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Chanda

Mar 15, 202614 min read

The key quote from Sasha’s post is this:

The most interesting finding in human psychology, ever, is that basically all of us are born with the wrong intuition about how to be happy. We think that doing enough tanha, enough grabbing, will please us. But actually, grabbing is the source of something like 90% of our unhappiness. It’s a basically dissociative reaction to reality which creates a sense of temporary dissatisfaction, like putting on tight shoes so that later your feet will feel good again. Skip it altogether, as much as possible, if you want to be at peace. It’s crazy how true, and how unintuitive, this is.

Sasha Chapin post

“The two kinds of desire, and one of the most important things I know”

  • Alex note: I feel shy copy-pasting his entire post, but… his main metric for success here will be views/likes/comments, so as long as someone on this page of my website checks out his post & likes it, no harm done?
  • Why copy-paste? So I can add my own annotations, and play with the structure a bit (e.g., breaking paragraphs down into separate lines, for easier parsing of key points)
  • So, note that the original Substack post will be easier to read, as it won’t have my frequent commentary

Let me just bastardize some Buddhism for you guys, in the service of telling you one of the most important things I know.

Alex note: “One of the most important things I know”, such strong signal!

There are two kinds of desire.

It’s hard to tease them apart conceptually.

If you’re treating this like an intellectual-only exercise, you will struggle

But that doesn’t matter too much, because it’s relatively easy to tell them apart experientially.

Consensus-ism stuff here of Feelings are signal, Feelings don’t contain false info, and Layer 1 (perceptions, ultimate reality)

They are tanha, and chanda.

Tanha: Scarcity-based desire. Graspy, clingy. Feels like fighting life. “I don’t want this headache, let me tense my forehead until it goes away.” Perhaps if I get a little more social status, I will finally love myself. Sigh, I don’t really want to do the dishes, but I should, because I want more sex and less arguments. Though I’m full-to-bursting, I’m taking another bite of ice cream. Push motivation.

“Perhaps if I grind for n months, and push myself to do x through a productivity stack, regimenting my days, trying to install new habits, etc, then I will achieve y, eventually”

Chanda: Whole-being desire. The kind of desire you fall into, which requires energy to resist. Your arm is being pulled by the paintbrush. The hours-long conversation that feels like it’s over in five minutes. Getting lost in a book. Slowly teasing apart a really gratifying puzzle. ==Desire that refreshes you when indulged==, rather than leaving you feeling spent and dirty. Pull motivation.

Alex note: Desire that requires no energy, no “grind”, IMO. Like, e.g., I didn’t have to force myself to learn the guitar when I was a teenager, with productivity hacks and etc. I really wanted to learn the guitar, so I spent a bunch of time with it, and enjoyed the process a lot, celebrated all the milestones, etc.

Flow state, “just-doing-the-thing-without-even-thinking-about-it”. Doing stuff from a Heideggarian “ready-at-hand”, non-self-aware place, rather than a “bricked”, “present-at-hand”, looking-at-the-thing-and-yourself-struggling-to-do-the-thing, place. Heidegger, ready-at-hand vs present-at-hand

The most interesting finding in human psychology, ever1, is that basically all of us are born with the wrong intuition about how to be happy. We think that doing enough tanha, enough grabbing, will please us. But actually, grabbing is the source of something like 90% of our unhappiness. It’s a basically dissociative reaction to reality which creates a sense of temporary dissatisfaction, like putting on tight shoes so that later your feet will feel good again. Skip it altogether, as much as possible, if you want to be at peace. It’s crazy how true, and how unintuitive, this is.

In Heidegger, ready-at-hand vs present-at-hand, Guy says “What happened is that a long time ago something went wrong with your deep models of how to be in the world.”
And, “What matters is that there is a solution: you must once again become an embodied being (not object) among other embodied beings.”

(The main reason long-term meditation makes people wildly happy is that it sensitizes you to when you’re doing tanha, thus providing the opportunity to relax most of it, which does beautiful things to the mind.)

This is a huge claim from Sasha, that “the fact that we, by default, think tanha is the way, but actually it absolutely is not the way” is the most interesting finding in all of psychology. The fact that he’s making such a strong claim is very good signal! Although it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true - he might be being a hyperbolic writer, as writers often are. At the same time, he is deep in the meditation journey, and will have seen the benefits of dropping tanha (as he says, arguably the main benefit of long-term meditation is the dropping of tanha)

We also tend towards poor intuitions about chanda. Perhaps we say to ourselves: “my intuition is telling me that I need to become a CEO to be happy.” But it would be weird if that were the case, because the intuition mechanisms in your mind are much older than job titles. What’s likelier is that there are ==certain configurations of experience that will make you happy==. Like “leading a group of people,” or “slowly turning something over in your mind,” or “transmuting reality into an artistic representation.”

this is an awesome point, and really rhymes with what I was doing yesterday re: Drafting my first principles to live by for 3 months → I realised that the ones Claude gave me Claude first principles and “stop start continue optimise” were ridiculous, total abstractions, attempting to point at the genuine configurations of experience that I enjoy, but from a dumb LLM-brained place

For example, I’ve noticed that I’m persistently delighted by affecting someone directly, in a 1:1 relationship. This can be accomplished by writing someone an email, or doing coaching, or cooking someone a meal. If I get creative about where to find this particular chanda, it is all over the place.

Chanda is often a much more broad and like, transferrable thing, like “affecting someone directly”, rather than a specific imprecise label for one specific action, like “writing an email”

The things that satisfy you most will contain ==multiple compulsive delights.== For example, I loved being a bartender, because it contained the opportunity to affect someone directly, and the opportunity to appreciate aesthetic experience, and useful low-resistance exercise, three personal sources of chanda. This made nearly every shift feel like an engaging dance, rather than a boring slog. To someone unaffected by such delights, it would be a horrible job.

overlapping chandas! Multiple compulsive delights!

Chanda is not particularly negotiable. As in: what provides it for you changes slowly over a lifetime, and the change is not voluntary. This is weird, because a shocking amount of human psychology is negotiable. You can reprogram disgust reactions that cause you to be racist or regard avocados as poison. People who are scared of heights can become mountaineers. Dissociated nerds can become sexual athlete tango champions. You can forgive people who have wounded you unforgivably. It is incredible how plastic we are.

But the energy patterns that give us compulsive delight? Mostly static, and mostly not in our control.

Presumably, seeds that were planted at some point, and often takes years of development, and then you have a thing of “this thing feels really compelling to me”. E.g., “I really love music, and finding new music that I love, because my dad would share music with me in the car when I was a kid, and he introduced my to The White Stripes, the first band I deeply loved, and then as I grew up I listened to more music, reinforcing this behaviour/inclination”

This implies how you can figure out your chanda, if you don’t know what it is. Look for the repeating patterns of desire in moments when you are truly happy. Look for the arrangements of energy that compel you. Remember, you are looking for general shapes, like “the feeling of sharing confidences,” or “the knowledge that you have served your duty.” Language here only serves as a pointer to the elemental arrangements of experience.

It’s really fucking easy to “discover” your chanda. Just look at the shit you genuinely love, stuff you do for free, without effort. “Of course I’d listen to an album I love for free, no coercive effort needed”. Etc

Meanwhile, tanha is much more variable, because the mind can create diverse feelings of scarcity. You might have a grippy desire to be skinnier if hanging around glamorously slender people, and then, later on, a grippy desire to be more muscular if you hang out with a bunch of gym rats. Around wealthy acquaintances, you might acquire a temporary itchiness about your financial status, and then later, traveling in a poor country, a shameful urge to conceal your wealth.

So your true desires will show up repeatedly in different guises, unmistakable signatures signed in different colors. Whereas your insecurity-based wants will likely be more environment-specific.

Obviously the separation isn’t completely clean. Designing a fashion line might involve chanda around the creative act, and then tanha around clingily fixating on whether certain colleagues show up to the runway show. But also obviously, some acts have a more favorable ratio.

Some tanha is going to be baked into every job. Some tasks are always aversive, and that’s fine, that’s life, you can’t avoid pain. The trick is to have a macro-chanda life, that will of course inevitably involve some micro-tanha

This is a way more helpful distinction than extrinsic vs. intrinsic, a division that makes no fucking sense if you think about it for more than two seconds, since most of our feelings occur in the context of relationship.

🚨 🚨 👇

This is the important thing:

The people I know who are happiest, most productive, and most creative are people who feed off chanda. They have structured their lives such that their work, relationships, and pastimes repeatedly offer true delight, in ways that also have prosocial externalities. This applies to artists, founders, chefs, housewives, all kinds of people. To me, a wonderful example is Tyler Cowen, who has said he lives selfishly, in complete surrender to his interests, but who gives out tons of money to promising young people, produces a huge amount of insightful writing for free, and so on. Structuring your life in this way requires creativity and flexibility about how to get your chanda, rather than attachment to a specific concept of what your job/relationships/hobbies ought to be.

Of course! It couldn’t be any other way. Look how much everyone loves Alysa Liu. The crux-y thing is that we’re so tanha-based by default, because we live in a scarcity mindset

Does all of this mean that we should never do tanha? Probably that is an overreaction. Sometimes there are chores that won’t be accomplished if we insist on enjoying them. And sometimes there are tradeoffs that totally make sense—like pushing yourself really hard to temporarily do a gig that gives you life-changing money or status, thus opening up future options for life engineering. Occasionally, being moral might require doing some gripping, like, say, holding yourself back from having an affair if you’re in an unhappy marriage with resolvable issues. Also, basically nobody writes a good book without some tanha. “Just follow your bliss” is a good corrective principle for strivers, but infantile if taken as sufficient guidance period.

You need to do tanha stuff sometimes, of course. We don’t live in a utopia - no one is going to file your taxes for you

So a rough guideline presents itself: engage in tanha if it helps set you up for more chanda in your future, or it’s a really good way to increase the welfare of others in some situation. Otherwise, think twice. Filling your days with tanha will lead to a tense face, a writhing gut, and a false life.

If you can engineer a life that’s at least benign for other people that’s mostly chanda, you are doing well. And if you can design a life where getting your chanda is also good for others, you are insanely fortunate. Most materially wealthy people live in a prison, compared to the freedom you enjoy. Be completely grateful that you and the world can operate in joyful harmony.

This post was a crystallization of some thoughts that have been percolating for awhile, but the crystallization was directly prompted by this great Tyler Alterman post: “Chanda is desire that arises from a place of non-tension. It often feels like a relaxed current, but can sometime be strong, channeled, like a great benevolent wave surging outward – and yet it is unattached to outcome. Intensify this style of desire while releasing craving & clinging, and genius springs naturally.” Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

Tyler Alterman tweet

Have u watched a friend get into Buddhism & then become passive, withdrawn, and boring? I think Western Buddhism is turning many of us into NPCs 😬 I suspect this is because of (a) a critical mistranslation and (b) failure to import a very important concept: chanda

Firstly, we messed up big in the 19th century by mistranslating one of the Noble Truths as “Desire is the root of all suffering.” Wrong! This mistranslation NPCifies ppl. They start cutting off all forms of desire & then there’s no motivation to do stuff

Damn, this is huge if true!!!!!!!! If it’s tanha is the root of all suffering, rather than desire

Tanha – the key word here in Buddhist scripture – apparently does not translate to desire. It best translates to “craving” or “thirst”

Secondly – and I think this is so important! – there is a concept of "wholesome desire": kusala chanda. (I’ll call this chanda for short, even though chanda on its own just means something like zeal or intention.) Chanda is a form of desire that does not involve clinging and subsequently suffering. Why is this never discussed??? I barely find any mention of chanda amongst you tpot Buddhist types

No craving, no zeal

What happens if you release tanha (craving) but don’t transition to chanda (zeal), the cleaner fuel? You mostly stop living. It’s like taking medicine for a disease, going “yay, I’m cured!” when the symptoms are gone, and then just standing there forever. Granted, this is what some monks do, but you’re not a monk, bro, you’re here on twitter

What does chanda feel like?

Now the key part: How do you tell the difference between tanha (which leads to suffering) and chanda (which can propel you healthily through life)?

I believe you can feel the difference through simple phenomenological markers. I can’t find any basis in the suttas for this, so now I’m just talking about my own experience, which is this:

  • Tanha (craving): tightness, restlessness, narrowness
  • Chanda (zeal): brightness, steadiness, spaciousness

Alex note - and of course, in a way, simple phenomenological markers are all you have. Like, of course that’s how you tell the difference between tanha and chanda. How else would you know, via intellectualising? Use your layer 1 lived experience bro!

Chanda for me feels like a sort of upward angelic current through my bodymind. It feels impersonal, as if I’m “channeling” something

According to a meditation teacher I spoke to (heavily paraphrased), tanha moves you toward a desire through control.

With chanda, however, a desire arises, and then you surrender to "life," which can guide you to the desire by “noticing synchronicities”

I’ve been making a practice of replacing tanha with chanda by (1) noticing whether my experience right now has qualities of tightness, narrowness, micromanagement. (2) If so, I relax that tanha, and (3) listen for chanda

This switch to cleaner motivation is having very immediate benefits. Try it!

Appendix

Rough ideas/notes

Chanda and epistemics

  • does chanda precede epistemics?? yes!!? because like, it’s pure signal. don’t even need to intellectualise. all you need. And you can use thinking to find a more durable or consistent shaped thing, or way to channel chanda to a better eventual outcome or some shit, but still, no intellectualising, no epistemics needed, to find the initial chanda, boom

Disclaimer: I AM NOT A BUDDHIST TEACHER OR SCHOLAR, I’M JUST A GUY INFORMALLY RESEARCHING HOW TO LIVE THE GOOD LIFE

Footnotes

  1. Strong claim from Sasha here, very cool! ↩

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