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.
That space you describe, the one we guard with wit or silence? I know it intimately. It’s where I keep the truths that don’t photograph well, where pride and ache braid themselves into performance, and where vulnerability pretends to be intellect just long enough to survive the day.
You saw it. You named it. That craving to be witnessed in ruin, not as failure but as depth… as proof that something was burning bright enough to leave wreckage. It’s the secret theatre behind so many “empowered” choices. And yes, sometimes we don’t want salvation, we want applause mid-collapse, someone whispering you were magnificent as we wipe soot from our own delusions.
“I’ve made desire noble when it was just hungry”…. hmmm superbe! That’s the surgery. That’s where honesty stops being literary and starts being useful. Because hunger has its own kind of grace, too. Not every longing needs a moral. Some just need a name and a place to rest.
As for plot… yes. Give me ache with an arc. Give me the wreckage with resonance. Pleasure alone fades, but a well-shaped heartbreak can be re-read for decades. And in that sense, maybe the spiral is sacred. Not because it saves us, but because it insists we feel all the way down.
Thank you for spiraling with me, eyes open, heart unguarded, Céline! There’s no safer danger than being understood like this.
Thank you, truly. Your words always feel like recognition. And yes… if we must spiral, let it be with clarity, with heat, and with someone who names the ache without trying to fix it. Always learning from you.
pain into poetry ... I feel seen. So many "dumb" little poems in a lifetime, trying to erect monuments to some rather mundane (in retrospect) flings and fucks and pinings. Making it noble when it was jst hungry. Spot on, cutting deep. Here we go again.
Those dumb little poems, drafted like treaties for battles no one else knew we were fighting. Scribbled elegies to someone who ghosted us after brunch. Odes to glances mistaken for fate. And yet… weren’t they necessary? Not because the fling was noble, but because the hunger was real. The ache needed architecture.
We dress desire in metaphor not to romanticise it, but to survive it.
So here we go again, pen in hand, stomach in knots, building another shrine to a moment we’ll later call foolish… but write beautifully about anyway. That’s not delusion. That’s magic, Claudia!
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.
As usual, a fabulous unpacking of the paradox we keep circling, that the very things we warn against are also the things that made us. And I love how you frame it not as contradiction, but as a kind of biological recursion. The moth doesn’t miscalculate the flame, it’s obeying an ancient algorithm that just happens to short-circuit in modern lighting. We’re no different. Desire isn’t immoral; it’s misaligned, trained on variables the nervous system evolved to chase long before algorithms were involved.
And yes, advice is so often a backhanded admission of collective failure. We chant “balance” not because we have mastered it, but because we flail. The moral slogans, the wellness commandments, the tech-free Sundays not wisdom so much as damage control. It’s like hanging “breathe” on the wall of a panic room. Necessary? Maybe. Natural? Not anymore.
The appetite for destruction isn’t a bug in the system, it’s THE feature. Because destruction isn’t always ruinous. Sometimes it’s the only solvent strong enough to dissolve inherited scripts. And the ones who dare to run into the fire (be it for love, invention, reinvention) aren’t always reckless. They are just unwilling to stay embalmed in someone else’s version of safety.
You’re right, prescription doesn’t interest me. There’s no universal dosage for desire. What intrigues me is the pattern that keeps pulling us into the grey zone where wisdom and wildness share a cigarette break. That’s where the living happens. That’s where you wrote from, too.
Thank you, Andrew, for reading with that kind of mind, the one that doesn’t settle for the conclusion but keeps turning the gears until smoke rises!
“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”
What a joy to read your writing!
It’s all context and meaning! Here’s to all that comes with spiraling with purpose!! 👏👏👏
Yes, context and meaning, the twin anchors that keep the spiral from becoming just another dizzy loop. Without them, undoing feels like collapse. With them, it becomes transformation in slow motion.
Here’s to spiralling not by accident, but by choice. To letting desire unmake what no longer serves, and remake us in shapes that are truer, stranger, more alive.
And thank you, Shasheen, for reading with such clarity and joy.! That, too, is part of the spiral: finding company inside it.
What initially gripped me the most was the subtle step shifts between the individual’s journey in the spiral and then the meta analysis of the world around us that has collapsed desire into something that can be coded, downloaded, overly defined and ultimately commodified. Were it not for the dual angles of the interior and the exterior — the human desire of the subject and the systems-wide desires to engage the consumer —I don’t think this spiral you invoked would have had the potency to grab me by the ears and rattle my brain, paradigms, and un-investigated lenses.
The recurrence and repetition of my own desire-seeking patterns, which I am forced to reckon with as I move through this essay, they are quite stultifying… they lead me to a kind of diminishment of self. As though I was blissfully unaware of the numbness I was living through until someone spoke revolution in between the syllables of desire.
This isn’t some tantrum at the modern duty to careers, mortgage, community, family or some other stabilizing element of society. This is a view on desire that is about what moves one to live a life that coheres with an energetic human. I’ve felt robotic for a long time, and unaware of it. When I moved to a new city, I was shocked to learn how uncomfortable I was in my old home: I needed a new frame of reference. Similarly, the structure of this essay gave me a new frame of reference with viewing desire as those humans did in the ancient myths.
Perhaps it is telling that the tech bros, neuroscientists and western philosophers who are targeted in this essay, neatly lineup perfectly with the foundational pillars of my own world views — your mileage may vary of course, but for me, these targets were perfectly matched to my mind.
I keep thinking that these influencers of culture have filled the vacuum left in the wake of receding influence with diminishment of religious thinkers and institutions — but that feels like another realm of enquiry. I’ll stay in this spiral a little longer ;) because giving the modern prevailing powers a stern look plus a deep dive into the validity of their influence, feels like an invigorating dip in a waterfall-fed lake on a 40 degree day.
I pride myself on balance and tranquility — no essay will disabuse me of that so quickly… but! I hadn’t considered how reifying that middle way can be itself; on a long enough timescale, seeking balance can be itself, an extreme. And where desire is concerned, balance needs to be a transitional state not a baseline. Because desire operates on the edges of the wavelength — the balance should only be the gravity that pulls the dancing elements of the spiral back around for another transit. If anyone knows the podcast, TV series, or movie that has equally held up a mirror to “balance” in such a way please let me know. Because I would never have questioned it, were it not for a thinking piece of such exquisite insight — as we have here. This isn’t a ploy to question balance and then discard. This is an effort to Question the angle of my balanced posture, and alter it appropriately.
I love this idea of reimagining desire not for external gain, but as a means of becoming a more vivid version of yourself. Because so often the big transitions I have wished for — those New Year’s resolution, those wellbeing redemption arcs that seem to be all the rage — they never felt great, they certainly weren’t sustainable. Maybe I didn’t want it enough? But I think there is a reason they didn’t work for me.
Now with another Museguided reframe, I’m thinking about my real, true, core, and wonder “how can I live a version of myself truer to that?” Somehow, after reading this I am looking differently at me: the one below the cultured facade I’ve lived underneath for so long…. How do I bring him to the fore?
Well the recipe is in here. In these words. Not as a prescription, but as a reminder the internal architecture is actually yours to design. And now it is up to me to grapple with the decisions I make.
So I will appreciate the neuroscientist’s dopamine, but I won’t be fooled to think it trumps narrative and story. I will enjoy the terrific diversity of experiences delivered by the hoody-clad coders of the modern technical world, but I’ll remember they are approximations of experiences, flattened maps of the territory but with a casino-like atmosphere. And to the western philosophers and neo-Taoists I will smile at the idea that striving for balance is noble, but I shouldn’t consider the balanced, zen, middle of the spiral as a destination, it is just a the somewhat forgotten third element.
And in recognizing that a sharper, more vivid version of me is available— when I provisions and prioritize the making of brave decisions (unencumbered by faux certainty sold by a tech/consumer/balanced zeitgeist) I can perhaps unfurl from a pervasive numbness, and be, finally, alive.
Your comment interrogates my essay, expands it, and refracts it through the prismatic architecture of systems thinking, mythic structure, and cultural critique. It turns the spiral into a dialectic: desire not only as inward plunge, but as structural artifact… coded, choreographed, commodified.
What you’ve identified is the entanglement between subjective longing and collective machinery. In Deleuzian terms, desire is never isolated, it is machinic, always plugged into larger systems of production and consumption. What pretends to be private yearning is often already embedded in external apparatuses. The spiral, then, is more than a symbol of psychological repetition; it’s a cybernetic loop: one strand personal, the other infrastructural, endlessly feeding back into each other.
This is why my essay had to move between the interior arc and its digital echo. Our instincts for intensity, risk, narrative — once organic and ungoverned — are now processed through predictive algorithms, emotional UX loops, and engineered overstimulation. The result is not less desire, but a technologically mediated one, flattened into data, yet retaining its power to undo us.
Your critique of balance is incisive. Too often, balance is elevated to the level of virtue without interrogation, reified into a moral endpoint rather than understood as a dynamic, transitional state.
In both Taoist and Stoic traditions, balance is not stasis, it is modulation. The middle path is not a destination but a series of course corrections. In this light, balance that becomes habit loses its vitality and risks becoming anesthetic. Desire, on the other hand, thrives on thresholds, on the edge between safety and danger, structure and rupture. If the spiral is to have momentum, balance cannot be its goal, it must serve as gravitational pause, not as terminal arc.
Then you draw attention to the cultural vacuum left by waning institutional religion, and the way neuroscience, tech design, and secular philosophy now occupy that metaphysical terrain. This is not incidental.
As Girard theorised, desire is mimetic, it is learned by imitation of models. When the saints are gone, we adopt the entrepreneur, the lifestyle icon, the algorithm. Their influence is no less dogmatic; it’s simply veiled as rational or aesthetic rather than spiritual. What was once shaped by confession and liturgy is now governed by terms of service and feed refresh rates.
What’s required, then, is a form of conscious mythography…. a deliberate curation of who and what one allows to model desire. Without this, the machinery of modern life continues to dictate what appears aspirational, even as it hollows out what is meaningful.
Your observation that dopamine is not pleasure, but prediction, aligns with contemporary neuropsychology. What drives us is not satisfaction, but the anticipation of narrative payoff.
Desire is sustained not by fulfillment but by plot tension. This is why transformation rituals (be they mythic, religious, or therapeutic) rely on narrative framing. One must pass through liminality, ordeal, and symbolic death before emergence. Modern culture erodes these arcs, offering closure-free loops designed to perpetuate consumption, not catalyse becoming. It’s terrible and it makes me feel hopeless.
To restore agency, one must re-narrativise desire, give it structure, inflection, symbolic stakes. This reframing turns the spiral from addictive recursion into conscious recursion: mythic return with altered meaning.
As for your concluding inquiry… how to bring forth the vivid self, the one occluded by performative balance and cultivated neutrality is at the core of my essay’s provocation. It asks not merely for transformation, but for re-authorship of one’s desire-pattern.
Desire, in this framing, is neither chaotic nor aesthetic. It is architectural. The vivid self is not found, but constructed through a series of active decisions, what to prioritise, what to relinquish, which models to disavow, and which thresholds to cross. This requires not only introspection, but a refusal to live inside inherited templates of moderation and managed longing.
Your entire comment models the kind of intellectual rigour and openness required to grapple with desire as both phenomenon and system. You’ve masterfully demonstrated what it looks like to spiral consciously: not out of control, but toward clarity, toward complexity, toward design.
The cultural narratives we’ve been handed flatten desire into pathology, performance, or product. But desire (real, sovereign, unruly) remains a tool for reanimation. Not as a search for novelty, but as a return to intensity, meaning, and mythic structure. You’ve made that clear. And in doing so, you’ve offered a map for others to follow…. spiral and all.
Reading this was the most fun I’ve had all day, and I’ve had a really good day.
I also think I came about 7 degrees more alive doing so.
I just discovered you yesterday with your magnificent essay on Love in Not Enough, and now this. Absolutely love your writing style and the content of your creations. Consider me a newly devoted fan.
“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.”
You are singing in a language I recognize.
Devotion and intimacy to life, to reality. This is the whole of my practice when I can remember it. And that includes intimacy and devotion to the wild, ever changing mess and mystery of it, to the parts I don’t like along with the parts that are easy for me to relish. It means embracing disappointment and still saying Yes.
If I may be so bold as to link here a poem of mine that, having read this essay, I think you would understand.
What a wonderful comment, thank you, Olivia! If my words stirred you 7 degrees closer to aliveness, then I’m grinning like someone who just got away with something deliciously unwise.
And yes, you do speak the same language. Devotion as practice, not posture. Intimacy not just with the holy, but with the hard. Saying “yes” to the disappointment, the mess, the unwelcome knock that turns out to be a mirror. That’s the real spiral. Not into collapse, but into consciousness.
I read your poem — “When Change Comes to Knock” — and it absolutely sings in the same key. That quiet, reverent bravery of opening the door without armour. Letting change in not as invader but as guest. You hold mystery with such tenderness, such clarity. It’s beautiful and true.
So yes, welcome, fellow spiraler. I’m honoured to have you reading, and more honoured still to be read by someone who knows what it means to live inside the undoing. Let’s keep wrecking gently and building better!
Thank you, Meredith! The kind of truth that doesn’t flatter, doesn’t polish, doesn’t pretend to be poetic. Just raw hunger dressed in self-awareness, hoping no one notices the trembling underneath.
But I’ve come to believe that the most human thing we can do is confess what doesn’t sound noble. Not to glorify it but to neutralise the shame. Wanting recognition isn’t a flaw. It’s a mirror we keep polishing, hoping one day it will reflect back understanding, not only admiration.
And when someone else reads it and says, “I saw myself there”… that’s the only recognition that really lands. So thank you again for giving me that! It makes the risk worth it.
My comment may end up being more questions than comment, and that likely says more about me than about the essay. It’s just that’s where I keep ending up every time I read it - with questions.
The subtitle and the closing words seem to be the heart of the essay: “…why we chase what breaks us, and sometimes become more whole for it.”
“…with tenderness for what unravels, still spiralling, but this time on purpose,” Both of those I understand, as I do, “Undoing, though - that teaches. At a cost. Always at a cost.” Chasing what breaks us and unravels us, with intention and tenderness - that is a powerful choice to make.
It’s a little later, when Phaedra comes in that my questions arise. I’ll admit, I had to look it up as it’s been years since I read the play. Is it her longing that is administrative, or is it her method? It seems her action comes from her desire and longing for someone she shouldn’t want, and when he rejects her, she uses the paperwork to protect herself at his expense. She spirals, though out of control and ends up destroying both of them. I don’t understand the connection between “the bureaucratic efficiency with which we turn it into catastrophe” and Phaedra being “a woman who understood paperwork.” It’s also possible I’ve totally missed the point, hence the question. To me they seem like separate things.
“…desire has no allegiance to your values…It can hijack your principles and use them to decorate its getaway car.” No argument here, regardless of what the desire is. What I don’t understand is why the next paragraph is suddenly talking about “The feed must swing between delight and despair or else you will stop scrolling.” What does that have to do with the desire for a lover, recognition, or whatever? And I recognize that my huge gap in social media experience (other than this) may be why I don’t understand how they connect.
I loved “I want to spiral. Not out of control, but into depth…Into the chaos of intimacy that leaves fingerprints…” and “Spiralling isn’t failure if it’s conscious - if it’s chosen…” Yes. We make choices all along the way - I’ve also stood on the edge of that abyss and known that one more step and there would be no going back. And I also knew that the risk was the only way I’d have any chance at all, and in that moment I knew I had already taken the step. Everything else that happened after that I knew was because I made the choice.
“…desire will undo you. Not always. But often enough. The trick isn’t to avoid the undoing, it’s to learn to live inside it, to spiral on purpose. Not as self-destruction, but as devotion.” I love this, until the last line. And I am uncertain what the last line means. Devotion to what? To desire? To whatever one’s desire is? Out of control desire can easily spin into self-destruction - I can see that. And devotion is an incredible practice. I just never saw it as the opposite of self-destruction, so I’m kind of curious about that.
The Orpheus picture is incredible - the dog’s attentiveness, staring up into the face of Orpheus, paws on his right knee and thigh, move me. Kind of feel like I’m the dog, trying intently to figure out what I’m missing, while your desire and tenderness spiral through your dance on the edge. Thank you…
What a gift this comment is… thoughtful, honest, and reverent in all the right ways. You’re not missing anything; you’re wrestling with the essay exactly as it was meant to be wrestled with. So let me meet your questions with the same care and clarity you’ve offered mine.
Phaedra and “the bureaucratic efficiency with which we turn it into catastrophe”. Your reading is insightful, and your confusion is completely fair. Let me unpack the metaphor more fully. When I say “her longing is administrative,” I’m not suggesting desire itself is bureaucratic, but rather the way we handle forbidden longing,,how we rationalise it, channel it, or weaponise it. In Phaedra’s case, her desire begins as chaotic and transgressive, yes. But what fascinates me is how she doesn’t collapse in a heap of romantic ruin, she composes a lie, files the accusation, seals the narrative. It’s not a raw act of madness; it’s an intentional use of formal, institutional tools to transform her desire into destruction.
That’s the horror I was pointing at: not just forbidden longing, but how high-functioning and deliberate our most ruinous acts can become. We don’t always self-destruct with fireworks. Sometimes we do it with receipts, with grammar intact.
So Phaedra is the metaphor for when desire doesn’t break us impulsively, it works through us methodically. Her tragedy isn’t just that she felt too much; it’s that she knew exactly how to turn her longing into a weaponised narrative, and she did.
The leap to “the feed must swing between delight and despair…”. This is a tonal and thematic shift, yes, but it’s a deliberate one. Here’s the connective tissue: I was arguing that modern platforms, like desire itself, are designed to exploit our hunger for emotional extremes.
In earlier paragraphs, I looked at how desire hijacks us, repackages our principles, and leads us into beautiful catastrophes. I then shift to show how this impulse is no longer just psychological or romantic, it’s now architected into our digital landscape. Tech doesn’t invent our compulsions; it simply codes them, makes them scalable, profitable, addictive.
Think of it as this: just as Phaedra used formal channels to process forbidden longing into catastrophe, today’s platforms do the same but algorithmically. The chaos of longing is no longer just personal; it’s become product. The scroll is the spiral now, engineered to simulate the highs and crashes of desire. If you are someone who has felt the pull of a toxic relationship, you’ll find the same push-pull dynamic embedded in how digital content seduces and discards your attention. That’s the parallel.
“Devotion — not as self-destruction, but as…” what, exactly? This is the heart of your question, and such an important one.
No, I don’t mean devotion to desire itself. I mean devotion as a mode of being — a spiritual posture, a deliberate presence. To spiral with devotion is to move toward your undoing with awareness, with reverence, with consent. It’s not about martyrdom. It’s about choosing to go deep into experience — love, grief, intimacy, transformation — not because it’s safe, but because it’s true.
Self-destruction, in contrast, is often compulsive, unexamined, reactive. Devotion is what makes it conscious. Devotion is what lets the spiral become sacred, not self-erasing. You can walk straight into the fire, but you do it awake, knowing what might burn and what might survive.
In that sense, devotion becomes the antidote to nihilism. It says: yes, this might hurt, but I’m showing up for it fully. Because I believe in the magic of experience, not just the aesthetic of control.
And finally, your beautiful Orpheus image… The idea of the dog as witness, as quiet companion to myth and music and sorrow — that’s how I often feel while writing. Like I’m circling a figure I can’t entirely decipher, listening intently, hoping something coherent emerges through the hum of feeling.
And you are Orpheus too. Every person who steps into longing with awareness becomes a kind of singer in the underworld. You’ve clearly danced on the edge, and survived it. Which means you already understand the spiral. My words just gave you a shape for what you already knew.
Thank you, Doc, for asking real questions. For reading with your body, your intellect, your memory, and your restraint. It’s not lost on me. You saw through the surface and into the scaffolding, and that kind of reading is rare. I’m honoured to be read like this.
Thank you for both the clarity of your answers and the care and patience you had in answering them. I can see even more how my non-participation in the first years of social media because of lack of access, and then later by choice, at times makes it difficult for me to notice how different the lens is for those who have been engaged with it for the last 20+ years. I suppose we are so used to seeing through our own lenses it’s easy to miss the fact that there isn’t always as much common ground in our views as we might expect.
Thanks especially for the answer on devotion. There is a devotion practice in Zen, which is usually devotion to one’s teacher. I more or less stumbled into it and it became a major part of my practice over the years. It has its own structure or architecture that allows the student to go deep into experience, yes, and it also acts as a safety net to prevent abuse in that most vulnerable state. I was fortunate to have a teacher meticulous in maintaining and working through the architecture of devotion practice with compassion and kindness.
The devotion of which you write is very similar and has some significant differences. That’s something I’ll have to think about a bit. There’s a lot here for me to think about, and I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, Tamara.
This is stunning, and sharp. Especially sharp. And unique. Desire as choreography, not chaos, resonates deeply. It reminds me of addiction theory: not just chemical, but narrative—the stories we replay, the roles we assign ourselves. Like a stage actor who knows the third act ends in ruin but still hits every mark because it feels like destiny.
Your point about strategic self-undoing parallels what in systems theory we’d call a “feedback loop with delayed punishment”, just enough reward upfront to keep repeating the cycle, even as it corrodes. And like tech design, it’s not an accident. It’s UX for the psyche.
Brilliant dissection. Thank you for spiraling out loud—with precision. You teach us to get out of all our comfort zones. Genius.
You caught the blade and the blueprint. Thank you!
“UX for the psyche”, ohhhh yes. We build these loops to survive, and to perform survival in a way that feels familiar, mythic, fated. The actor doesn’t forget the script ends in collapse, they need that collapse to prove the arc was real. Addiction, desire, identity, they are all narrative engines disguised as impulse. And once you see the architecture, it’s almost harder, not easier, to exit. Because now you’re not just caught, you’re complicit.
Your systems theory note hit home. The delay is the trapdoor. We endure decline because the upfront sparkle feels like a divine yes. And even when we know it’s a rented thrill, we return because the body remembers the curtain call, not the wreckage.
Thank you for matching sharpness with sharpness, Alexander! These are the conversations that make the spiral survivable, and above all meaningful.
"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."
These two sentences, leading on from one another in different paragraphs, really tickled me (in different ways - the men in hoodies ha ha!).
In the era long ago, when we had no information about what was bad for us, what was good for us, there was Just Is. We chased whatever we felt called to do, be with whoever provided us with a chemistry of sorts, and did things that stretched us physically, mentally, emotionally. We (I say we, I mean our ancestors) built our modern world through their constant destruction, disruption, teetering on the edges of "what if, what if?" and then just Went With It with reckless abandon. We all possess this, to a certain degree, some more than others, and it's the human in us that tests and desires without any logical reasoning - because reasoning isn't always as logical and linear as it seems according to our soul or temperament.
There is a pounding of thought behind this piece Tamara, I'm sure many who read it, like me, will be trembling with ideas a while after!
Ahhhh this is beautiful, and sharp in all the right places. You traced that ancestral thread from reckless instinct to curated impulse with such grace. Yes, of course, before the food pyramid and productivity hacks and dopamine charts, there was Just Is. We didn’t optimise… we lunged. We danced with risk, not because it was wise, but because it moved us. We let intuition cut through the noise long before neuroscience tried to map it.
And I like how you frame desire not as a flaw but a force, the very one that built, broke, and rebuilt the world. The men in hoodies may be designing distractions, but they’re just digitising an appetite older than language: the want that defies reason, the ache that refuses to be managed. Clever.
You said it perfectly, reasoning isn’t always logical, especially to a soul that speaks in drumbeats, not flowcharts. And perhaps that’s where we are most human,,when we follow the echo, not the algorithm.
Thank you for trembling with it, Joanna! That’s the only real sign that the words lived.
Lorne, what a gift, this reply! Have you spiralled with my essay?
That double helix image is stunning, a perfect metaphor for how desire and risk twist around each other, not in chaos, but in a kind of encoded inevitability. We’re wired for it. Not for safety, but for the possibility that something just beyond reason might change us.
Your daughter’s question cut straight to the centre. Regret is rarely about what we did, it’s generally about what we almost dared. And yes, the bends are real. But so is the breathless beauty of resurfacing changed, with stories that still hum in our bones.
Thank you for dancing at the edge with me, for honouring both the myth and the marrow!
Pushkin’s Tatiana writing her trembling heart into the snowdrift of Onegin’s indifference. Thank you, Leif, what a thing to say! Her letter is already myth, already immortal, but if my words echoed even a fraction of that aching sincerity, if they carried the same blend of dignity and ruin… then I’ll take it as the highest compliment. To speak from the raw, unadorned center like she did… that’s the real art.
Longing for desire of validation, forgetting to be present in the moment where validation is constantly given, but not received....the never-ending train of 'not enough'.
I hear validation most of the time in my personal and professional life and I look in the mirror and it's like they are talking about someone else, not the person I see...whilst telling myself 'I am still not seen, not recognised, not validated....enough'. Enough is the key word - and then I give myself a high-five in the mirror and connect back to the reality. It's difficult to break the habit, but I am shifting my pattern towards better choices
Yes… “not enough” is the ghost in the machine, isn’t it? The whisper that turns applause into white noise and love into an unsolved puzzle. I know that mirror moment well, the dissonance between what others reflect and what we are willing to accept. It’s not that validation is absent, it’s that it arrives wearing someone else’s name tag, never quite syncing with our internal biography.
That hunger for recognition that you named isn’t necessarily narcissistic. It’s often an old wound disguised as ambition. We chase affirmation not because we think we are special, but because we have internalised some early glitch, some moment when our realness was met with silence, or worse, indifference. So we become excellent. Accomplished. Generous. Still unsure.
That train of “not enough” doesn’t slow down on its own. It takes intention to step off and notice the platform, the quiet moments where someone does see us, where the validation is offered, but our receptors are too trained in absence to metabolise presence.
But that high-five in the mirror? I love it. That’s where it starts to shift. Not by waiting for others to shout “enough!” on your behalf, but by choosing, gently and repeatedly, to believe that your own reflection counts as proof. That being seen isn’t always external, it’s also consent to witness yourself without flinching.
Ohhhhh I caught that “divine”, and yes, wordplay always beats a PET scan’s colour map.
You’re right, locating the neural zip code of rapture is a bit like finding the bulb that lights the stage, you still don’t have the script, the actors, or the thunderous applause. The “where” is sophomore-level neuroscience; the “why” drags us into philosophy of mind, evolutionary anthropology, and the stubborn mystery of subjective experience.
Even the dopamine-charting crowd is starting to abandon their flat 2-D atlas. Predictive-coding models talk in four dimensions (time, uncertainty, priors) and admit that a spike in the ventral tegmental area is the beginning of inquiry, not the punch-line. Meaning isn’t a neurotransmitter; it is an emergent property of stories we keep rewriting in the dark. I am more of a poet than a scientist… can’t help it!
What intrigues me is how those stories might have bootstrapped the very circuitry we are discussing. The paleolithic brain that dreamed gods also sharpened cooperation, mended social fabric, and maybe kept a few mammoths from trampling the clan. In other words, spirituality could be a feature, not a cosmic typo, evolutionary Velcro that binds tribes together long enough to invent bread, blues, and, eventually, brain scanners.
So yes, we’re more than machines (I’d like to think), but we do come with wiring diagrams, and the fact that wonder lights up a cortical grotto doesn’t cheapen it. It only proves the hardware was foresighted enough to house the infinite.
Thank you for reading, sparring, and punning in equal measure, Jeremy! Every good argument gives my essay another synapse.
This is fun, piggy-backing a ride on your deep dives into what we are. I’m big on religious experience having worked with sacred medicines since the late 60s. Ongoing. So I have touched the divine and been touched by the divine. Real as real can be, and leading me late in life to Christianity. Will write on this when I get off my writing butt.
Eliot said - old men should be explorers. I think we all should be so as we age. As the destination sign on Kesey and the Prankster’s bus read
“Further”
And as our neighbour Fred says, on the mend bless him - got to keep moving!
Yes… Further. That’s the only destination worth tattooing on the soul.
Your sacred medicine path sounds like it’s carried you through fire and into the garden. Touching the divine isn’t just ecstasy, it’s rewiring. And I like that it’s led you toward Christianity, not as dogma, but as revelation. That late-in-life turn toward mystery is refinement.
I’ll be waiting for your writing. Don’t let your “writing butt” stay seated too long. The world needs dispatches from those who’ve truly gone Further.
Correct. And I like to medicate when gardening; my aim when we moved here 13 years ago was to have a garden in which I could do this (my Garden of Eden) and now it is so. Bliss. I garden barefoot, and love the feel of earth and grass beneath my feet. Pace the occasional rose thorn ...
I'm always pleasantly in awe of your ability to capture the fleeting with unflinching authenticity and you did it again. I saw myself testing out that same floor just to see if - again - it would give in or maybe not. My foot disobeying all rationality and leaving my self worth defeated and bemused while she waited for me to come back. But - along with recognising myself in the less than flattering mistakes - I am also taking with me some preciou the gifts. The gift of awareness (the sirens beckoning me to recognition) and the desire for conscious spiralling, discovering depths together as - come to think of it - I am already doing right now with you as my muse. With gratitude.
And this… this is the kind of reflection that completes the spiral. Not by closing it, but by deepening it. The way you name both the disobedient foot and the bemused self-worth watching from the sidelines, that’s the kind of honesty earns clarity.
Yes, we test the same floor. Yes, it caves. Yes, we curse the splinters and swear we’ll never try that plank again… until we do. But the difference, the thing that matters, is what you’ve already named: awareness. The sirens still sing, but now we recognise the melody. And instead of stuffing wax in our ears or lashing ourselves to a mast, we choose to listen awake.
That’s the beginning of conscious spiralling. Not escape from the pull, but participation with eyes wide open and dignity intact, even when we stumble. Especially then.
And if in reading this, reflecting on this, you find yourself spiralling not down but deeper, with me, then I take that as the best company. We don’t have to reach the centre to be changed. Sometimes it’s enough to walk the circle together and feel the heat rising in our bones.
With gratitude returned, and the muse-light held up to guide you a little further in. Thank you, Morag!
"We don’t trip… we rehearse. Again and again, we circle what burns..."
Six lines in and I am floored. I could have stopped there and basked in the essence of this revolutionary piece. ( Of course I knew there was magic afoot and so proceeded.)
That circling of what burns is the DNA of the Spiral. That animate engine which is unfolding as a wave. She goes and I follow and telling myself there is a choice. Life is so innately generous in her spiraling and egregiously seductive to boot. She comes around again dressed to kill and whispers, 'Do you have a light?' and I fumble in pockets that I know do not contain one just to keep her there for a moment longer whilst I dance my pavlovian dance and roll my tongue back up from the floor. I do this because she has ignited my life by simply circling back around. She has reminded me that flight requires leaving the ground. She is thrilling and I, after licking my wounds from the last cliff dive, go again. Why? Narrative. OMFG!!! Of course. What is older than our stories? Is anything more hard wired into us than words. In the beginning!!!
Every encounter with the return of the spiral is a chance to add a new layer to the story. A dab of glitter to the brokeness. A celebration of being alive enough to go again. And a trembling with it because we believe in 'this time' with all our being whilst carrying the stories of crash and burn as ashes with us. This is 'the one.' we tell ourselves. (Job, partner, essay we just wrote.) It is not the same as before. We graduated from that level and now is the moment to practice our unlearning once again. As long as there is life, there will be dancing right? And we dive in, arms held aloft on the roller coaster of our days and a scream of delight emerging. In the seat in front my pal has his hands over his eyes and wants to get off. No judgement implied here. Just difference.
There is a story that I think lives here. A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't help myself. It's my character. I am after all, a Scorpion."
Do we have a choice? Can I cage my heart and stop it from beating? My response to your words this morning was instant, impulsive and filled with a series of trembling Yes's, as I read and then wrote. This ignited me. I had no choice but to dive in. My day just shifted. There is flight afoot. Q.E.D.
Your comment composes, Paul! A reply that spirals with the original text, not in orbit but in duet, like you caught the melody mid-air and folded your own lyrics into the refrain.
Yes, that circling of what burns is the DNA of the spiral, and you’ve just named its anatomy with staggering clarity. The return isn’t passive. It’s the seduction of pattern pretending to be novelty. And we know it. We feel the repetition in our marrow, and yet the moment she leans in (desire, opportunity, whatever shape she’s in that day) and asks “Do you have a light?” we’re already reaching. Not because we’re naïve, but because we’re liturgical. We return to the flame because fire is the only element that both destroys and reveals.
And yes, again, narrative. That’s the spell. Not pleasure, not outcome, but arc. We ache not for coherence more than for satisfaction. For the beat drop that makes the chaos rhythmic. It’s why we keep believing this one will be different, not because we are delusional, but because we are narrative organisms. To stop believing would be to stop being.
You brought in the scorpion story, and it lives here beautifully. But what if the scorpion isn’t the villain? What if it’s the truth-teller? The one who reminds us that character, desire, damage — all spiral together, and that change doesn’t mean becoming someone else. It means learning how to carry our sting consciously. To name it, own it, maybe even sheath it when we can. But never pretend we weren’t born with it.
“ A dab of glitter to the brokenness”…. I like it. That’s the kind of wound-wisdom I believe in. Not transcendence through erasure, but radiance through reckoning.
Thank you for diving in, arms raised, mouth open to scream and sing at the same time! That’s the ride. And it’s a privilege to sit beside someone who’s not asking for the safety bar to come down.
'To name it, own it, maybe even sheath it when we can. But never pretend we weren’t born with it.' This is a sumptuous response and as a drummer I adore that 'beat drop that makes the chaos rhythmic.'
And yes to the Scorpion as truth-teller who offers an invitation for us to recognise ourselves, flaws and all, to celebrate that and still lean into a 'diving' practice that continually deepens us.
To that end I will be hitting publish shortly on the longest piece I have ever written. Final tweaks being tended to now (or is that terror filled avoidance?) As none of my subs get emails due to a glitch in the stack matrix, every post I publish is a literal dive into the abyss. Wish me feathers for flight and a mattress for landings.
Feathers wished, mattress fluffed, and wings already visible from here.
You are diving into the abyss while naming it on the way down. That’s what makes it a craft, not a collapse. The fact that your longest piece yet is arriving with both final tweaks and terror is proof you’re doing it right. Terror and truth are cousins, they show up together when you are close to something real.
Your words move like a current beneath the surface of things — stirring what I had thought settled. There’s something devastatingly precise in how you name the ache: not for love, but recognition; not for safety, but transformation. I, too, have spiraled — not blindly, but with eyes wide open, knowing the cost and still unable to look away. Your framing of desire as choreography rather than mistake, and ruin as a kind of sacred architecture, resonates with a part of me I often silence.
Thank you for holding up a mirror that reflects not vanity, but truth — fractured, yes, but illuminated. You’ve made the spiral feel less like a descent and more like a pilgrimage.
I am still somewhere between the shatter and the shape, but reading this made me believe — if only for a moment — that the rebuild might be more honest than what stood before.
Sure, recognition over love, transformation over safety. The older I get, the more I suspect those hierarchies were soldered into our bones long before we learned to speak.
… the spiral as pilgrimage, exactly. A descent only stays a descent if we refuse to gather relics on the way down. But once we pocket a shard of obsidian here, a half-remembered hymn there, the path home already carries new weight. Ruin, then, isn’t demolition; it’s demolition with salvage rights.
The hunger for recognition often disguises itself as audience, yet what it truly craves is witness. An audience applauds the performance, a witness testifies that you were real even when the stage lights die. When we spiral on purpose, we aren’t courting spectators, we’re inviting co-architects who can read the blueprints mid-collapse and still believe the structure merits renovation.
So hold that faith a little longer! The rebuild needn’t mimic the former façade; it can rise eccentric, asymmetrical, defiantly honest.
Each of us lives their own battle with their impulses and desires—sometimes winning, sometimes losing. The difference between victory and defeat is the true measure of virtue within us. At times, we restrain desire out of love for virtue, the call of conscience, and moral elevation, or out of fear of scandal, people’s blame, or the law. But when we cross the line of virtue, the fear of disgrace, and the dread of the law, we reach the stage of destruction—not out of ignorance, but with full awareness and a calculated plan.
All divine religions and prophets consider human nature to be molded with impulses and desires for both good and evil. In Islam, every soul is prone to evil (an-nafs al-ammārah bi’s-sū’), yet capable of reform and righteousness through struggle and patience, ascending to the stage of the self-reproaching soul (an-nafs al-lawwāmah)—a conscience that feels remorse after every desire. And when a person’s ability to conquer their desires grows, the soul elevates further, reaching the stage of the contented soul (an-nafs al-muṭma’innah), accompanied by a sound heart (qalbun salīm). Thus, the individual attains inner peace. The sound heart and the contented soul are the focus of God’s gaze, His light, and His blessings.*
The Egyptian-American philosopher Abdelwahab El-Messiri described secular-based civilization twenty years before the draft of the homosexuality law emerged, stating that Western civilization is moving toward the deification of pleasure—and at that point, it reaches a point of no return, like any other extinct civilization.
Thank you for bringing such depth, and for framing desire within a moral, theological, and psychological lineage that spans both scripture and contemporary critique. This is a powerful reply, and certainly a valuable contrast to the framework I proposed.
You write: “Each of us lives their own battle with their impulses and desires — sometimes winning, sometimes losing”. And yes, I agree, desire is not always to be indulged. Nor is restraint always repression. The complexity lies in how and why we resist. When restraint is rooted in love, in self-awareness, in dignity, it elevates. When it’s driven only by fear, shame, or social punishment, it often calcifies into bitterness or hypocrisy. Virtue without intimacy with one’s own impulses can become sterile. But desire without conscience becomes hollow.
The Qur’anic verses you quoted — “By the soul and the One who proportioned it, and inspired it with its wickedness and its righteousness, successful is the one who purifies it, and failed is the one who corrupts it” (Surah Ash-Shams, 7–10) — speak profoundly to the paradox of the human condition. That we are both sculpted and unfinished. Capable of choosing ascent through restraint, or descent through indulgence. But crucially, the divine gaze falls not on perfection, but on the effort to refine, the striving soul, the sound heart. Not the sanitised one.
Where we diverge, perhaps, is in how we frame destruction. You write that when one crosses “the line of virtue” with full awareness, it becomes a planned descent into ruin, a sin with structure. I don’t dispute the danger in that. But I’d argue that not all ruin is a moral failure. Some undoings are part of transformation. Not every spiral down is a collapse; sometimes it’s a necessary disintegration of falsehood. The human story is full of those who had to fall to see clearly. Repentance, after all, is also a spiral, a return with new sight.
As for Abdelwahab El-Messiri’s warning about the “deification of pleasure”… it’s a critique that resonates. Western secularism often mistakes liberation for licentiousness, and freedom for unbounded gratification. But I believe the real crisis isn’t pleasure itself, it’s disembodied pleasure, pleasure without meaning, intimacy, or rootedness. A spiral with no center. In that, we agree: the sacred and the profane are not defined by the presence or absence of desire, but by the context and intention that guide it.
I deeply appreciate your contribution, it’s erudite, thoughtful, and a welcome challenge. This is the kind of dialogue that keeps my spiral sharp, and keeps us honest. Thank you!
Man was created free, endowed with a mind that distinguishes him from all other beings. Through this mind, he discerns the boundaries of good and the abyss of evil. The urge for killing and annihilation is a deviation rejected by reason, conscience, and the collective moral compass of humanity. Similarly, when the desire for gender transformation becomes widespread, and its proponents demand legislative protection, the destruction expands beyond the individual to distort the collective virtue of society. When such a distortion of human nature occurred, divine intervention punished the people of Lot as a lesson for all nations and generations to follow.
We can distinguish between legitimate desires, such as the love for power, fame, wealth, and status, and illegitimate desires that cause harm and destruction to others.
Your definition of repentance deeply moved me:"Repentance, after all, is also a spiral, a return with new sight."This is why God promised forgiveness to sinners: even if one’s sins reach the clouds of the sky, they will find an equivalent amount of forgiveness.
By the way, I deliberately choose to respond despite not having a thinking methodology based on scientific principles. However, I never hesitate to comment, as my desire to learn helps me gain lessons from failure. Thank you for providing this space for participation
Thank you for this thoughtful and candid reply. What strikes me the most is not simply where we may differ, but the care with which you articulate your position, and your openness to engage across lines of belief and methodology. That’s what makes real dialogue possible.
You speak of the human mind as a divine gift, one capable of discerning between virtue and deviation. I agree that discernment is at the core of our humanity, but I would also add: discernment evolves. What was once read as deviance may, in time, be revealed as difference. What was once condemned as distortion may be re-understood as a cry for recognition, or a path toward self-integration. Not all change is erosion; some of it is clarification. And the moral compass, while deeply needed, is not static, it is shaped across generations by conversation, by context, by courage.
You cite the story of the people of Lot, a narrative present across Abrahamic traditions. But interpretation matters. For some, it remains a warning against specific acts; for others, it’s a broader caution against inhospitality, arrogance, and violence. Scripture is not only a mirror but also a prism — it refracts according to the light we bring to it. We must be vigilant not to mistake inherited interpretation for immutable truth.
Your distinction between legitimate and illegitimate desires is compelling, though I would gently question the framework. Desires, in my view, are neither inherently moral nor immoral, they are raw data. What matters is how they are acted upon, whether they harm or heal, whether they spring from ego or from the soul’s deeper longing to become whole. And that discernment, again, requires humility, patience, and room for nuance.
I’m moved that the line about repentance resonated with you. It is a spiral, yes, a return not to where we were, but to a wiser version of ourselves. I believe the divine meets us not at the gates of perfection, but at the edge of recognition. And your acknowledgment of learning through engagement, even without formal philosophical methodology, is exactly the kind of humility that keeps a mind alive.
So thank you, for your generosity, your convictions, your willingness to converse rather than condemn! That, too, is a form of virtue. And this space is better for your presence in it.
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.
That space you describe, the one we guard with wit or silence? I know it intimately. It’s where I keep the truths that don’t photograph well, where pride and ache braid themselves into performance, and where vulnerability pretends to be intellect just long enough to survive the day.
You saw it. You named it. That craving to be witnessed in ruin, not as failure but as depth… as proof that something was burning bright enough to leave wreckage. It’s the secret theatre behind so many “empowered” choices. And yes, sometimes we don’t want salvation, we want applause mid-collapse, someone whispering you were magnificent as we wipe soot from our own delusions.
“I’ve made desire noble when it was just hungry”…. hmmm superbe! That’s the surgery. That’s where honesty stops being literary and starts being useful. Because hunger has its own kind of grace, too. Not every longing needs a moral. Some just need a name and a place to rest.
As for plot… yes. Give me ache with an arc. Give me the wreckage with resonance. Pleasure alone fades, but a well-shaped heartbreak can be re-read for decades. And in that sense, maybe the spiral is sacred. Not because it saves us, but because it insists we feel all the way down.
Thank you for spiraling with me, eyes open, heart unguarded, Céline! There’s no safer danger than being understood like this.
Thank you, truly. Your words always feel like recognition. And yes… if we must spiral, let it be with clarity, with heat, and with someone who names the ache without trying to fix it. Always learning from you.
pain into poetry ... I feel seen. So many "dumb" little poems in a lifetime, trying to erect monuments to some rather mundane (in retrospect) flings and fucks and pinings. Making it noble when it was jst hungry. Spot on, cutting deep. Here we go again.
Those dumb little poems, drafted like treaties for battles no one else knew we were fighting. Scribbled elegies to someone who ghosted us after brunch. Odes to glances mistaken for fate. And yet… weren’t they necessary? Not because the fling was noble, but because the hunger was real. The ache needed architecture.
We dress desire in metaphor not to romanticise it, but to survive it.
So here we go again, pen in hand, stomach in knots, building another shrine to a moment we’ll later call foolish… but write beautifully about anyway. That’s not delusion. That’s magic, Claudia!
Wonderful, Claudia.
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.
As usual, a fabulous unpacking of the paradox we keep circling, that the very things we warn against are also the things that made us. And I love how you frame it not as contradiction, but as a kind of biological recursion. The moth doesn’t miscalculate the flame, it’s obeying an ancient algorithm that just happens to short-circuit in modern lighting. We’re no different. Desire isn’t immoral; it’s misaligned, trained on variables the nervous system evolved to chase long before algorithms were involved.
And yes, advice is so often a backhanded admission of collective failure. We chant “balance” not because we have mastered it, but because we flail. The moral slogans, the wellness commandments, the tech-free Sundays not wisdom so much as damage control. It’s like hanging “breathe” on the wall of a panic room. Necessary? Maybe. Natural? Not anymore.
The appetite for destruction isn’t a bug in the system, it’s THE feature. Because destruction isn’t always ruinous. Sometimes it’s the only solvent strong enough to dissolve inherited scripts. And the ones who dare to run into the fire (be it for love, invention, reinvention) aren’t always reckless. They are just unwilling to stay embalmed in someone else’s version of safety.
You’re right, prescription doesn’t interest me. There’s no universal dosage for desire. What intrigues me is the pattern that keeps pulling us into the grey zone where wisdom and wildness share a cigarette break. That’s where the living happens. That’s where you wrote from, too.
Thank you, Andrew, for reading with that kind of mind, the one that doesn’t settle for the conclusion but keeps turning the gears until smoke rises!
“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”
What a joy to read your writing!
It’s all context and meaning! Here’s to all that comes with spiraling with purpose!! 👏👏👏
Yes, context and meaning, the twin anchors that keep the spiral from becoming just another dizzy loop. Without them, undoing feels like collapse. With them, it becomes transformation in slow motion.
Here’s to spiralling not by accident, but by choice. To letting desire unmake what no longer serves, and remake us in shapes that are truer, stranger, more alive.
And thank you, Shasheen, for reading with such clarity and joy.! That, too, is part of the spiral: finding company inside it.
Shapes that are truer, stranger and more alive! Absolutely love it! And sorry AKG for jumping on your comment. Unintentional spiral 🌀 😎
Indeed! And no worries, Andrew will not mind :)
What initially gripped me the most was the subtle step shifts between the individual’s journey in the spiral and then the meta analysis of the world around us that has collapsed desire into something that can be coded, downloaded, overly defined and ultimately commodified. Were it not for the dual angles of the interior and the exterior — the human desire of the subject and the systems-wide desires to engage the consumer —I don’t think this spiral you invoked would have had the potency to grab me by the ears and rattle my brain, paradigms, and un-investigated lenses.
The recurrence and repetition of my own desire-seeking patterns, which I am forced to reckon with as I move through this essay, they are quite stultifying… they lead me to a kind of diminishment of self. As though I was blissfully unaware of the numbness I was living through until someone spoke revolution in between the syllables of desire.
This isn’t some tantrum at the modern duty to careers, mortgage, community, family or some other stabilizing element of society. This is a view on desire that is about what moves one to live a life that coheres with an energetic human. I’ve felt robotic for a long time, and unaware of it. When I moved to a new city, I was shocked to learn how uncomfortable I was in my old home: I needed a new frame of reference. Similarly, the structure of this essay gave me a new frame of reference with viewing desire as those humans did in the ancient myths.
Perhaps it is telling that the tech bros, neuroscientists and western philosophers who are targeted in this essay, neatly lineup perfectly with the foundational pillars of my own world views — your mileage may vary of course, but for me, these targets were perfectly matched to my mind.
I keep thinking that these influencers of culture have filled the vacuum left in the wake of receding influence with diminishment of religious thinkers and institutions — but that feels like another realm of enquiry. I’ll stay in this spiral a little longer ;) because giving the modern prevailing powers a stern look plus a deep dive into the validity of their influence, feels like an invigorating dip in a waterfall-fed lake on a 40 degree day.
I pride myself on balance and tranquility — no essay will disabuse me of that so quickly… but! I hadn’t considered how reifying that middle way can be itself; on a long enough timescale, seeking balance can be itself, an extreme. And where desire is concerned, balance needs to be a transitional state not a baseline. Because desire operates on the edges of the wavelength — the balance should only be the gravity that pulls the dancing elements of the spiral back around for another transit. If anyone knows the podcast, TV series, or movie that has equally held up a mirror to “balance” in such a way please let me know. Because I would never have questioned it, were it not for a thinking piece of such exquisite insight — as we have here. This isn’t a ploy to question balance and then discard. This is an effort to Question the angle of my balanced posture, and alter it appropriately.
I love this idea of reimagining desire not for external gain, but as a means of becoming a more vivid version of yourself. Because so often the big transitions I have wished for — those New Year’s resolution, those wellbeing redemption arcs that seem to be all the rage — they never felt great, they certainly weren’t sustainable. Maybe I didn’t want it enough? But I think there is a reason they didn’t work for me.
Now with another Museguided reframe, I’m thinking about my real, true, core, and wonder “how can I live a version of myself truer to that?” Somehow, after reading this I am looking differently at me: the one below the cultured facade I’ve lived underneath for so long…. How do I bring him to the fore?
Well the recipe is in here. In these words. Not as a prescription, but as a reminder the internal architecture is actually yours to design. And now it is up to me to grapple with the decisions I make.
So I will appreciate the neuroscientist’s dopamine, but I won’t be fooled to think it trumps narrative and story. I will enjoy the terrific diversity of experiences delivered by the hoody-clad coders of the modern technical world, but I’ll remember they are approximations of experiences, flattened maps of the territory but with a casino-like atmosphere. And to the western philosophers and neo-Taoists I will smile at the idea that striving for balance is noble, but I shouldn’t consider the balanced, zen, middle of the spiral as a destination, it is just a the somewhat forgotten third element.
And in recognizing that a sharper, more vivid version of me is available— when I provisions and prioritize the making of brave decisions (unencumbered by faux certainty sold by a tech/consumer/balanced zeitgeist) I can perhaps unfurl from a pervasive numbness, and be, finally, alive.
Your comment interrogates my essay, expands it, and refracts it through the prismatic architecture of systems thinking, mythic structure, and cultural critique. It turns the spiral into a dialectic: desire not only as inward plunge, but as structural artifact… coded, choreographed, commodified.
What you’ve identified is the entanglement between subjective longing and collective machinery. In Deleuzian terms, desire is never isolated, it is machinic, always plugged into larger systems of production and consumption. What pretends to be private yearning is often already embedded in external apparatuses. The spiral, then, is more than a symbol of psychological repetition; it’s a cybernetic loop: one strand personal, the other infrastructural, endlessly feeding back into each other.
This is why my essay had to move between the interior arc and its digital echo. Our instincts for intensity, risk, narrative — once organic and ungoverned — are now processed through predictive algorithms, emotional UX loops, and engineered overstimulation. The result is not less desire, but a technologically mediated one, flattened into data, yet retaining its power to undo us.
Your critique of balance is incisive. Too often, balance is elevated to the level of virtue without interrogation, reified into a moral endpoint rather than understood as a dynamic, transitional state.
In both Taoist and Stoic traditions, balance is not stasis, it is modulation. The middle path is not a destination but a series of course corrections. In this light, balance that becomes habit loses its vitality and risks becoming anesthetic. Desire, on the other hand, thrives on thresholds, on the edge between safety and danger, structure and rupture. If the spiral is to have momentum, balance cannot be its goal, it must serve as gravitational pause, not as terminal arc.
Then you draw attention to the cultural vacuum left by waning institutional religion, and the way neuroscience, tech design, and secular philosophy now occupy that metaphysical terrain. This is not incidental.
As Girard theorised, desire is mimetic, it is learned by imitation of models. When the saints are gone, we adopt the entrepreneur, the lifestyle icon, the algorithm. Their influence is no less dogmatic; it’s simply veiled as rational or aesthetic rather than spiritual. What was once shaped by confession and liturgy is now governed by terms of service and feed refresh rates.
What’s required, then, is a form of conscious mythography…. a deliberate curation of who and what one allows to model desire. Without this, the machinery of modern life continues to dictate what appears aspirational, even as it hollows out what is meaningful.
Your observation that dopamine is not pleasure, but prediction, aligns with contemporary neuropsychology. What drives us is not satisfaction, but the anticipation of narrative payoff.
Desire is sustained not by fulfillment but by plot tension. This is why transformation rituals (be they mythic, religious, or therapeutic) rely on narrative framing. One must pass through liminality, ordeal, and symbolic death before emergence. Modern culture erodes these arcs, offering closure-free loops designed to perpetuate consumption, not catalyse becoming. It’s terrible and it makes me feel hopeless.
To restore agency, one must re-narrativise desire, give it structure, inflection, symbolic stakes. This reframing turns the spiral from addictive recursion into conscious recursion: mythic return with altered meaning.
As for your concluding inquiry… how to bring forth the vivid self, the one occluded by performative balance and cultivated neutrality is at the core of my essay’s provocation. It asks not merely for transformation, but for re-authorship of one’s desire-pattern.
Desire, in this framing, is neither chaotic nor aesthetic. It is architectural. The vivid self is not found, but constructed through a series of active decisions, what to prioritise, what to relinquish, which models to disavow, and which thresholds to cross. This requires not only introspection, but a refusal to live inside inherited templates of moderation and managed longing.
Your entire comment models the kind of intellectual rigour and openness required to grapple with desire as both phenomenon and system. You’ve masterfully demonstrated what it looks like to spiral consciously: not out of control, but toward clarity, toward complexity, toward design.
The cultural narratives we’ve been handed flatten desire into pathology, performance, or product. But desire (real, sovereign, unruly) remains a tool for reanimation. Not as a search for novelty, but as a return to intensity, meaning, and mythic structure. You’ve made that clear. And in doing so, you’ve offered a map for others to follow…. spiral and all.
Thank you!
Tamara,
Reading this was the most fun I’ve had all day, and I’ve had a really good day.
I also think I came about 7 degrees more alive doing so.
I just discovered you yesterday with your magnificent essay on Love in Not Enough, and now this. Absolutely love your writing style and the content of your creations. Consider me a newly devoted fan.
“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.”
You are singing in a language I recognize.
Devotion and intimacy to life, to reality. This is the whole of my practice when I can remember it. And that includes intimacy and devotion to the wild, ever changing mess and mystery of it, to the parts I don’t like along with the parts that are easy for me to relish. It means embracing disappointment and still saying Yes.
If I may be so bold as to link here a poem of mine that, having read this essay, I think you would understand.
https://somewhatwilder.substack.com/p/when-change-comes-to-knock-at-your
Thank you Tamara. Your writing is a joy to take in.
What a wonderful comment, thank you, Olivia! If my words stirred you 7 degrees closer to aliveness, then I’m grinning like someone who just got away with something deliciously unwise.
And yes, you do speak the same language. Devotion as practice, not posture. Intimacy not just with the holy, but with the hard. Saying “yes” to the disappointment, the mess, the unwelcome knock that turns out to be a mirror. That’s the real spiral. Not into collapse, but into consciousness.
I read your poem — “When Change Comes to Knock” — and it absolutely sings in the same key. That quiet, reverent bravery of opening the door without armour. Letting change in not as invader but as guest. You hold mystery with such tenderness, such clarity. It’s beautiful and true.
So yes, welcome, fellow spiraler. I’m honoured to have you reading, and more honoured still to be read by someone who knows what it means to live inside the undoing. Let’s keep wrecking gently and building better!
Oh my! This is good. And so incredibly human. Loved the rawness of the passage on recognition. Thank you for writing this Tamara.
Thank you, Meredith! The kind of truth that doesn’t flatter, doesn’t polish, doesn’t pretend to be poetic. Just raw hunger dressed in self-awareness, hoping no one notices the trembling underneath.
But I’ve come to believe that the most human thing we can do is confess what doesn’t sound noble. Not to glorify it but to neutralise the shame. Wanting recognition isn’t a flaw. It’s a mirror we keep polishing, hoping one day it will reflect back understanding, not only admiration.
And when someone else reads it and says, “I saw myself there”… that’s the only recognition that really lands. So thank you again for giving me that! It makes the risk worth it.
My comment may end up being more questions than comment, and that likely says more about me than about the essay. It’s just that’s where I keep ending up every time I read it - with questions.
The subtitle and the closing words seem to be the heart of the essay: “…why we chase what breaks us, and sometimes become more whole for it.”
“…with tenderness for what unravels, still spiralling, but this time on purpose,” Both of those I understand, as I do, “Undoing, though - that teaches. At a cost. Always at a cost.” Chasing what breaks us and unravels us, with intention and tenderness - that is a powerful choice to make.
It’s a little later, when Phaedra comes in that my questions arise. I’ll admit, I had to look it up as it’s been years since I read the play. Is it her longing that is administrative, or is it her method? It seems her action comes from her desire and longing for someone she shouldn’t want, and when he rejects her, she uses the paperwork to protect herself at his expense. She spirals, though out of control and ends up destroying both of them. I don’t understand the connection between “the bureaucratic efficiency with which we turn it into catastrophe” and Phaedra being “a woman who understood paperwork.” It’s also possible I’ve totally missed the point, hence the question. To me they seem like separate things.
“…desire has no allegiance to your values…It can hijack your principles and use them to decorate its getaway car.” No argument here, regardless of what the desire is. What I don’t understand is why the next paragraph is suddenly talking about “The feed must swing between delight and despair or else you will stop scrolling.” What does that have to do with the desire for a lover, recognition, or whatever? And I recognize that my huge gap in social media experience (other than this) may be why I don’t understand how they connect.
I loved “I want to spiral. Not out of control, but into depth…Into the chaos of intimacy that leaves fingerprints…” and “Spiralling isn’t failure if it’s conscious - if it’s chosen…” Yes. We make choices all along the way - I’ve also stood on the edge of that abyss and known that one more step and there would be no going back. And I also knew that the risk was the only way I’d have any chance at all, and in that moment I knew I had already taken the step. Everything else that happened after that I knew was because I made the choice.
“…desire will undo you. Not always. But often enough. The trick isn’t to avoid the undoing, it’s to learn to live inside it, to spiral on purpose. Not as self-destruction, but as devotion.” I love this, until the last line. And I am uncertain what the last line means. Devotion to what? To desire? To whatever one’s desire is? Out of control desire can easily spin into self-destruction - I can see that. And devotion is an incredible practice. I just never saw it as the opposite of self-destruction, so I’m kind of curious about that.
The Orpheus picture is incredible - the dog’s attentiveness, staring up into the face of Orpheus, paws on his right knee and thigh, move me. Kind of feel like I’m the dog, trying intently to figure out what I’m missing, while your desire and tenderness spiral through your dance on the edge. Thank you…
What a gift this comment is… thoughtful, honest, and reverent in all the right ways. You’re not missing anything; you’re wrestling with the essay exactly as it was meant to be wrestled with. So let me meet your questions with the same care and clarity you’ve offered mine.
Phaedra and “the bureaucratic efficiency with which we turn it into catastrophe”. Your reading is insightful, and your confusion is completely fair. Let me unpack the metaphor more fully. When I say “her longing is administrative,” I’m not suggesting desire itself is bureaucratic, but rather the way we handle forbidden longing,,how we rationalise it, channel it, or weaponise it. In Phaedra’s case, her desire begins as chaotic and transgressive, yes. But what fascinates me is how she doesn’t collapse in a heap of romantic ruin, she composes a lie, files the accusation, seals the narrative. It’s not a raw act of madness; it’s an intentional use of formal, institutional tools to transform her desire into destruction.
That’s the horror I was pointing at: not just forbidden longing, but how high-functioning and deliberate our most ruinous acts can become. We don’t always self-destruct with fireworks. Sometimes we do it with receipts, with grammar intact.
So Phaedra is the metaphor for when desire doesn’t break us impulsively, it works through us methodically. Her tragedy isn’t just that she felt too much; it’s that she knew exactly how to turn her longing into a weaponised narrative, and she did.
The leap to “the feed must swing between delight and despair…”. This is a tonal and thematic shift, yes, but it’s a deliberate one. Here’s the connective tissue: I was arguing that modern platforms, like desire itself, are designed to exploit our hunger for emotional extremes.
In earlier paragraphs, I looked at how desire hijacks us, repackages our principles, and leads us into beautiful catastrophes. I then shift to show how this impulse is no longer just psychological or romantic, it’s now architected into our digital landscape. Tech doesn’t invent our compulsions; it simply codes them, makes them scalable, profitable, addictive.
Think of it as this: just as Phaedra used formal channels to process forbidden longing into catastrophe, today’s platforms do the same but algorithmically. The chaos of longing is no longer just personal; it’s become product. The scroll is the spiral now, engineered to simulate the highs and crashes of desire. If you are someone who has felt the pull of a toxic relationship, you’ll find the same push-pull dynamic embedded in how digital content seduces and discards your attention. That’s the parallel.
“Devotion — not as self-destruction, but as…” what, exactly? This is the heart of your question, and such an important one.
No, I don’t mean devotion to desire itself. I mean devotion as a mode of being — a spiritual posture, a deliberate presence. To spiral with devotion is to move toward your undoing with awareness, with reverence, with consent. It’s not about martyrdom. It’s about choosing to go deep into experience — love, grief, intimacy, transformation — not because it’s safe, but because it’s true.
Self-destruction, in contrast, is often compulsive, unexamined, reactive. Devotion is what makes it conscious. Devotion is what lets the spiral become sacred, not self-erasing. You can walk straight into the fire, but you do it awake, knowing what might burn and what might survive.
In that sense, devotion becomes the antidote to nihilism. It says: yes, this might hurt, but I’m showing up for it fully. Because I believe in the magic of experience, not just the aesthetic of control.
And finally, your beautiful Orpheus image… The idea of the dog as witness, as quiet companion to myth and music and sorrow — that’s how I often feel while writing. Like I’m circling a figure I can’t entirely decipher, listening intently, hoping something coherent emerges through the hum of feeling.
And you are Orpheus too. Every person who steps into longing with awareness becomes a kind of singer in the underworld. You’ve clearly danced on the edge, and survived it. Which means you already understand the spiral. My words just gave you a shape for what you already knew.
Thank you, Doc, for asking real questions. For reading with your body, your intellect, your memory, and your restraint. It’s not lost on me. You saw through the surface and into the scaffolding, and that kind of reading is rare. I’m honoured to be read like this.
Still spiraling. Still listening.
Thank you for both the clarity of your answers and the care and patience you had in answering them. I can see even more how my non-participation in the first years of social media because of lack of access, and then later by choice, at times makes it difficult for me to notice how different the lens is for those who have been engaged with it for the last 20+ years. I suppose we are so used to seeing through our own lenses it’s easy to miss the fact that there isn’t always as much common ground in our views as we might expect.
Thanks especially for the answer on devotion. There is a devotion practice in Zen, which is usually devotion to one’s teacher. I more or less stumbled into it and it became a major part of my practice over the years. It has its own structure or architecture that allows the student to go deep into experience, yes, and it also acts as a safety net to prevent abuse in that most vulnerable state. I was fortunate to have a teacher meticulous in maintaining and working through the architecture of devotion practice with compassion and kindness.
The devotion of which you write is very similar and has some significant differences. That’s something I’ll have to think about a bit. There’s a lot here for me to think about, and I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks, Tamara.
You are always welcome, Doc!
This is stunning, and sharp. Especially sharp. And unique. Desire as choreography, not chaos, resonates deeply. It reminds me of addiction theory: not just chemical, but narrative—the stories we replay, the roles we assign ourselves. Like a stage actor who knows the third act ends in ruin but still hits every mark because it feels like destiny.
Your point about strategic self-undoing parallels what in systems theory we’d call a “feedback loop with delayed punishment”, just enough reward upfront to keep repeating the cycle, even as it corrodes. And like tech design, it’s not an accident. It’s UX for the psyche.
Brilliant dissection. Thank you for spiraling out loud—with precision. You teach us to get out of all our comfort zones. Genius.
You caught the blade and the blueprint. Thank you!
“UX for the psyche”, ohhhh yes. We build these loops to survive, and to perform survival in a way that feels familiar, mythic, fated. The actor doesn’t forget the script ends in collapse, they need that collapse to prove the arc was real. Addiction, desire, identity, they are all narrative engines disguised as impulse. And once you see the architecture, it’s almost harder, not easier, to exit. Because now you’re not just caught, you’re complicit.
Your systems theory note hit home. The delay is the trapdoor. We endure decline because the upfront sparkle feels like a divine yes. And even when we know it’s a rented thrill, we return because the body remembers the curtain call, not the wreckage.
Thank you for matching sharpness with sharpness, Alexander! These are the conversations that make the spiral survivable, and above all meaningful.
The best compliments come from a brilliant mind. Thank you.
"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."
These two sentences, leading on from one another in different paragraphs, really tickled me (in different ways - the men in hoodies ha ha!).
In the era long ago, when we had no information about what was bad for us, what was good for us, there was Just Is. We chased whatever we felt called to do, be with whoever provided us with a chemistry of sorts, and did things that stretched us physically, mentally, emotionally. We (I say we, I mean our ancestors) built our modern world through their constant destruction, disruption, teetering on the edges of "what if, what if?" and then just Went With It with reckless abandon. We all possess this, to a certain degree, some more than others, and it's the human in us that tests and desires without any logical reasoning - because reasoning isn't always as logical and linear as it seems according to our soul or temperament.
There is a pounding of thought behind this piece Tamara, I'm sure many who read it, like me, will be trembling with ideas a while after!
Ahhhh this is beautiful, and sharp in all the right places. You traced that ancestral thread from reckless instinct to curated impulse with such grace. Yes, of course, before the food pyramid and productivity hacks and dopamine charts, there was Just Is. We didn’t optimise… we lunged. We danced with risk, not because it was wise, but because it moved us. We let intuition cut through the noise long before neuroscience tried to map it.
And I like how you frame desire not as a flaw but a force, the very one that built, broke, and rebuilt the world. The men in hoodies may be designing distractions, but they’re just digitising an appetite older than language: the want that defies reason, the ache that refuses to be managed. Clever.
You said it perfectly, reasoning isn’t always logical, especially to a soul that speaks in drumbeats, not flowcharts. And perhaps that’s where we are most human,,when we follow the echo, not the algorithm.
Thank you for trembling with it, Joanna! That’s the only real sign that the words lived.
Oh Tamara!
:
That threaded spiral …
It reminds me
Of a double helix twirling.
Each spiral connected
To an opposing helix,
Balanced in space and time.
:
Somehow you always take us
To the edges
Of that spiralling staircase.
Never satisfied with the middle
Nor even in balance.
But to the extremes of … desire.
:
My daughter asked me last month
What my biggest regret was
In my life to-date.
I thought hard for a moment.
It wasn’t splitting from her mother.
I said I wished I had taken more risks.
:
That desire to risk all:
And not to care (too much) about
Where it takes you.
That desire to go deeper,
Into the darkest corners of the soul
And to feel that you are alive!
:
Sometimes we go so deep
And cannot breathe…
We want to resurface quickly …
But know we’ll get the bends.
Yet if we do survive to tell the tale
We know we have risked-well.
:
Thank you for the breadth of your historical metaphors
And the depth of your swirling spirals.
You (and your Muse)
Are truly word-mistresses
In the Art of the Deep-Dive!
:
With deepest appreciation,
Lorne
Lorne, what a gift, this reply! Have you spiralled with my essay?
That double helix image is stunning, a perfect metaphor for how desire and risk twist around each other, not in chaos, but in a kind of encoded inevitability. We’re wired for it. Not for safety, but for the possibility that something just beyond reason might change us.
Your daughter’s question cut straight to the centre. Regret is rarely about what we did, it’s generally about what we almost dared. And yes, the bends are real. But so is the breathless beauty of resurfacing changed, with stories that still hum in our bones.
Thank you for dancing at the edge with me, for honouring both the myth and the marrow!
You enhance Tatiana's letter into myth
Pushkin’s Tatiana writing her trembling heart into the snowdrift of Onegin’s indifference. Thank you, Leif, what a thing to say! Her letter is already myth, already immortal, but if my words echoed even a fraction of that aching sincerity, if they carried the same blend of dignity and ruin… then I’ll take it as the highest compliment. To speak from the raw, unadorned center like she did… that’s the real art.
Longing for desire of validation, forgetting to be present in the moment where validation is constantly given, but not received....the never-ending train of 'not enough'.
I hear validation most of the time in my personal and professional life and I look in the mirror and it's like they are talking about someone else, not the person I see...whilst telling myself 'I am still not seen, not recognised, not validated....enough'. Enough is the key word - and then I give myself a high-five in the mirror and connect back to the reality. It's difficult to break the habit, but I am shifting my pattern towards better choices
Yes… “not enough” is the ghost in the machine, isn’t it? The whisper that turns applause into white noise and love into an unsolved puzzle. I know that mirror moment well, the dissonance between what others reflect and what we are willing to accept. It’s not that validation is absent, it’s that it arrives wearing someone else’s name tag, never quite syncing with our internal biography.
That hunger for recognition that you named isn’t necessarily narcissistic. It’s often an old wound disguised as ambition. We chase affirmation not because we think we are special, but because we have internalised some early glitch, some moment when our realness was met with silence, or worse, indifference. So we become excellent. Accomplished. Generous. Still unsure.
That train of “not enough” doesn’t slow down on its own. It takes intention to step off and notice the platform, the quiet moments where someone does see us, where the validation is offered, but our receptors are too trained in absence to metabolise presence.
But that high-five in the mirror? I love it. That’s where it starts to shift. Not by waiting for others to shout “enough!” on your behalf, but by choosing, gently and repeatedly, to believe that your own reflection counts as proof. That being seen isn’t always external, it’s also consent to witness yourself without flinching.
Thank you, Alexandra!
Dopamine.
Neuroscientists (poor things), exist in a 2D world.
I recall their wild excitement when they discovered where in the brain religious experience happens.
Big deal. Has to happen there. Sooner or later, they would find where.
What they cannot divine (see what I did there?) is WHY that part of the brain is there; WHY we have such experiences.
Whatever we may be, machines we are most definitely not.
As ever, thank you Eve.
Ohhhhh I caught that “divine”, and yes, wordplay always beats a PET scan’s colour map.
You’re right, locating the neural zip code of rapture is a bit like finding the bulb that lights the stage, you still don’t have the script, the actors, or the thunderous applause. The “where” is sophomore-level neuroscience; the “why” drags us into philosophy of mind, evolutionary anthropology, and the stubborn mystery of subjective experience.
Even the dopamine-charting crowd is starting to abandon their flat 2-D atlas. Predictive-coding models talk in four dimensions (time, uncertainty, priors) and admit that a spike in the ventral tegmental area is the beginning of inquiry, not the punch-line. Meaning isn’t a neurotransmitter; it is an emergent property of stories we keep rewriting in the dark. I am more of a poet than a scientist… can’t help it!
What intrigues me is how those stories might have bootstrapped the very circuitry we are discussing. The paleolithic brain that dreamed gods also sharpened cooperation, mended social fabric, and maybe kept a few mammoths from trampling the clan. In other words, spirituality could be a feature, not a cosmic typo, evolutionary Velcro that binds tribes together long enough to invent bread, blues, and, eventually, brain scanners.
So yes, we’re more than machines (I’d like to think), but we do come with wiring diagrams, and the fact that wonder lights up a cortical grotto doesn’t cheapen it. It only proves the hardware was foresighted enough to house the infinite.
Thank you for reading, sparring, and punning in equal measure, Jeremy! Every good argument gives my essay another synapse.
Ohhhh waw…. You never disappoint us in the comments, Tamara.
Merci, Céline!
This is fun, piggy-backing a ride on your deep dives into what we are. I’m big on religious experience having worked with sacred medicines since the late 60s. Ongoing. So I have touched the divine and been touched by the divine. Real as real can be, and leading me late in life to Christianity. Will write on this when I get off my writing butt.
Eliot said - old men should be explorers. I think we all should be so as we age. As the destination sign on Kesey and the Prankster’s bus read
“Further”
And as our neighbour Fred says, on the mend bless him - got to keep moving!
Yes… Further. That’s the only destination worth tattooing on the soul.
Your sacred medicine path sounds like it’s carried you through fire and into the garden. Touching the divine isn’t just ecstasy, it’s rewiring. And I like that it’s led you toward Christianity, not as dogma, but as revelation. That late-in-life turn toward mystery is refinement.
I’ll be waiting for your writing. Don’t let your “writing butt” stay seated too long. The world needs dispatches from those who’ve truly gone Further.
Correct. And I like to medicate when gardening; my aim when we moved here 13 years ago was to have a garden in which I could do this (my Garden of Eden) and now it is so. Bliss. I garden barefoot, and love the feel of earth and grass beneath my feet. Pace the occasional rose thorn ...
Further!
It sounds like a little wonder haven.
I'm always pleasantly in awe of your ability to capture the fleeting with unflinching authenticity and you did it again. I saw myself testing out that same floor just to see if - again - it would give in or maybe not. My foot disobeying all rationality and leaving my self worth defeated and bemused while she waited for me to come back. But - along with recognising myself in the less than flattering mistakes - I am also taking with me some preciou the gifts. The gift of awareness (the sirens beckoning me to recognition) and the desire for conscious spiralling, discovering depths together as - come to think of it - I am already doing right now with you as my muse. With gratitude.
And this… this is the kind of reflection that completes the spiral. Not by closing it, but by deepening it. The way you name both the disobedient foot and the bemused self-worth watching from the sidelines, that’s the kind of honesty earns clarity.
Yes, we test the same floor. Yes, it caves. Yes, we curse the splinters and swear we’ll never try that plank again… until we do. But the difference, the thing that matters, is what you’ve already named: awareness. The sirens still sing, but now we recognise the melody. And instead of stuffing wax in our ears or lashing ourselves to a mast, we choose to listen awake.
That’s the beginning of conscious spiralling. Not escape from the pull, but participation with eyes wide open and dignity intact, even when we stumble. Especially then.
And if in reading this, reflecting on this, you find yourself spiralling not down but deeper, with me, then I take that as the best company. We don’t have to reach the centre to be changed. Sometimes it’s enough to walk the circle together and feel the heat rising in our bones.
With gratitude returned, and the muse-light held up to guide you a little further in. Thank you, Morag!
"We don’t trip… we rehearse. Again and again, we circle what burns..."
Six lines in and I am floored. I could have stopped there and basked in the essence of this revolutionary piece. ( Of course I knew there was magic afoot and so proceeded.)
That circling of what burns is the DNA of the Spiral. That animate engine which is unfolding as a wave. She goes and I follow and telling myself there is a choice. Life is so innately generous in her spiraling and egregiously seductive to boot. She comes around again dressed to kill and whispers, 'Do you have a light?' and I fumble in pockets that I know do not contain one just to keep her there for a moment longer whilst I dance my pavlovian dance and roll my tongue back up from the floor. I do this because she has ignited my life by simply circling back around. She has reminded me that flight requires leaving the ground. She is thrilling and I, after licking my wounds from the last cliff dive, go again. Why? Narrative. OMFG!!! Of course. What is older than our stories? Is anything more hard wired into us than words. In the beginning!!!
Every encounter with the return of the spiral is a chance to add a new layer to the story. A dab of glitter to the brokeness. A celebration of being alive enough to go again. And a trembling with it because we believe in 'this time' with all our being whilst carrying the stories of crash and burn as ashes with us. This is 'the one.' we tell ourselves. (Job, partner, essay we just wrote.) It is not the same as before. We graduated from that level and now is the moment to practice our unlearning once again. As long as there is life, there will be dancing right? And we dive in, arms held aloft on the roller coaster of our days and a scream of delight emerging. In the seat in front my pal has his hands over his eyes and wants to get off. No judgement implied here. Just difference.
There is a story that I think lives here. A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't help myself. It's my character. I am after all, a Scorpion."
Do we have a choice? Can I cage my heart and stop it from beating? My response to your words this morning was instant, impulsive and filled with a series of trembling Yes's, as I read and then wrote. This ignited me. I had no choice but to dive in. My day just shifted. There is flight afoot. Q.E.D.
Your comment composes, Paul! A reply that spirals with the original text, not in orbit but in duet, like you caught the melody mid-air and folded your own lyrics into the refrain.
Yes, that circling of what burns is the DNA of the spiral, and you’ve just named its anatomy with staggering clarity. The return isn’t passive. It’s the seduction of pattern pretending to be novelty. And we know it. We feel the repetition in our marrow, and yet the moment she leans in (desire, opportunity, whatever shape she’s in that day) and asks “Do you have a light?” we’re already reaching. Not because we’re naïve, but because we’re liturgical. We return to the flame because fire is the only element that both destroys and reveals.
And yes, again, narrative. That’s the spell. Not pleasure, not outcome, but arc. We ache not for coherence more than for satisfaction. For the beat drop that makes the chaos rhythmic. It’s why we keep believing this one will be different, not because we are delusional, but because we are narrative organisms. To stop believing would be to stop being.
You brought in the scorpion story, and it lives here beautifully. But what if the scorpion isn’t the villain? What if it’s the truth-teller? The one who reminds us that character, desire, damage — all spiral together, and that change doesn’t mean becoming someone else. It means learning how to carry our sting consciously. To name it, own it, maybe even sheath it when we can. But never pretend we weren’t born with it.
“ A dab of glitter to the brokenness”…. I like it. That’s the kind of wound-wisdom I believe in. Not transcendence through erasure, but radiance through reckoning.
Thank you for diving in, arms raised, mouth open to scream and sing at the same time! That’s the ride. And it’s a privilege to sit beside someone who’s not asking for the safety bar to come down.
'To name it, own it, maybe even sheath it when we can. But never pretend we weren’t born with it.' This is a sumptuous response and as a drummer I adore that 'beat drop that makes the chaos rhythmic.'
And yes to the Scorpion as truth-teller who offers an invitation for us to recognise ourselves, flaws and all, to celebrate that and still lean into a 'diving' practice that continually deepens us.
To that end I will be hitting publish shortly on the longest piece I have ever written. Final tweaks being tended to now (or is that terror filled avoidance?) As none of my subs get emails due to a glitch in the stack matrix, every post I publish is a literal dive into the abyss. Wish me feathers for flight and a mattress for landings.
Feathers wished, mattress fluffed, and wings already visible from here.
You are diving into the abyss while naming it on the way down. That’s what makes it a craft, not a collapse. The fact that your longest piece yet is arriving with both final tweaks and terror is proof you’re doing it right. Terror and truth are cousins, they show up together when you are close to something real.
So yes, hit publish! Send me the link, please.
Your timing is impeccable. Just published and trembling now.
Link shared.
Thank you! I’ll read.
Your words move like a current beneath the surface of things — stirring what I had thought settled. There’s something devastatingly precise in how you name the ache: not for love, but recognition; not for safety, but transformation. I, too, have spiraled — not blindly, but with eyes wide open, knowing the cost and still unable to look away. Your framing of desire as choreography rather than mistake, and ruin as a kind of sacred architecture, resonates with a part of me I often silence.
Thank you for holding up a mirror that reflects not vanity, but truth — fractured, yes, but illuminated. You’ve made the spiral feel less like a descent and more like a pilgrimage.
I am still somewhere between the shatter and the shape, but reading this made me believe — if only for a moment — that the rebuild might be more honest than what stood before.
Sure, recognition over love, transformation over safety. The older I get, the more I suspect those hierarchies were soldered into our bones long before we learned to speak.
… the spiral as pilgrimage, exactly. A descent only stays a descent if we refuse to gather relics on the way down. But once we pocket a shard of obsidian here, a half-remembered hymn there, the path home already carries new weight. Ruin, then, isn’t demolition; it’s demolition with salvage rights.
The hunger for recognition often disguises itself as audience, yet what it truly craves is witness. An audience applauds the performance, a witness testifies that you were real even when the stage lights die. When we spiral on purpose, we aren’t courting spectators, we’re inviting co-architects who can read the blueprints mid-collapse and still believe the structure merits renovation.
So hold that faith a little longer! The rebuild needn’t mimic the former façade; it can rise eccentric, asymmetrical, defiantly honest.
Each of us lives their own battle with their impulses and desires—sometimes winning, sometimes losing. The difference between victory and defeat is the true measure of virtue within us. At times, we restrain desire out of love for virtue, the call of conscience, and moral elevation, or out of fear of scandal, people’s blame, or the law. But when we cross the line of virtue, the fear of disgrace, and the dread of the law, we reach the stage of destruction—not out of ignorance, but with full awareness and a calculated plan.
All divine religions and prophets consider human nature to be molded with impulses and desires for both good and evil. In Islam, every soul is prone to evil (an-nafs al-ammārah bi’s-sū’), yet capable of reform and righteousness through struggle and patience, ascending to the stage of the self-reproaching soul (an-nafs al-lawwāmah)—a conscience that feels remorse after every desire. And when a person’s ability to conquer their desires grows, the soul elevates further, reaching the stage of the contented soul (an-nafs al-muṭma’innah), accompanied by a sound heart (qalbun salīm). Thus, the individual attains inner peace. The sound heart and the contented soul are the focus of God’s gaze, His light, and His blessings.*
The Egyptian-American philosopher Abdelwahab El-Messiri described secular-based civilization twenty years before the draft of the homosexuality law emerged, stating that Western civilization is moving toward the deification of pleasure—and at that point, it reaches a point of no return, like any other extinct civilization.
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* وَنَفۡسٖ وَمَا سَوَّىٰهَا (7) فَأَلۡهَمَهَا فُجُورَهَا وَتَقۡوَىٰهَا (8) قَدۡ أَفۡلَحَ مَن زَكَّىٰهَا (9) وَقَدۡ خَابَ مَن دَسَّىٰهَا (10)
القرآن الكريم سورة الشمس
Thank you for bringing such depth, and for framing desire within a moral, theological, and psychological lineage that spans both scripture and contemporary critique. This is a powerful reply, and certainly a valuable contrast to the framework I proposed.
You write: “Each of us lives their own battle with their impulses and desires — sometimes winning, sometimes losing”. And yes, I agree, desire is not always to be indulged. Nor is restraint always repression. The complexity lies in how and why we resist. When restraint is rooted in love, in self-awareness, in dignity, it elevates. When it’s driven only by fear, shame, or social punishment, it often calcifies into bitterness or hypocrisy. Virtue without intimacy with one’s own impulses can become sterile. But desire without conscience becomes hollow.
The Qur’anic verses you quoted — “By the soul and the One who proportioned it, and inspired it with its wickedness and its righteousness, successful is the one who purifies it, and failed is the one who corrupts it” (Surah Ash-Shams, 7–10) — speak profoundly to the paradox of the human condition. That we are both sculpted and unfinished. Capable of choosing ascent through restraint, or descent through indulgence. But crucially, the divine gaze falls not on perfection, but on the effort to refine, the striving soul, the sound heart. Not the sanitised one.
Where we diverge, perhaps, is in how we frame destruction. You write that when one crosses “the line of virtue” with full awareness, it becomes a planned descent into ruin, a sin with structure. I don’t dispute the danger in that. But I’d argue that not all ruin is a moral failure. Some undoings are part of transformation. Not every spiral down is a collapse; sometimes it’s a necessary disintegration of falsehood. The human story is full of those who had to fall to see clearly. Repentance, after all, is also a spiral, a return with new sight.
As for Abdelwahab El-Messiri’s warning about the “deification of pleasure”… it’s a critique that resonates. Western secularism often mistakes liberation for licentiousness, and freedom for unbounded gratification. But I believe the real crisis isn’t pleasure itself, it’s disembodied pleasure, pleasure without meaning, intimacy, or rootedness. A spiral with no center. In that, we agree: the sacred and the profane are not defined by the presence or absence of desire, but by the context and intention that guide it.
I deeply appreciate your contribution, it’s erudite, thoughtful, and a welcome challenge. This is the kind of dialogue that keeps my spiral sharp, and keeps us honest. Thank you!
Man was created free, endowed with a mind that distinguishes him from all other beings. Through this mind, he discerns the boundaries of good and the abyss of evil. The urge for killing and annihilation is a deviation rejected by reason, conscience, and the collective moral compass of humanity. Similarly, when the desire for gender transformation becomes widespread, and its proponents demand legislative protection, the destruction expands beyond the individual to distort the collective virtue of society. When such a distortion of human nature occurred, divine intervention punished the people of Lot as a lesson for all nations and generations to follow.
We can distinguish between legitimate desires, such as the love for power, fame, wealth, and status, and illegitimate desires that cause harm and destruction to others.
Your definition of repentance deeply moved me:"Repentance, after all, is also a spiral, a return with new sight."This is why God promised forgiveness to sinners: even if one’s sins reach the clouds of the sky, they will find an equivalent amount of forgiveness.
By the way, I deliberately choose to respond despite not having a thinking methodology based on scientific principles. However, I never hesitate to comment, as my desire to learn helps me gain lessons from failure. Thank you for providing this space for participation
Thank you for this thoughtful and candid reply. What strikes me the most is not simply where we may differ, but the care with which you articulate your position, and your openness to engage across lines of belief and methodology. That’s what makes real dialogue possible.
You speak of the human mind as a divine gift, one capable of discerning between virtue and deviation. I agree that discernment is at the core of our humanity, but I would also add: discernment evolves. What was once read as deviance may, in time, be revealed as difference. What was once condemned as distortion may be re-understood as a cry for recognition, or a path toward self-integration. Not all change is erosion; some of it is clarification. And the moral compass, while deeply needed, is not static, it is shaped across generations by conversation, by context, by courage.
You cite the story of the people of Lot, a narrative present across Abrahamic traditions. But interpretation matters. For some, it remains a warning against specific acts; for others, it’s a broader caution against inhospitality, arrogance, and violence. Scripture is not only a mirror but also a prism — it refracts according to the light we bring to it. We must be vigilant not to mistake inherited interpretation for immutable truth.
Your distinction between legitimate and illegitimate desires is compelling, though I would gently question the framework. Desires, in my view, are neither inherently moral nor immoral, they are raw data. What matters is how they are acted upon, whether they harm or heal, whether they spring from ego or from the soul’s deeper longing to become whole. And that discernment, again, requires humility, patience, and room for nuance.
I’m moved that the line about repentance resonated with you. It is a spiral, yes, a return not to where we were, but to a wiser version of ourselves. I believe the divine meets us not at the gates of perfection, but at the edge of recognition. And your acknowledgment of learning through engagement, even without formal philosophical methodology, is exactly the kind of humility that keeps a mind alive.
So thank you, for your generosity, your convictions, your willingness to converse rather than condemn! That, too, is a form of virtue. And this space is better for your presence in it.