How Desire Leads To Suffering

Expectations vs. reality

Goals affect perception

Psychology says it’s natural to have goals, and that our progress towards them is what gives us our positive emotions. Even more, our goals change the way reality is presented to us.

There’s a video they show in psychology class: a bunch of people pass a basketball around fervently and you’re supposed to count how many times the ball bounces. The real game of it, though, is that everyone misses the man in a monkey suit that shuffles through the players, because they were focused on counting bounces, not observing the whole situation.

Our goals affect what we see and focus on. Is “feeling good” really, officially part of your goals? Because if it’s not, you might not see the beautiful parts of reality.

The Possibility of Failure Leads to Failure (Or, Expectation Leads to Disappointment)

Desire is what splits the world into positive and negative, because things either move you forward or are obstacles or are so insignificant as to be forgotten.

Most information is worth forgetting. While you have the goal of reading this article, did you forget how comfortable your chair is, or how beautiful the light is, where you are?

Even worse, if you set your world up as “if only I had X, then I would be happy,” then you have agreed with yourself to feel sad until you get that thing.

Then there’s the chaos of the world. What if you do everything right but circumstance still prevented you from achieving that goal? Would you spiral into defeat and self loathing (be honest), or be able to brush it off like it was nothing in the first place?

Having expectations is the source of disappointment, especially if they don’t reflect reality. That’s what they are by definition — conditions you project on reality that make you sad when they are broken.

Free Yourself From Disappointment

There are two ways to do that. The first is to expect less. In Buddhism, that’s called the practice of renouncing. You could be less disappointed in life by expecting less. Practice…