The Desire to Know More
I am reading a book of Buddhist essays entitled Hooked: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume. There is an essay by Ruben L. F. Habito which talked about three different types of desire that we can succumb to:
- The Desire to Have More
- The Desire to Know More
- The Desire for Thrill and Pleasure
And when we talk about the desires, we are talking about indulging in them excessively. Most people have a good understanding of how the first one and the third one works. For myself, the desire to know more is the vice of choice.
The desire to know more is unlike the other desires. You don’t get full from knowing too more – unlike eating more. It doesn’t create physical clutter like stuff does. You can indulge in the desire to know more, under the guise of being productive and strengthening yourself. In fact, with the limitless amount of data available on the internet, you can just go on and on aimlessly or as in-depth as you like; it is like wishing for a meal of your choice and getting it instantly.
For those of you who work in the software field, this is easily a never-ending treadmill of books, classes, and websites. Besides the actual art of software writing, there is also the business aspects like marketing, sales, management, and entrepreneurship. Once you get hooked into keeping up, the limiting factor merely become the number of hours in the day. In the last couple of years, this has turned into a habit of staying up late – just to see if I could squeeze another ounce of tid-bit into my already crammed head.
Anything in excess is not good. In my case, I’m just continuously tired, usually with nothing to show for it.
So what now? I think that I just need to manage this like I would manage physical stuff and clutter: be more aware of what I am taking into my brain and be more deliberate and focus as appropriate and disregard what is unnecessary. One downside of non-physical clutter in your head is that it is very difficult to do housecleaning.
Another thing to do is to blog more. The result of this is that it focuses my informational in-take into a tangible output. This will reduce the aimless never-ending web surfing.
Of course, we should take a moderate approach – we can’t just stop reading and learning and go back to being ignorant. We just have to be more conscious about the goals of learning – it should be directed and I shouldn’t be “stuffing my face”, metaphorically.
Besides, I get enough computer time at work anyways. I need to learn to chillax.
