The objection of your desire

Published on: 2025-07-30

A friend of mine recently sent me a video Why Japanese People Don’t “Want” Things Anymore concerning the unusually low desire in various domains of life seen in some Japanese people. The video speaks to the pressures placed on people through economic decline, which seems to have cut across cultures to strike a chord with viewers. In many ways, these same economic pressures apply to many of us in the developed world, where housing grows ever more unaffordable and our careers are increasingly threatened by AI. It is no surprise that some people have chosen to adapt by rejecting the traditional goals and measures of success and instead choose the satisfaction of a simple life.

Life-work balance - the unifying narrative of Gen Z - is sometimes held up as a virtue. After all, it is often said that the true purpose of life revolves around spending time with our friends and loved ones.Anecdote upon anecdote of those who regretted pursuing more career-oriented, high-performing pathways through life are heaped in front of us as cautionary tales to prove that excessive attachment to the careers, holidays and material goods are the sour grapes that we never wanted in the first place. However, people who espouse the benefits of such an idyllic life are often speaking not from their own hard earned learnings, but rather from regret. Concerningly, their advice comes not from their experiences, but rather their inexperiences.

As children, many people express a desire to become something when they grow up. One child wants to become an astronaut. Another wants to become an explorer. Like Aesop’s fox, reality denies us the opportunity to get what we really want and we have to rationalise some way to move on. The problem with the grapes isn’t that they are sour, but it’s that they are out of reach. By the same token, the malaise of low desire taking hold in society is merely the collective recognition of the futility of striving. The productivity crisis afflicting much of Australia remains hard to shake, despite the seemingly endless rollout of new tools and technologies to streamline and squeeze ever more output from the same human resource. The workers, if anything, are more capable and better trained than the past, yet we see ever decreasing productivity. Rationally, this makes perfect sense. The crisis isn’t in productivity, but rather in the rational allocation of effort in a system where actors receive very little in return for their toil.

What then, should people do to navigate this new era of futility? It seems that the simple life today isn’t a cottage garden surrounded by rolling green hills (nobody can afford that now), but rather consists of a cycle of eat, sleep, doomscroll, repeat. While it can be gratifying to blame the short term thinking of those in charge for the situation, such a criticism may be more productive if turned on ourselves. The perceived futility of striving for one’s goals might be true on a day to day basis, but on a longer timescale we can still make progress. Luck has always been a major factor in how things play out in the short term, but by doing everything that is in our control we can effectively make our own luck. In a world where the only thing that matters is our immediate success, a slow burn approach has the luxury of smoothing out the chaos and noise of the immediate, and latch on to the hidden signal of our long term goals. The objections of our desire are not in the external world, but rather our internal perception of it.

-J