24/11/2025
Black Friday‘s around the corner and I’m being bombarded with ads for cloud storage, holiday gifts, clothing, agentic AI…even a bionic exoskeleton. Oof!
I skip over all of it. I’m immune. Almost.
Really? A part of me thinks I’m above the consumer fray, but that’s BS. Fact his, I’m as susceptible as anyone. Some people might judge me a poor meditator, but this is when I’ve learned to give myself a break. When I do that, this apparent defeat turns into an opportunity for insight.
There’s a nagging emptiness inside all of us—the realization that everything and everyone—including our precious selves—will one day end. It’s human nature to survive—it’s an instinct—and to do that we keep trying to fill that yawning hole, even though it just yawns wider. This is craving.
No matter how long you practice and how good a meditator you become, the flux of life never stops. Orthodox Buddhists look forward to a state of permanent awakening with no more suffering, but to me that’s wishful thinking. Buddha’s foundational teaching is that everything changes and nothing is reliable. The solution is to stop craving, but craving is instinctive—it’s a hormonal drive, built right into our behavioral system with dopamine and cortisol, noradrenaline and serotonin that modulate motivation, pleasure, anxiety, and inhibition. There’s no escaping our corporeal nature.
However, you don’t have to be stuck in illusions about yourself. Notice that fleeting sense of self-esteem when you buy something that elevates you, or of low self-worth when you can’t afford it. You’ll soon see that the pleasure of gratification is always followed by a need to refill the hole again and again and again.
So, stopping craving is not a one-time thing. You need a counter-instinct to apply when it’s triggered.
But what triggers it? Craving is part and parcel of the survival instinct. It’s also the pathway exploited by marketers and advertisers to seize your attention. If you’re literally dying of thirst, craving will focus your attention and hopefully save your life, but desiring more stuff when you’ve already got more than you need is just a way to obscure your real needs and your true nature.
At the root of craving is willful ignorance. We don’t just acquire what we think we need, we identify with it too. It becomes part of our self image. Drive a Bentley convertible and you’ll feel much bigger than if you’ in a rusty old Ford. Both ways of looking are distortions of your self-image.
By identifying ourselves with what we want, we generate a fundamental misunderstanding about our temporary nature and get stuck in the illusion of a ‘self’ that needs constant refilling with food, skills, relationships, money, praise and god knows what else. We ignore the temporary nature of acquisition itself, thinking, ‘If I get this I’ll be complete.’
Craving takes over so easily because the mind builds habitual loops. One hit of pleasure from that chocolate bar and your nervous system instantly wants more. The cycle of craving leads to action; action leads to temporary satisfaction; satisfaction feeds craving. It’s like a whirlpool pulling you into its vortex in ever tightening circles.
This craving has nothing to do with the objects themselves. Craving causes us to protect the self-image we’ve created from any obvious deficiencies and contradictions. This is the version of ‘me’ that needs to own and control things to survive. My Inner Monk is constantly competing for attention with my Inner Consumer.
Insight can set you free, but even insight can become an object of craving. So can meditation itself. When we expect every meditation session to put us at peace and discount the possibilities of distraction and obsession, we miss the greatest opportunity of all—to see our craving in action and understand it in real time. When you think you know what you need, you lose all curiosity and fill your mind with unrealistic expectations.
