Desires--Can We Scale Them Down?

We don't need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.  -Donald Horban


Good luck scaling down your wants in our society. Never in human history have so many people been exposed to so much advertising--which is basically other people telling you what you should want, trying to create a sense of dissatisfaction in you through their words and images that doesn't go away until you have the product that they want you to buy. It's rather sad, really, that we're so constantly and consistently exposed to this sort of mental and emotional manipulation, but it's a fact that we need to accept if we're going to be able to cope with it effectively.

Human beings seem to always have wanted lots more than we could really get--or if we could get it all, much more than we could really enjoy and take advantage of. Life can become a different experience if we're able to "scale down our wants," to be satisfied with less and fewer, to not allow the lack of some particular thing in our life to determine how we feel or what we think. There are many, many legitimate wants, of course--I need a computer to do much of the work I do, so I definitely want to have a computer, but the work I do is rather simple, so I don't need a thousand-dollar laptop when a much less expensive one will do just fine.

And even if I wanted an expensive computer, I know from experience that when I do have access to all of the extras that make such a computer expensive, I don't even use them most of the time, so the money spent for them has basically been wasted.

I neither want nor need a new car right now. I don't want a different job. I like reading and I like listening to music, so I do want books and music, but I don't need to have every book ever written--I just want the ones I'd like to read. And even then, I can borrow them without possessing them. 

I believe that what Donald is saying is that we should allow ourselves to be satisfied with what we have. Not to the point that we can't want anything else, but to the point at which we realize that our happiness or satisfaction are not dependent upon getting and possessing more things. Life isn't about "I'd be happier if I just had. . ."; rather, it's about finding that space and feeling of "I'm happy. It might be nice if I had this thing, but I'm fine without it, too."