Desire’s Design: Destruction, Disruption, Delight
On ruin, risk, and the art of wanting more than what’s wise – why we chase what breaks us, and sometimes become more whole for it
When we want what will undo us……
Desire doesn’t knock. It kicks the door in, drenched in charm and just plausible enough to pass for intuition. We don’t fall into it – we run, arms open, because some part of us wants to be wrecked just enough to feel real. People talk about self-sabotage like it’s a mistake. It isn’t. It’s choreography. We don’t trip… we rehearse. Again and again, we circle what burns, not because we don’t know better, but because knowing better has never been enough to stop anyone. The most dangerous desires aren’t the wild ones, they are the ones that wear reason like perfume. They smell like purpose, feel like fate, and only reveal their claws when we are already bleeding. And the worst part? Half the time, we prefer it that way. Because safety may preserve us, but it rarely transforms us. Undoing, though – that teaches. At a cost. Always at a cost.
And yet, if desire were simply reckless, we would dismiss it like a teenager’s bad tattoo or a doomed investment in crypto during Mercury retrograde. But desire isn’t stupid. It’s strategic. It selects its moment with the precision of a sniper and the flair of a playwright. Look at Phaedra, not as a tragic cautionary tale, but as a woman who understood paperwork. She pines for Hippolytus, and she crafts the exact accusation that will ensure devastation. Her longing is administrative. It moves through official channels. Sealed, signed, and self-immolating. Ruin, when deployed cleverly, leaves no fingerprints. That’s the real horror: not the forbidden wanting, but the bureaucratic efficiency with which we turn it into catastrophe. And we applaud it… from a distance. We pay to watch plays about it, we click “next episode”, we read every line of the breakup post. Because watching someone else detonate their life in high definition is the closest thing we get to intimacy without consequences.
Neuroscientists, with their earnest bar graphs and lab-coated optimism, want us to believe it’s all about dopamine – novelty, reward, intermittent reinforcement. Fine! But explain this: why does a three-word message from the wrong person feel like a sermon from God, while a dissertation of affection from someone decent barely grazes the skin?! It’s not chemistry. It’s narrative. We do not seek pleasure, we seek plot. Desire that obeys is boring. Desire that evades, withholds, arrives late but devastating? That’s the stuff of myth. That’s what keeps poets employed and therapists overbooked. We don’t want closure, we want cliffhangers. The ones that leave us pacing, rewinding, editing our own dialogue long after the credits roll.
Western philosophy, meanwhile, pretends to know what’s good for us. It praises temperance, worships balance, frames restraint as moral superiority. But the same tradition canonised Augustine, who begged for chastity, but not yet. That parenthetical hesitation is the real gospel. Civilisations may be built on law, but they expand on loopholes. It’s the hesitation, the nearly, the not-quite-résistance that fuels everything from opera to capitalism. Every culture says “be wise” while secretly rewarding the one who breaks formation. And so, we keep dancing at the edge, one foot dangling over the abyss, because we have seen what’s down there and some part of us wants to be legendary, even if it means we are posthumous by the time anyone admits it.
Let me risk a confession I can’t walk back: the most insidious desire I have ever had wasn’t for a person, a substance, or even power – it was for recognition. Not love. Recognition. The ache to be understood, to be seen in such clarity that my flaws might be reframed as eccentricities, my ambition mistaken for integrity. It’s not noble. It’s not even interesting. But it’s persistent. And it’s lethal. I’ve sabotaged sleep, relationships, even moments of genuine happiness for the high of being validated by someone whose taste I barely respect. Why? Because desire has no allegiance to your values. It serves only itself. It can hijack your principles and use them to decorate its getaway car. And the truth is, some of us are more loyal to our hunger than to our health. Myself included.
Meanwhile, the men in hoodies designing our daily descent into overstimulation are just giving us what we keep clicking on. They know that moderation is bad for business. Ambivalence doesn’t convert. The feed must swing between delight and despair or else you will stop scrolling. And so, the architecture of desire gets coded into platforms, and what once required a Greek chorus, and divine intervention can now be triggered by an algorithm with a mood board. That thirst you feel at 2 a.m. is not divine longing, it’s product design. A/B tested. Strategically deployed. Made to make you believe you are chasing something meaningful, when really, you are being led in a loop with just enough breadcrumbs to keep you moving.
Sidebar, unscripted: yesterday, walking to the bakery, I saw a man drop his phone. It cracked, of course. He picked it up and kept staring into it, as though it hadn’t changed. As if the fracture didn’t matter. And I thought – this is us! Holding our broken narratives, pretending they still deliver the same light. We scroll on through the shatter, blind to the fact that we are only half-reflected now, and maybe that’s a relief.
Psychology has always had names for this. Repetition compulsion. Self-destructive tendencies. The echo chamber of unmet needs. But it all boils down to this: we mistake the familiar for the safe, even when the familiar is a mouth full of glass. We revisit old ruins not because we believe they have changed, but because they are ours. Known. Intimate. We have memorised where the floor gives out and still step there, barefoot, hoping this time we’ll levitate.
Plato, forever misquoted by dating apps and midlife crisis blogs, imagined a ladder of love – a noble ascent from the physical to the ideal, as if eros were a stairwell to the divine and not a trapdoor under your bed. But I’m no longer interested in climbing toward sterile perfection. I want to spiral. Not out of control, but into depth. Into him. Into the chaos of real intimacy that leaves fingerprints on your career, your sleep, your sense of moral coherence. Spiralling isn’t failure if it’s conscious – if it’s chosen, not slipped into like a recurring mistake. The spiral, at its best, is repetition, and it’s recurrence with stakes too. I don’t want detachment dressed up as wisdom. I want to ruin my schedule for the man I can’t stop dreaming about. I want our entanglement to rearrange my internal architecture, to bleed into how I write, how I dress, how I breathe in a room that suddenly feels charged because he was once in it. The spiral isn’t always a loop back to dysfunction. Sometimes it’s a whirlpool with a pulse, an erotic gravity that drags you – yes, dangerously – into a more vivid version of your own life. And I don’t want to be saved from that. I want to dive in, eyes open, even if it leaves me rebuilding something I haven’t named yet. Because not all danger is destruction. Some of it is arrival.
And no, ruin doesn’t always teach. Sometimes it just destroys. There are no guaranteed epiphanies. You can fall apart with perfect narrative timing and still learn nothing. The culture romanticises the phoenix but forgets to mention that ash is a permanent state for many. Still, I believe in Persephone’s model, not the victim dragged to hell, but the woman who negotiates her return. Six seeds for six months underground. A seasonal contract. A symbolic leverage. It’s not escape, it’s cohabitation with the dark, on her terms.
Hope, real hope, is not sanitised. It’s a bruised, sceptical thing. It limps. It side-eyes. It reads the terms and conditions before signing. It knows the language of desire and doesn’t pretend not to be tempted. It just insists on a seat at the table. I have found that the most durable form of hope is the one that acknowledges damage not as destiny but as data. What hurt you isn’t always what shaped you, but what you choose to make of it, that’s the architecture of survival.
So where does this leave us? In a culture that sells transcendence but delivers dopamine. Where wellness is monetised, burnout is bragged about, and desire is constantly redirected into purchase orders. You can’t scroll your way out of longing. You can only learn its accent, so when it speaks, you know whether it calls you forward or calls your bluff. We talk about self-awareness as though it’s armour, but it’s only as good as your willingness to use it in real time, not as a retrospective caption.
The big stories shrank. We replaced epics with content. We exchanged myth for branding. But the hunger didn’t go away. It just got domesticated. We still want meaning, but now it is filtered, curated, monetised. We want transformation, but only if it fits the grid. But transformation isn’t aesthetic. It’s violent. It’s unflattering. It’s often lonely. And it doesn’t always go viral.
So, no neat ribbon. No triumphal arc. Just this: desire will undo you. Not always. But often enough. The trick isn’t to avoid the undoing, it’s to learn how to live inside it, to spiral on purpose. Not as self-destruction, but as devotion. I’ve mistaken detours for destinies and blueprints for traps, and I will again. But these days, I’m less interested in controlling the damage and more interested in surrendering to the design. Not slowing the spiral, but knowing when to lean into its speed, when to let the momentum pull me into the version of myself that doesn’t flinch. I no longer want the escape hatch. I want the immersion. I want to spiral with him until the shape of my life changes, until what comes undone isn’t my sanity but my superficiality. The trap isn’t the spiral, it’s pretending we can love without consequence. Give me the consequence. Let me wreck gently and rebuild differently. Let me know I was alive.
And if that fails? I’ll be the one sweeping the broken glass, not because I enjoy it, but because at least I know the cost. And sometimes – on the best days – that’s enough to stop me from offering my whole self to the next beautiful catastrophe.
From the edge, eyes wide open, for the ruin that rearranges, not erases, with tenderness for what unravels, still spiralling, but this time on purpose,
Tamara
This pierced me in places I usually guard with wit or silence. You are always so dangerously honest, not just about desire, but about the intentionality behind our undoing. I love that you underline the allure of catastrophe, but mostly the admission that sometimes we want to be seen breaking, not just seen thriving. I’ve often told myself I’m chasing love, ambition, growth—but more than once, what I really chased was recognition through damage—as if ruin could somehow validate my depth.
What you say about desire wearing reason like perfume—that hit me. Because yes, the most treacherous wants in my life didn’t scream chaos. They offered logic, timing, even moral high ground. And still, I knew. I always knew. We do. The rehearsal metaphor? Brutal in its accuracy. We call it falling, but most of the time, we jump, praying the landing will finally teach us something new.
And this—“We don’t seek pleasure, we seek plot.” God. That’s it. That’s the nuance most miss. We crave narrative more than safety. We want to matter, even if it’s in the middle of a beautiful wreck. I’ve rewritten my pain into poetry just to make it palatable. I’ve made desire noble when it was just hungry. But this essay doesn’t romanticize it. It respects it while exposing it. That is so damn necessary.
Thank you for this, Tamara. For refusing the ribbon. For standing at the edge with your eyes wide open. You made the spiral feel sacred.
Something that's hard to understand and even harder to articulate is that often what is said isn't so much prescriptive as it is reactive. For example, you don't remind children to breathe, because breathing happens; it's involuntary, and so even though "keep breathing" is good advice on its face, it's never stated because there's no behavioral reason for it.
So the more you hear advice on temperance, balance, stoicism, etc, what's left unsaid is that most people most of the time aren't tempered, aren't balanced and aren't stoic, which is why there's appetite for these prescriptions in the first place.
There's clearly something adaptive about being and doing the causal things that regularly trigger the effect of "conventional wisdom", and this piece is wonderful because it's an attempt to explain the dark matter in-between what we say is good for us and should want, and what we actually desire, where one end of the continuum is discovery and growth, and the other is destruction.
What determines where you land on that continuum has a lot to do with random chance. One risky business venture leads to ruin, the other to a billion-dollar empire. The risk could've been the same, but a myriad of variables, mostly unforeseen, changed the outcome. So the lesson isn't to take the risk or not take the risk; it's simply that some will pay off and some won't. Again, not prescriptive, and perhaps why we're adapted to running towards the danger at times, because if we didn't, we would become atrophied and developmentally stunted, and thus in a perpetual state of existential crisis. Sometimes the moth uses the light to successfully navigate, other times to burn itself alive.
Incredible, Tamara. No one gets the gears in my head turning like you do.