21Apr03 | Limiting desires for a quality life

Our unlimited desires are clouding our peace.

Earlier this week I met a friend of mine who’s recently got his visa to go to Germany. He’s pursuing his master’s degree from Munich and we met over breakfast two days prior to him leaving. We talked about desires, meaning & FOMO.

Told me how he’d always been measuring his success with respect to his academic standing. “I wish I knew better but nobody told me what to do. I would've optimized for lots of things I want now”, he says. In a sense, we all wish we knew better, but that’s kind of how life works. And in my point of view, that’s the most unfair thing about it. We got to figure it out on our own.

In retrospect you’re the sum of your lived experiences, but judging by the data about your past, you sometimes think you might as well do better in the present & reduce the fear of missing out on everything you know you want, now that you’ve tasted how your future self will feel. But the thing about this is that your future self will always be more aware, to the point that you can almost never overcome this FOMO feeling you have at the present.

I am starting to think that during our twenties the fear of missing out is always going to be there. I’ve yet to meet a 20-something who’s taking valid decisions without the feeling that he may be missing out on something. I feel the same, my friend feels the same & I’m starting to see some kind of a correlation.

There is a classic study in psychology known as the jam experiment conducted by a researcher at Stanford University. She had the idea that the local grocery store would be an excellent place to understand how people make choices.

She set up sampling tables at a gourmet store:

• A table containing 6 flavors for tasting.
• A table containing 24 flavors for tasting.
• Customers who taste jam from either table get a coupon to buy a jar at a lower cost.

Conclusions:

• The 24-flavor table attracted more attention.
• 3% of those who visited the 24-flavor table bought a jam jar.
• 30% of those who visited the 6-flavor table bought a jam jar.

Most customers got attracted to the more exciting table, yet most became overwhelmed and dropped out of buying jam altogether.

Here’s a snippet from the book “The Defining Decade”, where in accordance with the jam experiment, author Meg Jay writes:

The next week, I told Ian about the jam experiment and wondered aloud about whether he felt too overwhelmed by life’s purported possibilities to pick something.

“I do feel overwhelmed by the idea that I could do anything with my life,” he said.

“Then let’s get concrete. Let’s talk about choosing jam,” I offered.

“Am I at the six-flavor table or the twenty-four-flavor table?” he asked.

“That is an excellent question. I think part of making any decision in your twenties is realizing there is no twenty-four-flavor table. It’s a myth.”

“Why is it a myth?”

“Twenty-somethings hear they are standing in front of a boundless array of choices. Being told you can do anything or go anywhere is like being in the ocean. It’s like standing in front of the twenty-four-flavor table. But I have yet to meet a twenty-something who has twenty-four truly viable options. Each person is choosing from his or her own six-flavor table, at best.

You’ve spent more than two decades shaping who you are. You have experiences, interests, strengths, weaknesses, diplomas, hang-ups, priorities. You didn’t just this moment drop onto the planet or, as you put it, into the ocean. The past twenty-five years are relevant. You’re standing in front of six flavors of jam.”

Now this is interesting because at least we know having unlimited desires is one source of experiencing that FOMO effect.

Having many desires makes you want to optimize for lots of things under so many constraints, first of which is time. The urge to optimize for lots of things at the same time makes FOMO slip easier to you. And you can't take valid decisions when you're experiencing FOMO, your decision-making compass will be impaired.

In this Joe Rogan’s 2-hour podcast from June 2019 with Naval Ravikant, there’s a part where they talk about having unlimited desires and it can not be put more right —here are my favorites:

• Desire is suffering. Every desire you have is an anchor where you will suffer. Have desires, just don’t focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing, and you focus on that, you’ll get it, but everything else you gotta let go.
• It's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace & your happiness.
• Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
• “When I'm unhappy about something, I look for what is the underlying desire that isn’t being fulfilled.”
• It's okay to have desires, you're a biological creature. But don't have too many! Don't pick them up unconsciously, don't pick them up randomly.
• Pick your one overwhelming desire & it's okay to suffer over that one. But for all the others you want to let them go so you can be calm, peaceful & relaxed.

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