![[IMG_1079.jpeg]] The base fact: > Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. ## 3 Answers There are 3 answers to a desire you haven't fulfilled yet: 1. **ACCEPT** - accept the situation as it is 2. **WORK** - work actively to change the situation 3. **LEAVE** - abandon the desire completely ## Be Careful with Leaving LEAVE here means renouncing things - saying I don't care about X anymore. Much harder to do than it sounds. Further - it is inefficient. In today's age of abundance, it's **much easier** to solve most of your problems than renounce them. Monks will try to renounce everything and spend 30 years of their life trying to get used to the new life... mostly unsuccessfully (some never get over it) > *“Every time I meet a prostitute, she wants to talk about God. And every time I meet a priest, he wants to talk about sex.”* - [Osho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneesh) Whatever you deny yourself will become your new prison. Maybe you can temporarily renounce something. But permanently? It can take a LIFETIME to renounce these things. And it can only take a few years to get them. ## The Solution? This is my advice: 1. Choose only one **major desire** you're fine being unhappy with until it's fixed. 2. The rest, **accept as being unfulfilled**, and work a little to get them up to some baseline (not 100% 10/10 fulfilled, but like 6/10 so it's not top of mind) This is how you avoid endless desires too. What you see happen with people is that they train their desire muscle so much and let it grow so unconstrained that the moment they get what they want - 5 new desires have popped up! Be explicit and make the hard decision. You can only realistically fulfill one at a time anyway. The worst case is when you *sort-of* desire something, *suffer* from that desire, but *don't do* anything about it. All the negatives and none of the positives. When you decide to have a desire, recognize that it's the cause of your suffering and unhappiness regarding that topic. Consciously choose - **"This is the thing I've CHOSEN to be unhappy about and go through mental battles until I get it"** Then actually do everything in your power to fix it. Otherwise you're just choosing to suffer for no reason. To leave you with an exercise: - create a list of your desires - answer how many are actually worth the battle? :) - DM me what you think