We are all free to interpret our desires as we wish, choosing what actions we believe will lead to their fulfillment. A tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering comes from people who dishonestly desire outcomes that are either not available to them, or for which they are unwilling to pay, or which they would absolutely not find joy in obtaining or possessing.
In life, you can’t have everything you want. The span of possible outcomes is finite, limited not just in absolute availability, but further constrained by the capacity and willingness of each individual. Reality is governed by laws of cause and effect defined before the creation of the world.1 These laws enumerate all possible outcomes. Every outcome has a prescribed path.2 All possible outcomes are not open to all people, and even those that are typically require a greater price than most are willing to pay. You can only have the things that are available to you and which you are willing to pay for.
When you choose to desire possibilities that are not available to you, you are living in a manner contrary to reality, and this is as dishonest as it is guaranteed to cause misery.
It’s also dishonest to dissociate the outcome sought from the path to it—desiring only the outcome, and not everything required to obtain it. For example, those who don’t want to be responsible for the maintenance of a home nor the fiscal discretion needed to save for the same don’t actually want a home, and a single person not willing to pay to find and keep a spouse worth marrying doesn’t actually want to get married, even if they say they do. Most suffering comes from people thinking that they’re choosing what they want when actually they’re choosing how they want to get it. You can’t usually obtain what you want if you are only willing to do what you want in order to get it. If you are only willing to do what you find pleasant, you will probably never get what you want. Those who pursue what they are not willing to pay the price for will either be miserable because they never get it or miserable when they do.
Footnotes
- 1. For all who will have a blessing at my hands shall abide the law which was appointed for that blessing, and the conditions thereof, as were instituted from before the foundation of the world. (D&C 132:5) ↩
- 2. There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated—And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated. (D&C 130:20-21) ↩