Distracted from work, I came across an article about South Asian and the Art of Putthing Things Off. It caught my attention because it felt uncomfortably close to home. I often pospone pleasure, deny myself rest, and push too hard. Pleasure is not a right but a reward.
Work first, joy later.
Have I really practicing discipline, or just avoidance in disguise?
Well, we’ve heard of the marshmallow experiment, the promise that resisting immediate pleasure can lead to greater success and emotional strength. But there’s a difference between waiting for purpose and hiding behind avoidance. When joy becomes conditional, breaks feel guilty and undeserved.
Avoidance, the word hits hard. If delaying joy is the avoidance, then what are we hiding from? Do I want to look competent in front of my boss? Do I want to save my face?
I put my work aside and picked up a book I had been avoiding for month: Schopenhauer, philosphe de l’absurde. Heavy title, yes. But this book gives me a strange kind of pleasure, not because of Schopenhauer himself, but it was a gift from someone I love. Then again, am I reading it for myself, or for him? Does the book actually please me, or am I trying to please someone else? Not sure.
I opened the page 67, and a line pierced me:
Every satisfaction hides a deeper dissatisfaction.
Somehow, it echoed the article I had just read. He believed desire itself is a trap, a lie that keeps us restless. Desire feed on itself, insatiable and never-ending. The moment one craving is satisfied, anotehr takes its place. Worse, he claimed desire is fictive, a kind of play-acting.
He writes:
The precise site of its lie is in presenting itself as desire, while it is in truth neither desire, nor tendency.
In the same sense, even anger and ambition are not real, only imitations. That anger I once felt at work, the frustration made me crumple papers and slam them into the trash, was it real? Or was I just acting anger?
What am I truly after?
This has been a topic for a meditation for a while, I keep looking for an answer. Perhaps, as Schopenhauer says, I only play as if my desire exists, while in truth it doesn’t. And yet, maybe naming the illusion is what people like, as it can show a step toward freedom, from workaholism, from avoidance, and from the endless game of desire.
