, make a few people feel loved, smile a little more than if I wasn’t around? 

What if I set the bar lower?

Found magic in the mundane, settled into satisfaction, and inhabited the current life I have more fully instead of ceaselessly envisioning something more? (aka. stop thinking all the time and just being)

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There’s a story I heard about when Joseph Campbell was a professor at Sarah Lawrence University. Campbell was beloved by his students but they staggered under the weight of his weekly reading assignments. One day, a young woman spoke up in protest. “I am taking three other courses, you know. All of them assigned reading, you know. How do you expect me to complete all this in a week?” Campbell just laughed and replied, “I'm astonished you tried. You have the rest of your life to do the reading."

I’m so impatient so often. 

Maybe I have the rest of my life to do these things, learn these skills, go on adventures, read these books. 

And maybe at some point along the way, I’ll realize most of it doesn’t matter. 

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Thank you for reading my writing. I hope this piece made your day a little more beautiful.

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Thank you Camilo (

Tangent

) for your time and invaluable help with this piece.

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