Stop Making Sense

My friend recently told me he stopped going to therapy to try solving his problems with ChatGPT instead. How’s it going? I asked. “Well, AI gives me a lot of smart, reasonable advice,” he said. “But it turns out I’m not a very reasonable person.”

We often think our pain comes from not knowing enough. So we chase tips, tricks, and diagnoses. But most suffering doesn’t come from a lack of data. It comes from what the Buddha called craving: an obsession with seeking happiness in the wrong places. And the trouble is: when we’re caught in craving, rationality won’t save us. It’s actually just another form of craving.

Take social media. We read about dopamine and the dangers of comparison, but the moment a notification pings, we obey anyway. Or take difficult emotion. We hear about “sitting with the feeling,” but before we even notice, we’ve turned to distraction: Netflix, email, another task. Anything but the feeling itself.

There’s a Buddhist story of a king who asks a monk to explain the dharma. “The world is a slave to craving,” the monk says. “Slave?” the king protests. “I’m no slave. I’m master of my choices.” The monk replies, “What if a neighboring kingdom had a lot of gold and a weak army?” “Oh,” the king admits, “then I’d have to conquer it.” “Then you too are a slave to craving,” the monk says.

At this point, most of us ask: So what do I do about craving? But that’s just more craving — the craving to stop craving. The truth is: craving isn’t something to fix. It’s something to understand. Just notice the craving when it comes. How does it feel in your body? Where does it tighten, where does it pull? See that it comes and goes. See that it hurts.

The more you look, the more you see there’s nothing solid there. As the Buddha said, craving is empty, like foam on the waves. You neither have to fight it nor obey it. And you don’t have to make sense of it. You’ve probably made too much sense of it already, to be honest. In the end, it’s presence, not sense, that will save you.

Tomaas, "Modern Addictions" (2016)