Re:What if you didn't need money or attention?
by derefr on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @04:27PM
(#7431623)
It's mostly a problem of conflating many different emotions under the one umbrella-term of "happiness." If, by happiness, you mean contentment, then removing desire can give you that. If, by happiness, you mean relief or satisfaction or excitement, then no, removing desire will not give you those.
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Re:What if you didn't need money or attention?
by md224 on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @04:58PM
(#7431809)
> If, by happiness, you mean contentment, then removing desire can give you that.
But would this not require, in some sense, the desire for contentment? I suppose this is just a semantic issue; somehow our usage of "desire" excludes this case (perhaps because it is so fundamental).
Re:What if you didn't need money or attention?
by derefr on Wednesday March 19, 2014 @05:06PM
(#7431852)
"Desire", when you strip away the connotations, generally just means "spikes in your dopamine system that reward you for acting toward a goal your brain associates with a previous large dopamine release."
Contentment, on the other hand, is something more like "the lack of any particular goal currently requiring you to think, plan, or expend energy."
Basically, they're at odds: when you have a desire, you are by definition discontented.