The simple delight of biting into a small piece of toasted seeded sourdough with a dab of butter on it. To accompany a sip of morning masala chai.

A small little voice subtly reveals what I desire. I have found it easiest to listen to the clarity of that voice when my mind has let go of dogmatic ideas of what is good and what is bad.

Desire doesn’t seem to be fazed by what the mind adjudicates to be good or bad.

When that little voice is met with action, the simplest things can be profoundly satisfying.

As a culture—this educated, pridefully modern, Western-influenced pocket of humanity—we have come such a long way from the joy of a simple life. It is so sad to sit with.

Recently, I have felt complete with living a calendared social life. And it has felt radical to reveal that to people. Ever since I left the startup world, I have noticed how deep the disease of what is normal in the corporate rat race, truly runs!

Like in the concept of “daycare”, where you are handing off the most precious of your creations to twiddle the color of a button on a doomscrolling website that sucks the life energy out of those seeking connection. That has become the norm!

Like in the concept of a “school”, where kids are locked away in a classroom for 8 hours every day, told exactly what they should be studying hour by hour by teachers who sometimes exercise the power they have been given in tyrannical ways to make up for the power that was taken away from them in their days of innocent by other weak tyrants.

What utter disease!

A rotten concept that prepares humans to willingly surrender their agency. To willingly choose a modern, flashier form of indentured servitude for life—like that H1B VISA that ties the belonging of Indian immigrants to their employers.

That eventually disconnects you from the simple fulfilling joy of just a small piece of sourdough with a dab of butter. Good quality bread, good quality butter. In small amounts.

The more you are involved in the process of preparing these small delights, the more delicious it tastes. I can’t even being to imagine what it would be like to have a cow who is a friend, like my cats are friends to me. And drink chai made out of her fresh milk and butter out of it too. Make sourdough bread from scratch, which I haven’t gotten to yet in my journey towards homesteading. So nourishing.

Instead of the long life I lived caught up in slaving away building virtual things, and efficiently eating what others prepared, slaving their own lives away living on concretized earth. Together living enslaved to a piece of paper—usually virtual—with grids in it that dictates what you do moment by moment. That kept me so disconnected from my true desire because what I should be doing was planned out weeks into the future, completely oblivious to what my desire might be then.

Now, that’s not to promote a completely unstructured life that runs after the ever changing desires. The hedonistic “always in flow” archetype that you encounter often in hippie/spiritual circles.

But if the structure in your life is not constructed with due regards to the specific spark of desire in you, I don’t know life could become a roaring adventure of experience and meaning that so many of us deeply long for.

It seems as if there is a dance between the structure and desire. Construct too much structure and desire sneaks around it. Construct too little, and desire will flap you around.

I grew up with plenty of structure without much attunement to the nature of the spark of desire that brings humans alive. When that happens, desire escapes the structure and catches humans by surprise, leading to shadowy, secretive expression of it. There’s plenty of that in the Indian society—one glance at the absence of conscious language about sex in Indian cultural structures and the fact that India is the most populous nation that has plenty of sexual abuse proves the point.

I noticed the same in my reading of the Book of Leviticus leading up to the harassment of the Messenger of Life, Jesus by the most scholarly religious men of the time—the Pharisees. And I noticed it in my year of exploring “intentional dating” where I had structurally rigidized myself against the joy of physical touch, that eventually led to me “falling in love” with the one woman I was not intentionally exploring partnership with.

Desire sneaks around structures that don’t honor it.