Reach exceeding grasp…

I woke up this morning with a tease of a sensation. Although I’ve fasted before, I forgot about one of the most irritating aspects of a fast – the preliminary desire. Long before your body is actually hungry, it signals you to eat because either it is 1) time for a meal or 2) your sugar levels have randomly shifted. The second reason in fact accounts for a lot of our behavior from overeating to the chaotic people who get angry and emotional when deprived of food. This isn’t real hunger.

I’ll probably be getting up and down from a soapbox throughout this blog, but this brings me to another point: I wonder whether phantom preliminary desire is something we indulge in so much today that we are destroying ourselves with it. Consider your life for a moment. Likely, if you are reading this you are from a somewhat privileged background – at least relative to other humans on Earth and moreover your predecessors.

You have a number of wants and yet it is hard to separate the actual urgency of getting those wants resolved versus the possibility that you are overstating the need. I’ll draw on my life for an example: do I need a $1500 bicycle? I have a bicycle now. The limitations are it is of poor quality to go for any trips over 100 miles in a day. Do I need to get tickets to the ridiculously talent laden Bridge School Concert this Sunday? (Tom Waits, Regina Spektor, Emmylou and Neil Young… that sounds like need, right?) Yet I have been to an obscene amount of music shows this year. What’s the line, beyond my budget. If there is none, when and where do I become a musical-hedon? Am I getting cliche and insipid? Let me get on to my point.

Listen. A wise friend recently argued that most great corporate and personal wealth was the byproduct of passing some economic externalities to others – other peoples living, future generations of people, our ecosystem, or perhaps most interestingly our literal selves in the future. A frequently observed point is that we are lousy at understanding the trade offs between near-term and long-term gratification.

So, this is why it’s important to know what we really want versus what we really need. Importantly, our very system with easily abundant credit is designed to counter this viewpoint: today, if you are flush with easily attainable credit, you are a superhuman who is very able to buy nearly anyone and anything. And yet, you are certainly potentially painting yourself into a corner in the not-too-distant future. I’m suggesting that maybe economic utilities are not things we calculate over sustained periods of time. Rather, if I buy a new M5, I might effectively be subconsciously saying, “Screw you, future Samir!” (Note: I will not now, nor ever purchase a BMW.)

And that’s just me doing that to myself. The sane of us can at least bear the accountability of our own mistakes and live with them. But, here’s where things get hard: what does it mean to live in a society that depends on doing things to people that I don’t want done? And what if my very want or need makes things so? I like abundant power, but not so much that my niece grows up on a planet with a chaotic climate. Not so much that I like the fact that only 40 miles away from where I type (in Northern California’s East Bay), literally and figuratively poor children will face an asthma crisis by living near refineries.

The cop-out answer is usually: I didn’t break it. I don’t have to fix it. I wonder if that is enough for us. I’m not playing arm-chair Marxist here, either. I believe that capitalism is probably the best current way to create incentive for innovation. And yet, it seems essential that we get a better picture on what it means for our needs to be addressed. Of course, the bitter irony of it all is that in order to stave off our own personal “phantom” hungers, we perpetuate a society that ensures “literal” hunger in others.