I came across this tweet by Naval Ravikant:
“The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”
The most perceptive and skillful among us (the argument goes) are those who best know how to fulfil their desires.
The tweet has appealed to many: shared 10,000 times, saved 11,000 times, and liked by 43,000 accounts. It is a tenet that vindicates both the pursuit of one’s desires and the exploitation of others’ desires, making all participants in our consumerist culture happy.
For the Buddha, a skillful (or “intelligent”) person is one who finds and applies the answer to the following question:
“[W]hat, having been done by me, will be for my long-term welfare & happiness?”
Cūḷa Kammavibhaṅga Sutta; MN 135
Maybe getting what we want out of life will be for our long-term welfare & happiness… Maybe not. Until we understand desire—where it comes from and what it leads to—putting our intelligence in full service to it is unintelligent indeed.
May we desire intelligently,
Simeon
“If the mark be noble, the cleverness is laudable, but if the mark be bad, the cleverness is mere smartness.”
—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Suggested Reading
To Have or To Be? by Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm, one of the twentieth century’s clearest psychological critics of consumer life, argued that two modes compete for every human life: having, which measures a life by what it acquires, and being, which measures it by what it becomes.
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Stop Trying To Be Happy | Buddhism
Why are we never content? Is it even possible to find peace and happiness that last? Over two millennia ago, the Buddha confronted these same questions, and this led him to one of his deepest (and most counterintuitive) insights: that the very thing we’re all doing to find happiness is what keeps it from us.