Unsatisfiable Desires

Modern civilization has given us abundance. It allows us to easily satisfy many of our desires. When we are hungry, it is easy to get food. When we feel cold, we can turn up the thermostat, or put on a sweater. When we feel hot, we can turn on the air conditioning, or get a cold drink from the refrigerator. Few of us do hard labor for a living. We don’t come home exhausted after a long day’s work in the fields. We don’t have to worry about predators. Interpersonal violence is rare. We have homes that are safe, comfortable and convenient. Most of our basic desires are satisfied.

Yet, we are not happy. Abundance has made it easy to satisfy many of our desires, but we are not satisfied.

If we can easily satisfy a desire, such as hunger, then it fades into the background. We still feel hunger, but it isn’t a major driver of our thoughts and actions, because it is easily satisfied. When we feel hunger, we simply eat and it is gone. We don’t experience the depths of hunger that our ancestors experienced. We also don’t experience the same joy from a full stomach. Hunger has become a minor detail of life. Desires that dominated the lives and minds of our ancestors have faded into the background.

Modern civilization satisfies the desires that are linked to survival. The human body has finite needs. It needs food, water, temperatures within a certain range, the absence of fatal and debilitating diseases, and protection from predation and violence. Given those conditions, most people will live long, healthy lives.

However, the biological purpose of life is to reproduce, not just to live. Survival is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We have desires that are not linked to survival, such as the desires for sex and power. Those desires are open-ended, because reproduction is open-ended. There is no ideal number of offspring, beyond which further reproduction is maladaptive. More power could always be useful to you or your offspring. So, we evolved to have desires that can never be satisfied, desires that will always drive us to act in the world.

The desires for sex and power have no theoretical limits, although there are practical limits. For a man with a healthy sex drive, it might be enough to have a harem of a hundred beautiful women, or to have sex with a different beautiful woman every day. That would bring about sexual exhaustion, and reach the practical limit of the male sex drive. However, even a man with a hundred beautiful concubines might dream of having one more. For power, it might be enough to rule the world. But maybe not. Power can always be strengthened and consolidated.

Also, sex and power are zero-sum games after a certain point. If one man has a harem of a hundred women, then some men must have no women. A man might want to have sex with a beautiful woman, but she might not want to have sex with him, making it impossible to jointly satisfy both of their desires. If some people have high social status, others must have low social status. Desires for sex and power are intrinsically unsatisfiable in the aggregate.

What does everyone in the modern world dream of? Fame. That has become the standard life fantasy since the 1960s. If you are a man, fame means that you can have sex with lots of women. If you are a woman, fame gives you attention and power. Everyone wants to be famous, but by definition only a few can be. Only a few people can realize their dreams. The rest will be stuck in a frustrated state: pursuing their dreams but never attaining them.

In the developed world, we have reached the limit of material progress in satisfying human needs. We have reached a level of production at which everyone’s basic needs for food, comfort and security are met. Beyond that level, most production is just used to compete for sex and power.

Modern civilization produced abundance, but it did not create a utopia of happiness. It replaced the struggle to survive with the struggle for sex and power.