When people desire more than they need to be materially comfortable, something else is driving them. What is it?
There are many possible answers. But they are all related. They are all driven by emotional appetites. As our bodies feel hungry, thirsty, tired, or horny, our emotions activate different appetites. When we feel scared, lonely, bored, or confused, we seek some way to dampen those feelings.
The problem is that most of the ways we self-medicate do not address those feelings for long. They may distract, or delay, but they do not heal.
There are alternative strategies that can be more effective. These include meditation, talk therapy, spiritual contemplation, artistic expression, and richer, more supportive, social interactions.
These require a lot more work. They often rely on the support and guidance of wise experts. Experts usually work for money, unless we have family, friends, or dedicated community members who work out of love.
At the same time, the world is full of frauds. Many people claim to have wisdom to share, but merely want to take our money. There are also semi-frauds, who believe they know truth, but are themselves confused or delusional.
People are generally practical. We solve the problems we can, when we can, with the resources we have. We don't like to waste energy and resources. But what happens when our inadequate solutions don't work? Mostly, we just keep trying them, for lack of alternatives.
Worse, it becomes normalized to cope with our problems in dysfunctional ways. Everybody does the same things, even if those things never work. In fact, they usually have a small effect, for a short time. And those non-solutions—reducing only symptoms—become the only ones we consider. We become habituated to our pathologies.
Pathological self-medication has become a universal problem. It affects people in all demographics. Because there is no simple cure for emotional deprivation.
The worst thing about emotional deprivation is that it self-perpetuates through inheritance. Our emotionally deprived ancestors have passed on their pathology through all the intermediate generations, to us. And we will pass it on to our descendants. Unless it is interrupted. Until it is healed.
It is also reinforced horizontally. When communities of people experience the erosion of some relationships, and the ensuing emotional deprivation, it stresses other relationshops. Good relationships can be fragile. Even strong ones can be damaged by events beyond our control.
Sadly, we don't know how to heal emotional deprivation at scale. Strong social webs are slow to build. They require stable environments. They rely on trust and familiarity.
Even the awareness and understanding of the role of emotional deprivation, and related appetites, is insufficient, and often dismissed. Most people are now dependent on beliefs that material satisfactions, of one form or another, can replace emotional needs. Food, sex, drugs, money, music, games, gambling, alcohol, parties, fashion, fame, violence, power… all distractions, mostly pointless, elevated to hedonic religion.
This problem isn't new. And it has been recognized for a long time. But not widely. And those who do understand it have failed to popularize that understanding, or otherwise inspire real efforts to educate the public, or to invest enough in finding a real solution. The forces that act against them, driven by people in the grips of addiction and mistaken beliefs about how to feed their own emotional appetites, are too powerful.
As long as it is difficult to truly address one's emotional deprivation; as long as it is easy to substitute sensation and fantasy; people will choose those methods; some of them, in the grips of pathology, will continue to achieve great power and influence; and the substitutes will continue to be promoted and sold at scale. Because it is easier. Because we are stuck in a repeating cycle, and can't break out.
It may be that human relationships are simply too fragile. And that long-distance interactions between strangers will always destroy them.
There are very few psychopaths in the world. But most people are ersatz psychopaths, when it comes to strangers in far away and foreign lands. Once we had the power to reach them physically, but lacked any sense of emotional connection, and could not see them as fellow humans, we were free to abuse them. And now all nations abuse one another.
The very first nations were built on this inhumanity between tribes. And some tribes themselves became internally inhumane, in response to material deprivation of one kind or another, or to unavoidable trauma. We still live with the consequences of past disasters endured by our ancestors. Too much suffering, too much grief, requires a pathological psychology to survive.
What we all lack is sufficient real emotional resilience. And it may be an impossible ask. We are simply too fragile. Our seemingly powerful world is built on this fragility, and is equally fragile. Essential cultural institutions, which took decades or centuries to build, can be dismantled and destroyed in moments, when the deprived and depraved are put in power on false pretense.
We don't have the means to prevent this disintegration. We don't know how to recognize and address it, before it ignites a wildfire. Once the fire starts, we have no way to put it out. It must burn out of its own accord.
No one wants to hear this. People will keep trying to stamp out the fire here and there, even while it leaps from tree to tree, and the sparks float in the wind for miles, igniting new fires all around. But we are in it now. The fire is burning out of control. We cannot take control back, until the excess tinder is exhausted.