Buddha Shoulda Woulda

Thoughts on desire as the root of unhappiness

I’ve been thinking about stuff. Possessions. There’s a kind of abstracted, Westernized version of Buddhism—and I believe the concept is in the genuine article, too—that the way to be happy is not to have everything you want, but to not want anything. Desire is the source of unhappiness. Jesus taught something analogous: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” I think about that a lot.

“Desire is the root of unhappiness” may or may not be metaphysically true. But it is probably psychologically true. As a fairly new owner of a house, I’ve been surprised by how I, at times, feel less secure and more anxious than when I lived in an apartment. Some of it is the fact that a house has so many more entry points: that its status in the mind as a fortress is rather belied by the fact that eight or so eminently breakable windows are all that separate you from the outside.

But some of it is simply the realization that I have more to lose. And I wonder if having things to lose actually induces anxiety, suspicion, and paranoia. Whether too much stuff is bad for mental health.

Having things to lose is a kind of burden; a constant background program draining your mental processing power. In many ways I prefer to own worn-out, broken-in stuff that requires no watchfulness. I love my blazing fast, professional-grade $1500 laptop, but I can’t use it or take it anywhere without imagining the cost of a mistake. The cat can step on your beater laptop from college, or it can get stolen, or you can open it wrong and put a permanent impression in the display. Not so with the new, expensive one.

The idea of owning a new car fills me with dread; how can you enjoy driving it when you know that first rage-inducing scratch or dent is embedded in the future, too annoying to let go, too expensive to fix? Or a new jacket waiting for a tiny little pill in the fabric or a stain? Or a new table, a blank canvas for hot pot bottoms and spilled drinks and cat claws?

But then—I wonder if this weight of caring for things is simply adulthood; responsibility. Is it lazy or immature to own stuff that doesn’t require concern and care? Is opting out of the rat race and the consumer economy a failure of patriotism (as George Bush might have put it) or maturity? Is thriftiness actually a kind of greed or Scrooge-like miserliness, a refusal to participate in the rhythms of normal life? Is resisting consumerism and the desire to accumulate stuff a way to pretend you never have to grow up?

I’ve had this argument about spending money at small businesses. I’ve always just kind of absorbed the idea that self-reliance is virtuous. For example, cooking your own meals instead of spending money at a restaurant. I picked up some kind of puritanism that says going out to eat is vaguely in the category of vice. But it’s not as if self-sufficiency in the American suburban context means growing your own food. It just means relying on a slightly different vast network of logistics and infrastructure and subsidies. Maybe relying on other people is good. Maybe this abstracted Western Buddhism is its own radical individualism.

All that said, I can’t imagine that it is virtuous to accumulate stuff. I think of all the stuff I have, which seems, like the Hydra’s heads, almost to multiply as I sort through it. I think of all the stuff in my parents’ basement, and how none of us would notice if half of it disappeared tomorrow. And yet, even knowing that, it stays. Why? That pull, that instinct to hold onto things for no particular reason—that is not responsibility. Perhaps it is even a vice, an echo of original sin. We’re bent into thinking the desire for stuff is analogous to thirst or hunger, something that can be quenched with “enough.”

In the course of writing about urbanism, the public realm, the selfishness embedded in car-centric life, I’ve been called a leftist, and, more rarely but interestingly, a potential Buddhist. There it is again. There is—in a sense—something un-American about opting out, simplifying, foregoing. There’s a reason “you will own nothing and be happy” is perceived as a threat, not as a truth. And yet, it might be. There is something “collectivist” inherent in, say, riding public transit, experiencing this unprofitable, diverse, sometimes a touch messy or chaotic vehicle as the lifeblood of a city, its public living room.