WHAT DO WE TRULY DESIRE? An experiential reflection (a non-academic essay on human nature)
We humans possess a peculiar nature. We look out into the world and search for everything that will bring us pleasure, delight, or bliss. If we stumble upon something that catches our searching senses, we seize it and do not let go until we have devoured it entirely. We are devouring creatures. Whatever strikes our fancy, we try to grant ourselves. Nothing suggests this is a glitch in the operating system of this universe. Rather, it seems the entire system is set up this way. And every human being is shaped precisely within this matrix. We walk through life collecting knowledge, experiences, sensations, things, and thoughts, and rarely do we pause to wonder whether this way of life is truly satisfying. Whether it brings us what we truly desire... and whether we even know what we truly desire.
Yet amidst all this chasing after joy, it sometimes happens that we completely forget the truest reality of all: one day, we will no longer be here. Our days are limited. Every moment spent otherwise than as we wish in the depths of our soul is a lost moment. It is gone forever. We often overlook our mortality or suppress it in the hope that something of us will remain even after it. But if we look the truth fully and nakedly in the eyes, we discover that asking what comes after death actually means refusing to face finality itself.
Awakening to one's own mortality is crossing the threshold of wasting time. It is a turnaround from devouring—which has hitherto produced only limited pleasure—toward our own essential being, which calls for its inner, self-generated pleasure, a pleasure so full of fulfillment that it overflows with its beauty and charm into the world around us.
Despite this awakening, we run up against the barrier of the world. In today's world, the older we are, the less autonomous joy and inner beauty we experience. There is no doubt that this is largely driven by the fact that under the weight of the obligations life imposes upon us, we forget what is truly valuable and what can be found only in the deepest closeness to oneself. We forget to pay attention to what genuinely opens up deeper dimensions and expanses within us, and what shows us that we can ultimately turn our human nature to the benefit of the world and ourselves. And when we thus remember, the question naturally arises within us: can we collectively begin to create a world in which, with advancing age, a person not only grows in understanding but deepens and anchors themselves in their own source of joy?
What do we truly desire? Perhaps it is simply that not a single minute of our finite life should go unlived.
Written by a human hand, out of real lived experience, not generated by AI.