The two kinds of desire, and one of the most important things I know

pull over push

Let me just bastardize some Buddhism for you guys, in the service of telling you one of the most important things I know.

There are two kinds of desire. It’s hard to tease them apart conceptually. But that doesn’t matter too much, because it’s relatively easy to tell them apart experientially. They are tanha, and chanda.

Tanha: Scarcity-based desire. Graspy, clingy. Feels like fighting life. “I don’t want this headache, let me tense my forehead until it goes away.” Perhaps if I get a little more social status, I will finally love myself. Sigh, I don’t really want to do the dishes, but I should, because I want more sex and less arguments. Though I’m full-to-bursting, I’m taking another bite of ice cream. Push motivation.

Chanda: Whole-being desire. The kind of desire you fall into, which requires energy to resist. Your arm is being pulled by the paintbrush. The hours-long conversation that feels like it’s over in five minutes. Getting lost in a book. Slowly teasing apart a really gratifying puzzle. Desire that refreshes you when indulged, rather than leaving you feeling spent and dirty. Pull motivation.

The most interesting finding in human psychology, ever, is that basically all of us are born with the wrong intuition about how to be happy. We think that doing enough tanha, enough grabbing, will please us. But actually, grabbing is the source of something like 90% of our unhappiness. It’s a basically dissociative reaction to reality which creates a sense of temporary dissatisfaction, like putting on tight shoes so that later your feet will feel good again. Skip it altogether, as much as possible, if you want to be at peace. It’s crazy how true, and how unintuitive, this is. (The main reason long-term meditation makes people wildly happy is that it sensitizes you to when you’re doing tanha, thus providing the opportunity to relax most of it, which does beautiful things to the mind.)

We also tend towards poor intuitions about chanda. Perhaps we say to ourselves: “my intuition is telling me that I need to become a CEO to be happy.” But it would be weird if that were the case, because the intuition mechanisms in your mind are much older than job titles. What’s likelier is that there are certain configurations of experience that will make you happy. Like “leading a group of people,” or “slowly turning something over in your mind,” or “transmuting reality into an artistic representation.”

For example, I’ve noticed that I’m persistently delighted by affecting someone directly, in a 1:1 relationship. This can be accomplished by writing someone an email, or doing coaching, or cooking someone a meal. If I get creative about where to find this particular chanda, it is all over the place.

The things that satisfy you most will contain multiple compulsive delights. For example, I loved being a bartender, because it contained the opportunity to affect someone directly, and the opportunity to appreciate aesthetic experience, and useful low-resistance exercise, three personal sources of chanda. This made nearly every shift feel like an engaging dance, rather than a boring slog. To someone unaffected by such delights, it would be a horrible job.

Chanda is not particularly negotiable. As in: what provides it for you changes slowly over a lifetime, and the change is not voluntary. This is weird, because a shocking amount of human psychology is negotiable. You can reprogram disgust reactions that cause you to be racist or regard avocados as poison. People who are scared of heights can become mountaineers. Dissociated nerds can become sexual athlete tango champions. You can forgive people who have wounded you unforgivably. It is incredible how plastic we are.

But the energy patterns that give us compulsive delight? Mostly static, and mostly not in our control.

This implies how you can figure out your chanda, if you don’t know what it is. Look for the repeating patterns of desire in moments when you are truly happy. Look for the arrangements of energy that compel you. Remember, you are looking for general shapes, like “the feeling of sharing confidences,” or “the knowledge that you have served your duty.” Language here only serves as a pointer to the elemental arrangements of experience.

Meanwhile, tanha is much more variable, because the mind can create diverse feelings of scarcity. You might have a grippy desire to be skinnier if hanging around glamorously slender people, and then, later on, a grippy desire to be more muscular if you hang out with a bunch of gym rats. Around wealthy acquaintances, you might acquire a temporary itchiness about your financial status, and then later, traveling in a poor country, a shameful urge to conceal your wealth.

So your true desires will show up repeatedly in different guises, unmistakable signatures signed in different colors. Whereas your insecurity-based wants will likely be more environment-specific.

Obviously the separation isn’t completely clean. Designing a fashion line might involve chanda around the creative act, and then tanha around clingily fixating on whether certain colleagues show up to the runway show. But also obviously, some acts have a more favorable ratio.

This is a way more helpful distinction than extrinsic vs. intrinsic, a division that makes no fucking sense if you think about it for more than two seconds, since most of our feelings occur in the context of relationship.

This is the important thing:

The people I know who are happiest, most productive, and most creative are people who feed off chanda. They have structured their lives such that their work, relationships, and pastimes repeatedly offer true delight, in ways that also have prosocial externalities. This applies to artists, founders, chefs, housewives, all kinds of people. To me, a wonderful example is Tyler Cowen, who has said he lives selfishly, in complete surrender to his interests, but who gives out tons of money to promising young people, produces a huge amount of insightful writing for free, and so on. Structuring your life in this way requires creativity and flexibility about how to get your chanda, rather than attachment to a specific concept of what your job/relationships/hobbies ought to be.

Does all of this mean that we should never do tanha? Probably that is an overreaction. Sometimes there are chores that won’t be accomplished if we insist on enjoying them. And sometimes there are tradeoffs that totally make sense—like pushing yourself really hard to temporarily do a gig that gives you life-changing money or status, thus opening up future options for life engineering. Occasionally, being moral might require doing some gripping, like, say, holding yourself back from having an affair if you’re in an unhappy marriage with resolvable issues. Also, basically nobody writes a good book without some tanha. “Just follow your bliss” is a good corrective principle for strivers, but infantile if taken as sufficient guidance period.

So a rough guideline presents itself: engage in tanha if it helps set you up for more chanda in your future, or it’s a really good way to increase the welfare of others in some situation. Otherwise, think twice. Filling your days with tanha will lead to a tense face, a writhing gut, and a false life.

If you can engineer a life that’s at least benign for other people that’s mostly chanda, you are doing well. And if you can design a life where getting your chanda is also good for others, you are insanely fortunate. Most materially wealthy people live in a prison, compared to the freedom you enjoy. Be completely grateful that you and the world can operate in joyful harmony.

This post was a crystallization of some thoughts that have been percolating for awhile, but the crystallization was directly prompted by this great Tyler Alterman post: “Chanda is desire that arises from a place of non-tension. It often feels like a relaxed current, but can sometime be strong, channeled, like a great benevolent wave surging outward – and yet it is unattached to outcome. Intensify this style of desire while releasing craving & clinging, and genius springs naturally.” Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.