Ep 573: Why Is Desire Making You Miserable (Even When You Get What You Want)?

In this reflection, we unpack Vedanta’s most practical lens — the two inner equipments: mind and intellect — and why the root cause of stress, fear, anger, and that nagging sense of incompleteness is desire (attachment). Drawing on the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth and Naval Ravikant’s insight that “desire is a contract to be unhappy until you get what you want,” we show how fear is the desire to keep what we have and anger is agitation from unfulfilled wants. Chasing wants is like drinking salt water: it breeds more craving and more suffering. Vedanta’s antidote is to put the intellect in the driver’s seat, inquire, and turn attention inward to the completeness that’s already within. Watch to learn a clear, daily framework to spot desire contracts and dissolve them at the root.

The Daily Vedantic is a daily podcast and YouTube channel dedicated to the timeless wisdom of the Upanishads (https://thedailyvedantic.com/). Dating back to over 5,000 years ago, the source of nearly all Eastern Philosophy, and loved by Western giants from Emerson to Thoreau to Carl Jung and Alan Watts, studied daily by Joseph Campbell to Aldous Huxley to Arthur Schopenhauer and countless others, The Daily Vedantic aims to make this ancient philosophy as modern and accessible as it is simple, practical — and profound.

James Beshara ( https://www.twitter.com/jamesbeshara ) is a renowned startup founder of multiple companies, a prolific startup investor in 200+ others including some of the biggest startup names on the planet, a husband and father of three little girls, and philosophy student and teacher in Los Angeles.

James also co-hosts Yoga For Your Intellect (https://www.YFYI.co), a biweekly long-form conversational podcast with his teacher Joseph Emmett ( https://www.instagram.com/yogaforyourintellect )

James is a student of Swami Parthasarathy, the acclaimed author of Vedanta Treatise (Vedanta Treatise – The Eternities)  and teacher at Vedanta Academy in Malavli, India. As James says often, when you’re ready for the real thing, Swami’s daily lectures are where the true wisdom and systematic discovery of the world’s oldest continually studied philosophy resides: https://www.vedantaworld.org