Origin of Desire

One of the main events in my early life which fuelled my curiosity to find what the world was all about and who I was came in my teenage years and the changes in outlook which puberty brought.

Now at the other end of life I find that these changes are reversing. The tide came in and the tide goes out. So where does that leave me as an individual? Are my desires and interests shaped and even controlled by my brain connections and chemical switches which act upon them?

Indeed, why do I think about such questions rather than just taking them as a given and getting on with life? Is this interest also merely a product of my genes and my environment? Or is there more to me than that?

Over the years I have had various interests and things which I have enjoyed doing and getting engrossed in. Some have appeared and then disappeared apparently without any conscious choice on my part. When they disappeared it was sometimes hard to imagine why they fascinated me the way they did.

I spent a lot of time playing with electronic circuits because it gave me pleasure and for no other reason. If something else, such as art or following football had given me that kind of pleasure, I would have engaged in those instead without questioning why. Now, I would construct a circuit if I had a reason to do so but it would feel more like a talk than something I would do for its own sake.

What does that tell me? Is, as some would argue, my “self” just a collection of threads which have come together and could just as easily be unravelled and rearranged? Or can I look at interests and desires as “neti, neti” and look for the essence of who I am as something beyond that?

I am not an electronic engineer, I am not an amateur philosopher, I am a person who is wearing these interests and activities as a person would wear a suit of clothes.

Who I am as a person is unobservable to me. I do not have the vantage. It is not possible to observe oneself. If I think I can then it is not my true self which I am seeing.