The Horror Of Wanting
I’m writing this from 40,000 feet in the air, on my way to California for a networking event.
If I am being honest, I am dreading it (just a little bit). But I’ve been pumping myself up, trying to get excited for all the possibilities a trip like this makes possible.
Why? Why convince yourself to do something you don’t feel like doing?
After reading this blog post, you will have an answer to that question.
You’ll also understand why you have struggled, in the past, to teach yourself new habits, to achieve goals, or to motivate yourself.
You’ll understand how profoundly we have warped our entire lives in the pursuit of our goals…
And maybe, just maybe, you will see (like I do) a light at the end of that tunnel.
And before we see the light, we have to go deeper into the dark.
This week, we continue on from last week’s post (so read that first, if you haven’t).
Let’s review what we’ve covered thus far:
Drives are evolutionarily-selected, genetically hard-wired end goals we have no control over (reproductive success, survival, etc.)
Drives are inextinguishable; they are cycles of the buildup and release of tension. As such, we do not seek the end of the drive, but an object that is predicted to temporarily satisfy it.
Our brain is a predictive machine; it is hard at work building a causal model for how the world works. It does this so it can better predict and pursue the objects of our desire.
As the brain detects adaptive patterns - things which lead to rewards (the objects of our desire) and away from pain - it edits itself to reinforce those patterns, in the short term with the release of dopamine, and over repeated reinforcements, through Hebbian learning.
We are left with a picture of the brain as a machine for constant striving, ever-adapting itself to the world as it understands it. Our environments (and the cause and effect relationships we perceive between what we do and the rewards or suffering we receive) change our minds, and our minds influence how we perceive our environments.
We are goal-directed beings, compelled to acquire the objects of our desire (sexual partners, group status, material possessions, peak experiences, etc.), even though the satisfaction they bring is only temporary.
This is not wrong; it is not broken. Our brains are highly evolved engines of reproduction and survival; they have served us well for millions of years. Our challenge is that our current world - one in which many of our baseline survival needs have been met - is profoundly at odds with that machinery.
Imagine that you only wished to meet your physical and emotional needs, in the same way that your ancient ancestors did. You would require some form of shelter, enough caloric intake to keep your body working, and social interaction (romantic partners, friendship and belonging, etc).
Despite all our issues with poverty, health, and the like, the fact remains that it has never been easier to meet those needs than it is right now. Since 1990, the percentage of people living in extreme poverty (on less than $1.90 per day) fell from 36% of the global population to 9.2% in 2022. Between 1950 and 2021, global life expectancy at birth increased by nearly 23 years, from around 49 years in 1950 to 71.7 years in 2021. From 1950 to 2019, global age-standardized mortality rates decreased by about 62.8%, mostly due to improvements in public health and medical care.
Of course, there are areas torn apart by war and ravaged by poverty; of course, even in a highly advanced economy like the United States, well-being is unevenly distributed. But my guess is that if we had to choose between being poor today vs. being poor 500 years ago, most of us would choose today.
(This does not decrease the extent of the moral horror of extreme poverty in developed nations, but that’s a separate blog post.)
As a result, one would imagine that the amount of labor we perform in order to meet our needs would go down. After all, our needs are easier to meet than before; we have access to a great many labor-saving devices; we have learned a significant amount about making processes efficient.
And yet - it is the opposite.
We work more than our ancestors. For example, the Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa (a pre-agricultural society) typically worked around 15 hours per week, or about 3-5 hours per day. In early agrarian societies, such as ancient Egypt or medieval England, people worked more than hunter-gatherers but still less than modern industrial workers. A farm worker in ancient Israel worked about 8 hours a day, but only for around 296 days a year. Similarly, peasants in medieval England worked about 8 hours a day, but only for roughly 150 days a year.
Meanwhile, workers in the United States average about 36.4 hours per week (or roughly 1,892 hours annually).
You may want to blame this on “capitalism” or “consumerism” or whatever other -ism you dislike, but there is something more profound at work here. After all, those earlier societies are us; they turned into us, chose, on some level, to become us. The arc of history bends towards more and more work, more and more effort.
Why?
Let’s zoom in a bit and start with how I start my morning:
On the bathroom scale.
I’ve been in the same nutrition program for many years.
I stay in it because I find that, left to my own devices, I eat like someone with only a few days to live. This isn’t conducive to my long-term goals, hence the program.
Part of this nutrition program is weighing yourself every single morning. This is important for a few reasons, not the least of which is that you learn that your weight going up or down on a particular day means absolutely nothing for your long-term weight trends. There’s a lot of randomness baked into what we weigh each morning.
The program is very explicit about this practice and what it’s meant to do (teach you about random weight fluctuations) and not do (tell you whether you’re doing a good job or not).
Imagine that you are not in a nutrition program like mine, however. Imagine that you set yourself a goal of losing some weight. You go online, find a calculator, and determine that your “ideal weight” is 150 pounds. You currently weigh 170 pounds, so you set out to lose 20 pounds.
Let’s imagine further that this hypothetical person, over the course of the first month, is going to lose 2 pounds. They’re on track to be at their target weight in 10 months, which is good!
What does that process of losing the first 2 pounds feel like?
On some days, when they step on the scale, the number goes down. When the number goes down, they feel good - they’re making progress towards their goal!
On some days, when they step on the scale, the number goes up. We know that the daily fluctuations of weight are mostly random, but to our imaginary subject, it doesn’t feel that way.
Instead, when the number goes up, they feel bad.
Here is a critical element to understand: people feel losses more intensely than they feel an equivalent gain.
If you find a dollar, you feel some amount of happiness. If you lose that dollar, however, you feel more upset about it than you felt good about finding it. We are loss-averse by nature; the brain remembers these events and seeks to avoid them in the future.
At the end of that first month, our hypothetical subject has had a bunch of ups and a bunch of downs. Overall, they’ve lost 2 pounds and made progress towards their goal. Here’s the rub: it doesn’t feel that way to them.
No - instead, the scale has become a source of pain. Our goal-pursuer is NOT focused on the object of desire they wished to pursue (a certain type of body, a certain way of feeling, whatever it was). Instead, they are focused on the number which represents the object. And because that number (like nearly all numbers) contains random variation, the ups are more painful than the downs feel good. That means that, to the brain, standing on the scale is net negative, even though they are making progress.
What happens next? One of three things:
1.) The person can work to improve their rate of weight loss (difficult);
2.) The person can manipulate the system (easy);
3.) The person can manipulate the data (easy).
What do you think they will choose?
I already know the answer because the hypothetical person in question is me.
Here’s what I did:
“Forget” to step on the scale regularly;
“Fudge” the weight numbers in my report to my coach;
“Fudge” my recordings of what I ate and when I ate it.
In nearly every instance, I manipulated the system or the data rather than trying to improve my actual performance.
Note that doing this isn’t a neutral act. By giving my coach inaccurate data, I made myself less likely to achieve my goal. I was moving backwards!
And it’s not just me. This behavior is so endemic, so common, it has it’s own eponymous law:
Goodhart’s Law.
It goes like this:
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
This is most notoriously seen in the ridiculous steps universities take to improve their U.S. News and World Reportrankings.
Stories of “cooking the books” to nab a higher spot on the list - inflating faculty counts, buying unneeded equipment, artificially capping or otherwise manipulating class sizes, etc - are commonplace. Completely by chance, I came across an article this week in the Times about whether the recent ouster of the University of Florida‘s President (the highest paid university president ever!) happened because they weren’t paying enough attention to the U.S. News rankings. That is just one example among many.
At some point, the U.S. News rankings did do a good job of showing potential students which schools were best. Once universities understood and began to manipulate the criteria, however, the rankings became hopelessly muddied.
Goodhart pops up in my professional life most often in the context of Google search.
At one point, Google’s innovative site ranking algorithm did an incredible job of organizing the internet’s information and giving it to you when you needed it. This led to their position of dominance in the industry.
Once companies realized that being Number One in Google was potentially worth millions of dollars, however, an entire industry - SEO, or “search engine optimization” - sprang up specifically to figure out how to manipulate Google’s algorithm and get sites to rank which otherwise would not.
What has this led to?
For one, a considerably worse search experience for everyone. How many times have you appended “Reddit” to a search query, just to find something written by an actual human? How many millions upon millions of dead-end, for-no-one, absolutely worthless pages of content have been slapped across computer screens worldwide simply as a way of forcing one website or another to the top of the list?
Google feels like a wasteland now, a bunch of robots talking to other robots - part of the reason that people are increasingly turning to AI-enabled search engines (“Can you please just read all this for me so I don’t have to?”)
Goodhart’s Law is everywhere: give us a goal to pursue and we will relentlessly pursue the numbers associated with that goal, not the goal itself. We distort the systems around us to make it appear that we’re making progress, and we’ll do that even when it moves us further away from the things we actually want.
This is profound and I want you to pause here for a moment: we prioritize the numbers that seek to measure the goal outcome over the goal outcome itself.
Why should this be the case?
Two reasons:
The predictive infrastructure of our brains; and
The increasingly complex webs of cause and effect we are buried in.
I’m going to quote a passage here from Goodhart’s Imperius, which helped to crystallize some ideas for me:
“In brief: there were studies with monkeys whose brains were hooked up to detectors and who had straws positioned to squirt juice into their mouths. When those monkeys exhibited desired behaviors, the scientists would give them a shot of juice, and the detectors would register a dopamine spike.
After a while, though, the dopamine spike migrated. It became associated with a “victory!” screen that the scientists would flash whenever the monkey performed a desired behavior, just like a dog begins to associate clicks with treats and other rewards.”
We discussed dopamine spikes last week when we talked about Hebbian Learning. Dopamine acts as a “more like this” hormone, encouraging neurons that fired to fire the same way again. In this way, certain actions or patterns are reinforced.
Take a moment to consider what’s happening in the monkey’s brain. In the beginning, the dopamine spike was focused on the reward, in this case, the juice. The juice tastes good, the monkey feels good, the brain says “more like this.”
But the dopamine spike doesn’t stay there. Instead, it moves to a point earlier in the causal chain. Rather than receiving a dopamine spike when they get the juice, the monkey receives a dopamine spike when it behaves in such a way that often results in getting the juice.
This is the predictive brain at work: figure out what gets us rewarded or what avoids pain, and then do that.
Then, if possible, figure out what results in the behavior that gets us rewarded or avoids pain, and then do that.
And then, if possible, figure out what results in the behavior that results in the behavior that gets rewarded or avoids pain….and on, and on, and on.
Jacques Lacan often referred to the metonymy of desire; the tendency for the object of desire to be easily swapped out with something with which it is associated. In this sense, our desire slides from one object to another, often without us noticing. First we desire the partner; then we find out that the partner likes leather jackets, so we desire the leather jacket; then we realize that leather jackets cost money, so we desire money…until, sooner or later, the objects of our desire are unrecognizable, divorced from where it all began, like Citizen Kane yearning for “Rosebud” on his deathbed.
While Lacan analyzed this problem psychoanalytically, the migration of the dopamine spike gives us a physical mechanism by which this is already-always taking place. This is not optional: it is inherent to the way our minds operate. It happens entirely below the threshold of conscious awareness.
Return to my example - avoiding stepping on the bathroom scale, fudging the numbers in my weekly check-in. Why do this when it moves me further away from my goal of losing weight?
Because, subconsciously, that is no longer my goal.
My goal has become to make the number go down. Controlling my food intake is one of the most difficult and inefficient ways to do this! It is FAR easier to simply edit the spreadsheet at the end of the week and pretend. Not only does this give me the dopamine spike I’m looking for (since my predictive brain has understood that making the number go down is now the goal), it helps me to avoid a potential source of pain (judgement from my coach).
Let me get this straight - I get a dopamine spike AND avoid potential pain, and all I have to do is edit the spreadsheet (manipulate my class rosters/buy equipment I don’t need/cram the night before the test/take drugs/lie about the number of faculty we have)? Sign me up!
And so it goes. And Goodhart rolls in his grave.
(Or he would. He’s alive. But you get the point.)
The thing to remember about all this - the metonymy of desire, our tendency to manipulate the system rather than improve it - is that we’re like this because it worked.
Every single one of our ancestors was reproductively successful. Every single one of our ancestors lived long enough to pass on their genes. We are all the children of predictors, of metonymous desirers. This is our nature because it was adaptive.
“Was” being the operative word.
Our brains evolved over millions of years to engage the natural world in the process of meeting our survival needs - and at this task, they are the absolute peak of evolution. The brain is the most complex and incredible thing the universe has ever produced - the only bit of matter that has named itself. We’ve walked on the moon, for Christ’s sake.
But that’s the thing - a world in which people walk on the moon is not the world for which our brains have evolved. The rhythms of the natural world are no longer the rhythms we depend on.
The expectations and demands of the modern world would shock our ancestors. Imagine walking one of our ancient ancestors into a Costco. The size, the scope, the number of people - it would terrify them.
It would be, for all intents and purposes, an alien abduction, a source of existential horror the likes of which even H.P. Lovecraft could never imagine.
And every day we tell our predictive brains: “OK, go and figure that out for me. Predict which actions will lead to my happiness.”
One of my absolute favorite illustrations of this is in the essay I, Pencil by Leonard Read. It is worth reading in full, but I’ll quote below:
“(As a pencil) millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. ...There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.”
We have desires, and so we set goals. In the process of pursuing those goals, our brains predict what actions will lead to reward. When they find them, they look ahead in the chain of causation to find the behaviors that result in the actions which lead to reward (as with the monkeys and the juice).
But there is no end to the chain of causation.
Ever.
It radiates, fractally, outwards, forever.
It never stops, and so neither can you.
First one thing, then the other.
I want to be thin. I want to be strong.
Is it probiotics? Steady state cardio? Weights?
Oh, never mind - the culture has shifted. Now they want something else.
Better to be unaffected. Cynical.
No - wait - now they (who is they? Do we know? The faceless, nameless mass which determines our fates?) want the manic pixie dream girl type. The alpha male. The Zyn bro. The soft male. Andrew Tate. Socially liberal, economically conservative, into it, over it, the TikTokker performing the same dance as a million others, gesticulating in hopes that the algorithm - itself an infinite black box of statistical potentials and possiblys and maybes - will pick them out of obscurity and reward them with being seen -
Please, someone.
What do I desire?
How do I get it?
Who am I?
In his house at R'lyeh,
dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
An unimaginable, unknowable presence,
Lurking just below the surface of everything,
Sending us anxious dreams.
He didn’t exist,
So we invented him.
Have you read this far? I appreciate it.
To review:
The drive seeks an object to satisfy it, if only temporarily.
Our brain tries to predict the behaviors that result in attaining those objects.
But desire is metonymic - the objects of our desire shift as our predictive brains seek to reward behaviors earlier and earlier in the causal chain.
But because our modern world is so complex, so interconnected and therefore impossible to predict, we never stop - and the behaviors that get reinforced become increasingly disconnected from the end results we want.
This means that when we set goals:
1.) They are rarely for things we actually want;
2.) It becomes easier to manipulate the system than to improve it.
If you have ever sensed a source of deep anxiety lurking just below the surface of modern life, well.
This is why.
This essay has already gone on quite long, so I will end this here.
Next week, we will talk about what we can do about it - because there is something we can do.
A way of both making ourselves and the world a better place and escaping the treadmill of metonymic desire and anxiety.
Until then.
Dan