Craving is not caused by seeking pleasure, but by the ego
Craving causes suffering
We all want to stop suffering.
The reality of suffering is the first of the Four Noble Truth of Buddhism.
The second Noble Truth is that suffering is produced by craving.
The third and fourth Noble Truths are that there is an ending to suffering and the teachings of Buddhism are a path to end suffering. Let’s put those aside to avoid getting entangled in the religious beliefs of Buddhism.
It is obvious that suffering exists. It also makes sense that craving causes a lot of suffering, although perhaps not all of it. We struggle to achieve a lot of things in life and, when we don’t get them, we suffer.
Buddhism goes further by saying that any suffering, like being sick, losing a limb, losing our sanity or losing a loved one, is caused by craving because we are unduly attached to our body, our mind or to our loved ones. It is questionable that living without any attachment is possible or even desirable.
Zen and other schools of Mahayana Buddhism teach that suffering is caused by ignorance, which in turn cause craving. But ignorance of what? What is the wisdom that would free us from craving and suffering?
In any case, avoiding craving would greatly diminish our suffering.
Drug addiction and craving
Thanks to neuroscience research on addiction, we have learned a few things about the neurophysiological mechanism of craving. As it turns out, craving is independent of pleasure. When somebody starts taking an addictive drug, it gets hooked on the pleasurable experience produced by it. As the drug gets consumed over and over again, three things happen:
The pleasure produced by the drug decreases.
Not taking the drug produces a state of dysphoria and physical pain: withdrawal.
There is a craving for the drug distinct from seeking the pleasure produced by the drug.
Eventually, avoiding withdrawal and the intrinsic craving produced by the drugs become the sole motivation for taking it.
Neuroscience has also revealed that addictive drugs like opioids (morphine, heroin, fentanyl, oxycodone), psychostimulants (cocaine, methamphetamine) and tranquilizers (Valium, pentobarbital) produce craving by hijacking the reward pathway, which is a neuronal pathway connecting the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the nucleus accumbens that uses the neurotransmitter dopamine. The VTA and the nucleus accumbens are located in the basal striatum, an area in the middle of the brain.
Are seeking pleasure and drug addiction the same thing?
This is the idea proposed by the book Dopamine Nation, by Anna Lembke. It proclaims that all pleasure is addictive, including some innocuous, or even positive, things like reading romantic novels, cold showers, working and the mental state of flow. Lembke justifies this idea in that pleasure produces dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. She thinks that this leads to addiction the same way that opioid drugs and cocaine produce addiction.
This idea has entered modern pop psychology, leading to fads like NoFap (an anti-masturbation movement), porn detox, and dopamine fasting (avoiding any pleasure to “replenish dopamine stores”).
This is just an attempt to provide a scientific basis for the old philosophical belief that pleasure produces craving. When we feel pleasure, it makes us want to repeat it, so we start craving it. We seek pleasure, we get it, but this only makes us want more.
Let’s examine these claims in detail.
Craving is not caused by seeking pleasure
Let’s start with neuroscience. It’s not true that pleasure releases dopamine in the accumbens. It’s much more complicated than that. In another article, I describe the mechanisms of dopamine release in the reward pathway and explain how addictive drugs produce an anomalous dopamine release that is entirely different from the one produced by normal mental states, including pleasure.
It is called the reward pathway for a reason. What triggers dopamine release is not pleasure, but the anticipation of reward. Rewards do not have to be pleasurable, just something that the brain has been trained to consider a goal. Reward is not the expectation of pleasure, but anything that motivates us.
The things that we really crave
Think about it. What are the rewards that we pursue in life? They rarely are pleasure. Money. Fame. Professional success. Love — which is code for getting a good romantic relationship.
These are the things we crave.
They ultimately may translate into pleasure — good food, good sex, a relaxing vacation. But the truth is that we get so involved in chasing these things that we forgo the more mundane pleasures for their sake.
We eat junk food to get back to work.
We have sex while worrying about our career.
Our vacations are sort and loaded with worry.
We even let love for our partner languish because we don’t dedicate enough time to keep our relationship alive.
Why do we pursue these things?
We rarely enjoy the pleasures of life
We rarely seek pleasure for its own sake.
Truly enjoying pleasure would be an exercise in mindfulness.
When eating, we would pay complete attention to the taste, smell and texture of our food, putting aside judgement and extraneous thoughts.
When we have sex, we would stay fully focused on touching the skin, feeling the shape of the body of our partner, looking in her/his eyes for the pleasure we evoke, enjoying the pleasure arising from our body.
Non-judgmental focusing on sensations is the core of mindfulness. We can practice mindful eating, mindful sex and mindful sports.
Mindful pleasure would not induce craving for two reasons. First, it would satisfy our natural needs, so we would wait until we are hungry, horny, etc., before we seek it again.
Second, like any mindfulness exercise, mindful pleasure takes a lot of energy, so we may get tired and depleted if we do it too often.
What is the ego?
The reason why we crave money, fame and success is explained by something we could call the ego hypothesis. It posits that the ego is a part of the mind that originates as an internalization of the admonitions of our parents and teachers.
Human sociability is controlled by some powerful emotions, like guilt, indignation, pride and shame. Guilt makes us feel bad when we do something morally wrong. Indignation makes us angry when somebody else does something morally wrong. Pride is feeling good when we succeed in a difficult task. Shame is feeling bad when we fail or don’t measure to societal standards.
As children develop, these emotions make them very sensitive to praise, chastising and shaming by their educators. By the time they become teenagers, the goals to succeed instilled in them by their educators have become solidified into their own internal critic — the ego.
The ego craves praise. It fears guilt and shame. It is also critical of other people, judging them through the emotion of indignation when we think that they have done something wrong.
Achieving success and avoiding failure are not the only things that the ego wants. It is also in charge of self-preservation, driving our fears and anxieties. In this, it can be useful. However, it gets in the way when fear paralyzes us and gets in the way of focusing on what we are doing.
I am not saying that the ego is bad. It is necessary for us to behave appropriately in society. People who are impervious to the control of guilt and shame are sociopaths. That’s why saying that somebody is shameless is an insult.
The drive of the ego to succeed is also necessary for us to succeed in our career, in sports, in relationships… in any endeavor that we take in life. It provides the energy for us to work hard and improve ourselves.
The ego is at the core of craving
The ego hypothesis explains how the ego is at the core of the cravings that make us miserable: money, fame, success, love, etc.
Since the ego is based on learned rewards, it engages the dopaminergic reward pathway. This is the true function of the reward pathway, not to make us seek pleasure, but to provide the push on anything that motivates us in life. And our primary motivations, as human beings, are learned socially early in life.
That pat in the back we give ourselves when we accomplish something hard — it involves dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens.
Paradoxically, the shame of failure also involves dopamine release, but this happens in other parts of the reward pathway that are associated with unpleasant feelings.
Modern society encourages oversized egos
Modern society encourages the development of the ego with its emphasis on competition and possession.
For men, their value as human beings is based on success in their profession, making money, sports and having a relationship with a high-value woman (sexy, loving, smart and fun).
For women, their value is traditionally associated with body image (being beautiful and sexy) and getting a relationship with a high-value man (good provider, high social status, handsome, faithful and caring). For some time, this has been changing by giving women the same professional and financial goals as men. For many women, this means getting caught in the double demand of being beautiful and professionally successful.
At the same time, modern society decreases the value of friendship and kin relationships. This takes us away from unconditional love, so our self-esteem becomes solely anchored in our ego.
Ego and pleasure
We seem to pursue pleasure. However, but we do not seek it for its own sake but because our ego sees it as a reward, as something that we are entitled to.
This is what generates the fear of missing out (FOMO). It makes us become envious when other people experience pleasures that we do not. We even get jealous when our loved one experiences sexual pleasure without us.
We want the biggest slice of the pie, not because we want to eat more, but as a sign that we deserve more than others. Because we are better than others. We want to seduce the hottest person in the room, not because we are attracted to her/him, but to signal our social status. We want the best hotel room, the fastest car, cutting ahead to the front of the line.
It’s all ego.
It drives craving because the ego wants more, more, more.
Ego and morality
But even if we forgo pleasure to live a moral life, we are still in the hands of the ego.
Since one of the main things that we internalize during our education is moral rules, the ego plays an important role as the enforcer of morality.
Again, this is necessary. We need to become well-behaved persons that play nicely with others. Failing to do so would turn us into abusers and criminals.
However, just like we need to shed the excessive drive of the ego to succeed to avoid craving and suffering, to be truly free we need to break the excessive hold that morality has on us.
Viewing it from a different angle, the morality that we learned forces us to put our self-esteem in the hands of external judgement by others. This is hard to avoid because we have little control over guilt and shame. These emotions evolved to be controlled by our social environment. It’s hard to avoid feeling bad when faced with social disapproval. Shame is so powerful that leads some people to suicide, especially emotionally vulnerable teenagers. This is why being criticized in social media has such a devastating effect on young people.
This drives us to conform to existing social values, instead of being able to confront them and establish a more rational system of morality.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can train ourselves to shift our moral focus from externally driven societal values to internally created values. We can draw our own moral code and stick to it.
People who espouse values at variance with the dominant moral code had to do that: gays, atheists, free-thinkers, skeptics, non-monogamous people. The importance of the emotions of pride and shame is shown by how they need to focus on pride to build a shield against societal judgement and rejection. It also helps to gather in groups of like-minded people, so that they can rely on their mutual approval.
Religions tell us to avoid pride and hubris by being humble. However, by that they mean is to give up our agency and put ourselves in the hands of priests, gurus and religious beliefs.
What I propose here is the opposite: a self-empowering practice that refuses to conform to traditional morality.
What I am talking about is freeing ourselves by breaking the chains of traditional morality and irrational beliefs.
The problem with unquestioned Virtue
We start to see what a project of inner liberation would look.
To avoid craving that leads to suffering, we need to dethrone the ego from its place of exclusive driver of our motivation. We need to develop a form of soft self-control that based on joy, curiosity, mindfulness and happiness, instead of craving and possessiveness.
But we also need to free ourselves from the shackle of unreflective morality, which is chosen by society and not by us. These moral reins are also in the hands of the ego. We need to change our values from externally determined to internally driven.
The Virtue proposed by Stoicism needs to be examined carefully. It just assumes that things valued by society, like temperance, generosity and courage, are good on principle. This is not what a rationally examined moral code looks like.
The key problem, however, is that placing Virtue at the center of the project of spiritual growth leads us to what I call the trap of the ego. We want to see ourselves as virtuous, to get that pat in back, to see ourselves as great, as better than others.
Which is pure ego.
Therefore, pursuing Virtue creates its own craving. We suffer when we fail to measure up to our standards. We judge ourselves harshly. Our mind gets divided between the controller and the controlled, the rational part that sets lofty goals and the emotional, animal part who drags us down to failure and sin.
Ignorance leads to craving when we operate under the wrong model of the mind. One that thinks that reason is good and that emotions are bad and need to be controlled. Or that sees sexual desire as an animal impulse that deserves utter contempt.
Such a divided mind is at war with itself. It sets itself up for failure. Most of its energy is spent in fighting with itself, so there is nothing else left for true creativity.
Flow is egoless action
Flow is a mental state that is achieved when we face a challenge that engages our skills but requires a complete focus to accomplish. It is characterized by feelings of effortlessness, focus, creativity, energy, timelessness, selflessness and joy.
I explored the neuroscience of flow in this article:
It presents evidence that flow involves the deactivation of the default mode neuronal network — which is engaged while we daydream or don’t do anything in particular — and the activation of the executive attention network — which mediates internally directed attention. A key detail is that the default mode network includes de medial prefrontal cortex, which creates the sense of self. In contrast, the executive attention network turns off the medial prefrontal cortex while activating other parts of the prefrontal cortex in charge of directing attention: the rostral-lateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
In practice, this translates into that we forget ourselves during flow. We become so completely focused on what we are doing that we turn off the ego so it doesn’t get in the way. We forget the goal and focus on the process.
This agrees with the spiritual teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism. In the Bhagavad Gita, the god Krishna instructs king Arjuna about becoming detached from the benefits of his actions. Likewise, the practice of mushotoku in Zen consists of acting without seeking personal benefit from the action.
These may sound like lofty goals, difficult to attain in practice. However, they become feasible when we train ourselves to enter flow.
By training our mind to enter flow more and more often, we can develop a way of being that is independent of the ego. Our life becomes focused on creativity, on the process instead of on the goals. This dampens the influence of the ego and reduces craving.
A practice that avoids craving by decreasing the importance of the ego
How can we use all this to direct a philosophy of life or a spiritual practice?
Here are some of the things that I incorporate into my own practice:
Develop a form of soft self-control based on a deep understanding of my feelings and motivations.
Integrate my unconscious and my emotions to resolve my inner contradictions.
Engage in activities that lead to flow, like writing, rock-climbing and skiing.
Do the best that I can and then let go of the outcome.
Practice mindful pleasure by focusing my attention and avoiding distraction while eating, doing sports or having sex.
Do not see myself as deserving better treatment than other people — do not be entitled.
Pay attention to thoughts and emotions based on self-importance, like envy, jealousy and FOMO.
Take responsibility for my actions and my decisions about my future.
Do not consider myself a victim.
Stop judging my past and who I think I am. Let go of trauma and regrets.
Follow a path with a heart by doing things that satisfy the entirety of my being, not just the things that I think I should do or I am being told to do.
Consider finding the goal of my life as an essential part of the practice, not a closed question.
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