There's an otherness to the iPhone’s light at 1 AM when you're swiping through someone else's #VacationToks desperately looking for inspiration. It's the same blue glow that Buddhist monks might recognize as the color of hungry ghosts. Those mythical beings with enormous appetites and needle-thin throats, forever consuming, never satisfied. We've built entire mega-billion-dollar tech businesses on this light. We've architected our days around it.
Here's what the algorithm knows that ancient philosophy spent centuries discovering: wanting is not about the object. It never was. The vacation, the relationship, the perfect morning routine documented in 47-second clips. These are just the modern vocabulary for an older grammar of Suffering. What we're really scrolling for is the feeling of being the person who has those things. But that person doesn't exist. Not even for the person posting.
The Architecture of Comparison
I’m considering writing a K-drama loosely based on Tokyo's rent-a-family industry. A company called Family Romance where actors play relatives for people who need the appearance of connection: relatives at your wedding, mourners at funerals. ¥10,000 for a grandmother. ¥30,000 for a CEO father, for up to four hours. The whole idea felt too tatemae—the staged, socially correct version of connection—until I realized we're all doing this digitally, every day, renting glimpses of other people's families, careers, bodies, breakfast tables. We're method actors studying for roles we'll never play.
We're method actors studying for roles we'll never play.
The tech industry keeps casting itself as the director of this performance. The Browser Company releases an ad for their AI assistant where the CEO has it write an email to his wife about Christmas gifts for his sisters. Just letting the machine handle the part where you think about your family. They played it straight, like this was aspirational. Like this was the problem we were all waiting to have solved: the unbearable weight of writing twelve words to someone you supposedly love. We're building a world where the performance of care matters more than care itself, where the gesture arrives perfectly crafted but nobody's actually behind it. The generation that would rather have AI write their wedding vows than risk sounding stupid in front of the person they're marrying. The thank-you note, the apology, the "thinking of you.” All of it outsourced to the machine that knows exactly what to say because it's read every love letter ever written and averaged them into something that sounds right but means nothing.
The Buddhists call it *dukkha*, often mistranslated as lower-case-s suffering, but really meaning something more like "unsatisfactoriness," that one grocery cart wheel that's slightly off its axle, that persistent wobble in everything. And nowhere is this wobble more apparent than in the space between your life and the life you're watching through your phone, the gap that widens with each swipe.
Consider the mechanics: You see someone's announcement (job, engagement, pregnancy, whatever). Your brain, that ancient pattern-recognition machine, immediately runs the calculation: them minus you equals what? The resulting number always comes up negative. Not because you have less, but because the equation itself is broken. You're trying to solve for x when you've already decided the answer is less than.
The algorithm serves you the architect's loft in Copenhagen, the founder's impressively wackadoodle morning routine, the writer's romantic cabin upstate where they're finishing their third novel. Each swipe is a small, piercing violence. Here's what you're not, here's what you'll never be, here's the party you weren't invited to, happening right now, forever.
The Paradox of Digital Desire
There's something insidiously sublime about how precisely we've engineered our own dissatisfaction. Previous generations had to work for their envy: attend parties, read society pages, peer up through Manhattan apartment windows at night when they're lit up. In 2025, we've perfected dissatisfaction: digitized, frictionless, always-on.
But here's something advertisers understand that philosophers sometimes miss: Desire. Doesn’t. Actually. Fucking. Want. Satisfaction. Desire wants desire. The moment before you click "buy now" is more pleasurable than anything that arrives in a box two days later. The fantasy of becoming someone else is always more vivid than the reality of remaining yourself with better accessories.
Desire. Doesn't. Actually. Fucking. Want. Satisfaction. Desire wants desire.
This is what the Buddhists had another word for: *tanha*, the thirst that creates more thirst. Not the absence of water but the sandpaper throat burning itself, the way a lighter-fluid flame feeds on whatever you offer it and asks for more. You think you're shopping for a life but you're really just teaching yourself new ways to be dissatisfied with your own.
You think you're shopping for a life but you're really just teaching yourself new ways to be dissatisfied with your own.
The Curated Surface has become our shared language. We mistake the documentation for the experience, the caption for the feeling, the grid for the life. This is what the old Zen teachers meant about the finger and the moon. We’re so busy admiring everyone's pointing technique that we've forgotten to look up. And even if we could have it, their perfect kitchen, their book deal, their mysteriously toned arms. The mind that wants is... a broken cup. Nothing stays; everything spills through.
The Currency of Joy
I think about a co-worker who deleted Instagram after realizing she was experiencing her own life as potential content. "I couldn't eat a meal without considering its documentary value," she said. This is the tax on modern existence: every moment bifurcated into the experience and its potential representation, the living and the proving of life.
Here's what Epictetus knew that my therapist is trying to tell me for $200 an hour: it's not the thing that disturbs you but the story you tell about the thing. That couple's anniversary trip to Santorini, Singapore and Saint Tropez doesn't actually mean anything about your failed relationship. Their success doesn't diminish yours. The universe isn't keeping score.
But we've built an entire civilization on the opposite premise. That everything is scarce, that someone else's joy is your loss, that we're all competing for the same finite amount of happiness doled out by some cosmic financial AI app.
The antidote isn't positivity. Fuck positivity. It's something harder and stranger: *mudita*, sympathetic joy, the practice of letting someone else's good fortune wash over you like an unexpected summer thunderstorm that blesses you with the ‘this must be how tropical fish feel’ as they effortlessly glide through coral reefs. Weather that you can stand in and enjoy too. Not the performative "yasss queen" of the comments section but something quieter, more revolutionary. Actually meaning it. Actually feeling their happiness as a kind of communal well, a resource for all, a reminder that joy is possible, that it exists, that it's moving through the world right now touching people who aren't you and that's not a tragedy but a kind of... proof.
But joy. Real joy, not its performative Pixar cousin Happiness. Operates on an entirely different frequency. Joy doesn't photograph well. It sucks at self-promotion. It has no elevator pitch. When the meditation teachers talk about *mudita*, they're describing something that gains value by being given away, an economy that runs counter to every scarcity model we've been taught.
The Different Contract
This requires a different contract with reality. You have to unlearn the cult-like belief in the economics of scarcity, the zero-sum game where someone else's win is your loss. You have to locate what you're actually seeking. Not the apartment but the feeling of security, not the relationship but the true sense of being chosen, not the career but the belief that your life has meaning. These are states, not achievements. They're available right now, in this moment, in the quality of attention you bring to whatever's in front of you.
This is why *santosha*, that Sanskrit concept of radical contentment, feels so damn alien to my ‘modern’ mind. It's not about settling or giving up. It's about recognizing that the race you're running has no finish line because the track is a möbius strip. You're chasing your own tail at Wile E. Coyote speeds, with better metrics and more sophisticated tracking.
The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh once wrote that the miracle isn't walking on water; it's walking on earth. But we've made the earth itself feel... insufficient. We've convinced ourselves that everyone else is obliviously levitating to “99 Luftballons” while we're stuck with gravity.
The mystics all say the same thing different ways: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Your life doesn't change. Your relationship to your life changes. The circumstances stay exactly the same but something shifts in how you hold them, like that moment when you stop fighting the bicycle and trust the balance, and suddenly you're not struggling to stay upright, you're simply, magically, riding.
The Luminous Return
And here's something that sounds like a vintage paper greeting card but turns out to be true: when you stop trying to live other people's lives, your own becomes suddenly luminous. Not better, not transformed, just actually visible for the first time. Like water finding its level when you stop anxiously stirring it. Like silence after noise. The joy that arrives isn't the opposite of suffering. It's what happens when the wanting finally exhausts itself, when the Algorithm of Desire finally crashes and you're left with just this: your actual life, the one you've been living all along while you were busy watching everyone else's.
Everything you've been searching for in their stories is already here in yours. Not as achievement but as presence. Not as comparison but as attention. The moon has been there all along. You just have to stop watching everyone else point at it and finally, finally look up.
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