I was watching football on a plasma screen TV when I heard the angelic voices softly intoning. They came from behind, growing in strength until I could make sense of the words, and then the lyres started. Soon a man began to sing.
“You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you find, you get what you need!” No, it wasn’t a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep or a religious revelation. It was the Stones, innocently playing on the jukebox in Rand last Sunday morning.
Since that fateful day I’ve had occasion to ponder the significance of this song’s lyrical content. For years I had taken its outlook on life, so plainly sung, as the literal truth. But then I looked with my eyes, and I thought with my mind, and I started to question.
What do we really need? On one level — food and shelter. On another level — friendship, love and acceptance. But aren’t these needs also the same as our wants? They’d better be, or else we’d never trouble ourselves to go out of our way to secure those needs. So is it possible that our wants and our needs are one and the same?
Not necessarily. I may want a brand new Cadillac, but I’ll find a way to carry on without one. It’s not the Cadillac’s smooth ride I crave so much as what the car stands for: Status, success, power. But I don’t really “get” these things along with the suicide doors and black leather interior; I could be the same trashy Tennessean as I always was. So when we get what we “want,” we never get what we “really” want, because what we “really” want is not to be found anywhere on earth. We “really” want our Platonic ideals, and the material things with which we surround ourselves are just substitutes for these concepts, mere coping mechanisms to try to fill the bottomless holes of desire with which we’ve been born and into which we’ve been conditioned.
Some, finding this state of existence unacceptable, renounce the world, become Buddhist monks, and spend their whole lives cultivating a mental attitude that they hope will let them break out of the wheel of desire. But isn’t the desire to extinguish desire just that — another desire? It is indeed, so there is no way out, no escape. Like lab rats in an Edgar Allen Poe-sanctioned psychology experiment, we scurry about the maze of our lives, cornered in on all sides by the unscalable walls of nature and nurture, slaves to filling the gaping pit at the center of the room with whatever detritus we can find, watching the pendulum of our days tick by.
Without divine assistance, this problem is pretty much unsolvable, so it makes no sense for us mere mortals to stress out over it. Be thankful for what you have and content with what’s “good enough.” Take pleasure in the small things in life that make you stop and wonder. Don’t ever let yourself think you “can’t get no satisfaction.” However you choose to get by is fine by me. Just don’t move my cheese.
—Jesse Jones is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. He can be reached at jesse.g.jones@vanderbilt.edu.
