When I was a child, between I would say 7 to 9 years old, I was really into bionicles. They were those plastic toys made by LEGO that were mechanical humanoid-looking monsters built from standardized parts, a sort of mix between biology (the human body) and mechanical components, which is probably where they got their name from. Bionicles themselves are utterly irrelevant to the story at hand, but the point is that I was quite obsessed with them, to the point of feeling severe FOMO from seeing friends who had a bionicle that I didn't have.
While looking at my own limited collection, I thought about how cool it would be to have all of the bionicles. That phrase seemed to have resonated in my head, because as I kept thinking about it more and more, I realized that if I wanted to have all of them, knowing that the LEGO company would release more of them over time, I would have to keep buying, and buying, and buying all of the bionicles. There would never be an end to my desire. It would be endless.
That realization, that desires are, by themselves, endless, threw me a bit for a loop. It was a similar realization as when you realize that there is no largest number, because you can always add 1 to whatever largest number you can think of. This realization I just had had a similar incremental-shape, a confrontation with infinity, but it felt a lot more personal and thus a lot more important than some abstract idea about numbers.
I can't say that realization in particular shaped my life to come, it's not like I was the Buddha or anything, because as a teenager and a young adult I was terrible with my emotions and breaking out of addictive loops. In many ways my entire life was shaped by the addiction to pornography that came from my teenage years, and my attempt to break from that, so it's not like realizing the endless nature of (unconscious) desires allowed me to transcend the wheel of Samsara or anything, but it was certainly an early sign of my propensity towards existential subjects, and noticing larger patterns about myself.
I still think about that anecdote from time to time, because I do find it useful to short-circuit the habitual loop of desire, and jump straight to the conclusion. "I want X, and then Y, and then Z" and then what? What do you expect from having all of those things? What will they bring you that you don't have right now? And are you ready to pay the cost to pursue those desires?
I don't think there is anything wrong with desires in general, but most of our desires nowadays are not real, they don't come from us, they are generated from without. Either the implanted desires from advertising, or the mimetic 1 desires of looking at what other people have. And in basically every case, they don't lead to lasting satisfaction, or real growth, they are simply desires which are good at gripping our attention and spread from person to person.
1 Mental note for myself to distinguish between the word 'mimetic' used here, and memetic, which I also sometimes use. The latter refers to 'memes', a term coined by Richard Dawkins to describe human patterns that spread between people, a cultural analog to genes, whereas the former is derived from 'mimesis', a term you would find a lot from a thinker like René Girard for instance. In many ways they point to the same thing, because the most prevalent memes are those that take advantage of our strong tendencies to simply imitate what we see, but there are more memetic strategies than simply mimesis.
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Anecdote Maturity Spirituality Desire Consumerism
2026-05-26