What Distorts Desire?

 

A child holds two candies. You give another child three. The first one looks down, then up at you: Why does she have more?

That tiny moment of comparison is the quiet birth of a distortion that follows us through life. We often blame parents, culture, or society for twisting our desires. But a subtler distortion begins much earlier, in the instant we learn to count.

From Words to Numbers

When a child learns words, they step into the world of language and shared meaning, what Lacan called the Symbolic Order. Words separate and define: this is a chair, that is a cat, you are Anna (not Ana). Words create difference, but they also open the horizon of desire, because no word ever fully captures what it names. There is always something missing, something beyond. That absence fuels imagination, love, and longing.

Numbers, however, are different. If words are like containers with a fixed shape, numbers are blank vessels. The number five can hold chairs, years, likes, or dollars. It is pure abstraction, and that is its strange power. Because numbers can be stacked and compared, they do not only describe reality, they rank it.

With numbers, what Lacan called manque, the fundamental Lack, changes shape. It is no longer just an open gap that sets desire in motion. It becomes a quantified deficit. Two is less than three. Ten is more than five. From childhood onward we learn not just to want, but to measure our wanting against the wants of others. We lose track of what we desire and begin to chase the numbers themselves.

Life on the Scoreboard

It is true that numbers bring fairness and clarity. Science, music, and justice depend on them. But when numbers are applied to the sense of self, they corrode.

This is the logic of the scoreboard. We scroll through social media and feel the sting of comparison: a friend with more followers, a photo with more likes. We measure our worth in salaries, square meters, grades, or calories. The anxiety of having less, the hollow triumph of having more—this is the grammar of quantified desire.

It reduces reality to a binary mode, ones and zeros, having or not having. Capitalism does not just use numbers, it weaves them into our very identity, creating a currency of the self. Our days are filled with metrics: productivity charts, credit scores, engagement rates. We confuse our identity with possessions, as if our value grew with the pile of things we collect, many of them not valuable at all. Desire, once a creative force pulling us toward the unknown, collapses into arithmetic. Life becomes an exhausting race to keep up.

What Cannot Be Counted

And yet the richest parts of life resist this arithmetic. The warmth of a gaze. The silence after laughter with a friend. The way a sunset floods the sky with colors no number could capture. These experiences are powerful precisely because they cannot be measured. They belong to the uncountable, the incalculable core of being alive.

The Uncountable Self

The task, then, is not to abolish numbers but to defy their tyranny over meaning. It is to actively privilege the uncountable within us and between us.

This means seeking moments that defy measurement: a conversation that meanders without a point, a project pursued for its own strange joy, a silence shared that requires no validation. It is in these spaces, between the metrics and beneath the rankings, that desire breathes freely again. Not as a want for more, but as a profound pull toward the depth of our own experience.

Our value was never meant to be calculated. It can only be lived. The final rebellion against the distortion is to anchor ourselves not in what we have, but in what we are: messy, unquantifiable, and alive.

Test your desires in my related post here

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