Maxim Pomytkin, mentologist

Desire is a reaction of the human psyche arising from the discrepancy between a person’s representations of the ought (the due, the normative, the required - how it should be) and the actual (how it is). This reaction manifests as psychological tension, which motivates a person to eliminate it.

The formation of the representation of the ought is influenced solely by a person’s mentality. The representation of the actual is formed based on the evaluation of reality through the prism of their mentality.

Intentionally or not, this model, in terms of influencing representations of the actual, is used by people whose work involves impacting others. For example, the reflex of buyers to the smell of freshly baked bread can trigger a feeling of hunger, leading them to purchase more products at the store that "arranged" this; opposition politicians may create traffic jams right before elections to increase societal dissatisfaction, while the authorities, in contrast, block planned water and power outages. By manipulating public opinion, politicians may influence election results. There are numerous examples of such deliberate or accidental influences on the perception of reality.

Using the mechanism of desire formation, mentology can create desires by influencing a person’s representations of the actual. By actualizing certain values of the person, one can impact both the formation of the ideal representations and the path of further "desire specification."

A person will have no desires only if their representations of the ideal and the actual fully coincide. When these representations do not match, the person, stimulated by psychological tension to eliminate the contradiction, begins searching for the "root of the discord."

In the initial stage of this search, the person recognizes the tension but is unaware of its cause. Often, one might hear phrases like: "I want something, but I don’t know what." Referring to their feelings and/or experience, the person transforms this abstract desire into an indefinite wanting, such as "I want to eat," "I want to know," etc., and then further specifies the wanting. This process of desire specification occurs under the influence of the person's mentality, sensations, experience, and representation of the actual. Sensations can provide information about the needs of the body, experience offers behavioral patterns to satisfy the indefinite wanting of this kind, and mentality helps both to find options and evaluate them. Even if little time passes between the "birth" of the contradiction between the ought and the actual, and the sufficient specification of the wanting, the specification usually proceeds in several stages. The process of desire specification concludes with a sufficient level for active actions to satisfy this wanting.

Example

• Reality: The person feels tension from wanting to eat. They are at home. There is an average set of food in the fridge, as well as a store and restaurant within walking distance.

• Mindsets: "Resources need to be conserved," "Everyone wants happiness," "You shouldn’t look worse than others," "You need to be strong," "You should strive for the best," "Everyone wants to live."

• Experience: Average experience of food consumption;

• Sensations: The person feels hunger, and to some extent, the sensations suggest what is better to eat.

When the desire is sufficiently specified for action, the person takes action to satisfy it. As a result, the representations of the part of reality that caused the tension align with the representations of the ought, and the tension is relieved. 

However, there are other possible scenarios.

Scenario 1: The Want Cannot Be Sufficiently Specified for Satisfaction.

The person has a set of mindsets and experiences containing templates for realizing the values embedded in those mindsets. As long as they are in a familiar situation, realizing values using existing experiences is not difficult. Such situations are called “comfort zones.” But there comes a moment when a person finds themselves outside a “template situation”: the mindsets remain the same, but there is no experience for realizing them in the new situation, and consequently, the person cannot sufficiently specify the want. Without a way to satisfy their want, they are lost. Continuing with the food theme, consider stories of city dwellers lost in the forest: their experience simply lacks information on what is safe to eat and what is poisonous.

In this scenario, the “problem” of desire lies in the absence of an appropriate behavioral template, a concrete method for realizing the value. The person can acquire a new behavioral template from someone else (advice) or create it themselves. One can imagine a situation where someone is forced to generate their own experience, forming a desire in their mind without existing satisfaction templates (e.g., this might occur in training sessions).

Scenario 2: The Want is Sufficiently Specified, but the Person Cannot Act.

In this situation, the person knows exactly what they need to do to satisfy the want but does not act for some reason. Sometimes the reason lies in reality. For example, being in a desert without water, one can clearly specify the want to “drink any water,” but if there are no water sources within 100 km, satisfying this want is impossible. Sometimes the reason is “in the head”: the satisfaction of want (1) (realizing value (1)) conflicts with realizing value (2), which is more important to the person, and thus value (2) “blocks” the realization of value (1). This is a situation of lack of experience: the experience of realizing value (1) without compromising the more important value (2).

The actualization of value (2), in this case, leads to the blockage of satisfying the desire caused by value (1). A possible method to discredit this situation could be problematization: “Why have a value that one cannot realize?”

Scenario 3: Actions are Taken, but the Want is Not Satisfied.

This is a situation of incorrect specification of the want. It can occur when the desire was caused by value (1), but during specification, a more important value (2) was considered. As a result, despite the realization of value (2), the tension created by value (1) persists. A similar situation can arise if there are obstacles to realizing value (1), leading to the realization of value (2) instead. A vivid example is people who quit smoking. Even after quitting smoking using Allen Carr’s method, they experience tension and, due to incorrect specification of the want, try to reduce tension by eating more than usual. Conversely, smokers who go on a diet often smoke more during the diet.

This third scenario is interesting because it allows one value's tension to lead to the realization of another, possibly "implanted" value, thereby not just blocking undesirable actions (behavior) but replacing them with others.

In all three scenarios of “problematic” desires, the gap between the ideal and the actual remains. As a result, the tension is not eliminated, and since it is a stimulus for its removal, the person continues to seek ways to relieve it.

Fundamentally, the problem can lie in the representations of the ought (“wanting the unreal”), or in the representations of the actual (“the world as I imagine it”), or both. There are three “exit” options (satisfying “problematic desires”):

1. Obtain or generate new behavioral templates (experience) that allow for the realization of the values causing the tension.

2. Change the reality that prevents the satisfaction of the desire.

3. Reevaluate values.

The original publication of this article was made in Russian on the Association of Mental Approach (Mentology) website in 2018.

Translated from Russian by Andrey Kazantsev in 2024.

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