Buddhism and the mindfulness meditation counsel giving up desire, but is that really so healthy?

This page is a stub, created on 2024-09-27. Its contents are notes on the issues and angles I want to address about this topic.

I wrote this in response to a friend's Facebook post:

Well, there is a great deal of wisdom to be gained from Buddhism (and I myself have gained a lot through many years of study and practicing mindfulness meditation), I think a lot of the framing around giving up or letting go of desire is unhealthy and unhelpful.

Perhaps there are just errors in translation, revealing some of the biases of the translators, but that seems somewhat unlikely to me.

I think the real trick is to embrace desire, and then cultivate a healthy relationship with it, where you don’t get overly invested in or identified with achievement of particular results in a way that could lead to dysregulation.

But I think wanting things is profoundly good, and any counseling to the contrary involves logical contradictions and absurdities.

I'm reminded of an observation I have about alcoholism:

Without suggesting the particular course any individual ought to take to manage their own life and affairs, when someone who struggles with using alcohol responsibly chooses to abstain entirely, this can be a reflection that they remain in the grips of their alcoholism (or, put less dramatically, that they have still not yet learned how to use it responsibly). Turning away from or avoiding a stimulus is not the same as knowing how to deal with it effectively. (That itself is related to why I always tend to lean into all emotions, including all the unpleasant ones: "The only way past is through.") True mastery of or healing from something like alcoholism is learning how to use it responsibly.

Now look, if someone just doesn't care for alcohol or their unpleasant experiences have made it unappealing, that's a different situation; they are not dealing with temptation in that context, so the alcoholism might have been resolved in a different way.

I hasten to make explicit that abstention may well be an important part or step in overcoming alcoholism, but until one tests one's reaction to using alcohol and seeing whether it remains a negative influence, one likely remains in a sort of limbo, still "being an alcoholic". And then there may be situations where the risks are too great, and the easier path with greatest ROI is to just abstain. While I'm dubious that this is the best course of action, since learning the general skills that cultivate discipline, resilience, and strength pay dividends far beyond one's relationship with alcohol, I certainly wouldn't presume to offer categorical prescriptions for what all people ought to do; people need to figure out their own paths on their own timelines in their own ways.

Bringing it back to desire--

I think there's a striking parallel. So many people have a pathological relationship with desire, where unmet and frustrated expectations lead to all manners of dysregulation and suffering. But it seems simplistic and short-sighted to just get rid of the stimulus (the desire)--the skillful approach, just as what the "anti-desire" philosophies counsel with respect to unpleasant emotions, would be to embrace desire and then learn how to make sure that it manifests in life-affirming ways.