WHEN THE ITCH GOES QUIET

There's a peculiar pleasuredom in desire. I don't mean to sound preachy, I mean in an almost mechanical fashion. Desire is a type of motor. It buzzes with everything we construct and I began to think what might happen if someone decided to reach in and turn it off.

Imagine a world where there was sufficient for everyone. Not just enough, like you say at parties, and occasions, enough, I mean enough enough. Food and shelter and safety and connection of all sort. No one saves because there's nothing to be saved from. There's no need to scheme because nothing is to be gained by scheming. It feels like the end of a long war. It's like a relief.

The not so great question under that picture, though, is: would we have created anything?

Consider the sources of most of our technology. The plow didn't come about because farming was fun... it came about because people were hungry and tired and didn't want to be hungry and tired. Disease wasn't interesting to study; people were afraid to die and they were afraid that their children would die. Even space travel, which was 'pure', was created by an unholy competition between two nations in order to show that they were superior to the other nation. Peel back the layers of just about any advance, and you will discover the person who was afraid, jealous, aspiring, or simply had had enough.

A busted up origin story for progress. We dream of innovation as a great, inspired curiosity: human beings striving to reach for the stars because they have a natural curiosity. I believe that urge is genuine, that there is such a thing as it. I don't believe it's the loudest voice in the room, though. Discomfort is typically the loudest voice. Discomfort is impatient. Curiosity, though may wait a lifetime for satisfaction, Discomfort wants relief by the End of today.

It is said if you eliminate the discomfort, you eliminate the deadline as well, if you were to create a happy utopia. People would still be wondering. A geek would still be working in a garage somewhere just because he enjoys the way gears go together. However, tinkering is slow and doesn't scale the same way as desperation. Desperation attract armies of people over night. The curiosity gathers a number of hobbyists in a couple of decades.

There's practically no time compression like there is with competition. Two people working on the same problem, but each one unwilling to be second, will often solve the problem faster together than either alone, out of competition. It's not a good thing that we have. Not something you'd want to put up on a motivational poster. It works, though, and has for practically all the time that there's been any record.

That got me thinking that it's not suffering that makes growth, it makes growth by friction. We have to be rubbed at the point sufficiently to get us moving. Contentment does not create conflict. It produces stillness. Even in its stillness, peace has never created anything.

Perhaps the true nature of utopia is not that there is no want left in it. Perhaps it's a world which finally understood how to desire something without having to inflict injury. That is the more interesting, more challenging utopia to dream of and perhaps the only one worth striving for.

_{Image Generated with Gemini AI}