Since graduating college four years ago, I have worked two significant jobs: one is advertising, one in sales. While I enjoyed the latter more than the former, I recognize an emerging theme when reflecting on my experience at work and in life: no matter my role, I struggled to accept that role as part of my identity. I could never commit to my work.
I denied work permission to define me.
There is a tower made of ten books on the floor in my bedroom, beside a plywood bookshelf painted white. Brown rings stain the covers and I’ve creased many of their pages at the corners. When I moved into a new apartment in February, I decided to stack these books together because I read them all for the same reason: for clarity in my career path.
All of the exercises, anecdotes and advice within those pages promised to teach me about myself. Each book delivered on that promise — hindsight shows me — but none of them, on their own, led me to commit to a meaningful career.
I look at this stack, removed from my other books, and it reminds me of all of the hope, frustration and longing embedded in a search for purpose. For so long, I sought meaning in my work.
I realized that meaning is something we create rather than discover.
Nothing I read told me what I should be, or what I should do. I would finish a book and feel dissatisfied, and then I’d try to find a better book. This chain continued for years. Disappointment swelled in proportion to all of the knowledge I acquired.
Socrates compared the search for happiness to a leaking jar. What I wanted was to discover my vocation. What I discovered is an insatiable wanting.
What are we to do with desire?
Contrary to Buddhist teachings, I do not believe that we should eradicate desire. I have tried, and I fear that life without wanting is indolence: static and dead. Objectively, nothing would get better for anybody.
On the flip side, desire drives action. Put it behind the wheel and surely you will leave a legacy. Yet, the story of King Midas reminds us that a world made of gold is void of sustenance. Pure wanting — unchecked desire — manifests as anxiety and eventual self-destruction.
Parasites get a bad rap.
Let us not demonize desire, but accept the feeling of longing and develop a symbiotic relationship with it. To know the organismic hunger that desire incites while remaining mindful of the greed it ushers when we stray from virtue.
My stack of self-help books reminds me of desire, it will topple if it grows too tall.