i want you to want
this year for Christmas i want you to want. something ridiculous. something you'll never have. something you'll think about for the rest of your life.
I’ll go first.
I want an original set of Louis Vuitton luggage. I find the hard-sided suitcases to be beautiful objects, visually pleasing and also quite evocative in their secret history. But most of my desire comes from a tactile place. I want to feel the weight of each piece. I want to run my hand across the leather and shove the reinforced corners into the palm of my hand. I want to fiddle with the handles and the buckle closures with my fingertips. I want to smell the outside and I want to find mascara and lipstick stains on the inside of the train case.
There is no way I would use the luggage set as my actual luggage. They look very heavy and impractical for today’s overcrowded travel. Too precious in age and non-monetary value to be chucked into the cargo hold. And I will never own a home where displaying these as objet d’art would make sense. Even if I did, keeping them clean and pristine is beyond my modest housekeeping habits.
But, please, listen to me: I do not care. I still want that set of luggage and I will probably always want that set of luggage and I have no expectation of ever getting that set of luggage.
It has become clear to me that humans have lost some of our familiarity with both individual and collective desire.
Politics across the west is utterly devoid of any hope or vision (unless it’s about maximising short-term profit). It is still just a bunch of white guys trying to lead countries as if they were managing a bank branch. Do they know they could have just been bank managers, and taken up fantasy sports if they wanted to play with human lives like numbers in a spreadsheet?
Children and teenagers aspire to be the most popular image on our screens, to be over-photocopied versions of personalities cobbled together from the most inoffensive traits. Honestly, though, why wouldn’t they? Young people are not stupid. They are not vapid. They see, very clearly, that any work not performed for an audience, with perfect lighting, offending no one, questioning nothing, will not pay enough to build an independent, quality life.
Mainstream movies in the last 20 years are so devoid of human sexuality that 90s romcoms look dirty and raunchy in comparison. When the 50 Shades books and movies came out, people lost their minds and fired every tired, woman-hating argument at the story, the author, and at the women who dared enjoy fantasy.
Why are we so afraid of desire?
When I find myself wanting something ‘unproductive’, ‘useless’, or worst of all, something I cannot buy, I tell myself I’m foolish to think about such a thing. But who does that serve? Not me, because I’ve just chastised myself for an entirely benign synapse. Where did I learn to monitor my own thoughts like that, and why?
I suspect it has something to do with maintaining the status quo. The more I get to know and get comfortable naming my whims and whimsies, the easier it is for me to feel the difference between “I am desperate to have an original Chanel tweed suit” and “I am desperate to have a fairly paid job where my labour and time are respected.”
One feels like a lovely daydream. One feels like cruel injustice sitting heavy in my stomach.
Social conditioning would have me dismiss both with a disparaging remark about my intelligence or maturity. Cutting myself off from my own emotions, making myself into little more than a Roomba.
My Christmas wish is for you to let yourself want something, anything, everything. To be curious about that feeling. If you’re uncomfortable with what you want, be curious about that.
I want you to relearn how to just want things not immediately available within minutes of picking up your phone.
I want you to want. And not in an I Want You to Want Me by Cheap Trick way. I want you to want like, “Romeo save me, I’ve been feeling so alone. I keep waiting for you but you never come. Is this in my head? I don’t know what to think. He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said…”
on topic:
Daddy, or the Death of Fantasy by Sam Kriss
Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horney by RS Benedict
None by Heather Havrilesky for her newsletter ASK MOLLY (published today and honestly you should have read hers first and/or instead of mine).