The Economy of Desire: How Society Harvests Our Attention

Every living organism requires energy to stay alive. The same is true for ideas. An idea survives only as long as minds feed it attention. When no one thinks about a concept, it dissolves. When millions desire it, speak of it, chase it, the idea grows into a collective force.

In the modern world, a handful of desires have become the central engines of human activity. Almost everyone is pulled by some combination of the following:

1. The desire to live long

2. The desire to be rich

3. The desire to be happy

4. The desire to be desired

5. The desire to be successful

Success here can mean anything at all — status, achievement, recognition, validation. What matters is not the definition, but the energy people pour into it.

Our education systems, social structures, and cultural narratives channel our minds into these narrow pathways. They direct our thought-energy into sustaining these collective desires, much like batteries powering a machine. It resembles The Matrix, except the system we feed is conceptual rather than mechanical. We keep these ideas alive simply by wanting them.

And because we keep them alive, they keep us busy.

Yet the truth is simple: if we step outside this narrow window of socially manufactured desire, life becomes far less complicated. One does not need much to live with dignity. But a life free from social craving is often dismissed as “boring,” “unambitious,” or “monk-like.” Such labels are merely the defenses of a society threatened by those who withdraw their energy from it.

The Chef and the Nature of Value

A chef in a luxury hotel once told me that after preparing a portion for a guest, the extra food is thrown away. When I asked why he didn’t eat it himself or give it to someone, he simply said he was bored of the food and that the restaurant’s policy forbade staff from consuming leftovers.

The moment he no longer desired the food, its value collapsed.
The same plate that once thrilled him became mere waste.

Value is not in objects.
Value lives in the desire-energy we attach to them.

When desire fades, everything becomes disposable.

The Entropy of Desire

Think of how many things once mattered to us deeply but now barely exist in memory. Childhood dreams, teenage obsessions, early adult ambitions — they were once the center of our universe. Today they are scattered debris, forgotten without ceremony.

This is the entropy of desire: everything we want eventually dissolves once we stop feeding it attention. Only the true learnings — the transformations of understanding — remain.

Self-Realization as Liberation

Self-realization is not an exotic spiritual achievement. It is simply the recognition that society’s desires are not inherently ours. The moment we see this clearly, their grip loosens. Desire loses its coercive power.

People who live in this clarity exist all around us, but they remain invisible because they do not broadcast themselves. Society only notices those who seek attention. Those who seek nothing are practically undetectable.

They are:

• the quiet workers who never aspire to climb,

• the elders who sit peacefully watching life unfold,

• the hobbyists who create without performing for an audience,

• the individuals who once chased ambition and quietly walked out of its shadow.

They are not rare.
They are simply not loud.

Their existence is proof that liberation doesn’t require withdrawal from life — only withdrawal from compulsive desire.

The Glimpse in the Mirror

Every now and then, we get a clear reflection of how deeply society controls our time, our identity, and our emotional energy. It becomes obvious that most of our life is spent fulfilling expectations that are not truly ours.

Real living happens only in those rare moments of pure curiosity — when learning lights up the mind and we feel aligned with ourselves rather than with the world’s demands.

Those moments are flashes of our original consciousness.

When learning becomes the main driving force, life stops being a performance. Stress dissolves because learning does not demand validation. It only requires openness. In that openness, we reconnect with nature, with time, and with the self that existed before society carved its imprint on us.

We do not lose our life.
We finally notice the part of it that was ours all along.