Picture your favourite dessert. Thanks to the lockdowns everywhere, you have not been able to visit the restaurant that serves it. This is playing on your mind for a few weeks. Finally the restaurant opens up one day, and you order it on Uber Eats / Zomato / Swiggy / GrubHub. You polish off the delicacy in no time. Wow, wasn’t that long wait just so worth it?!
Given the relatively small serving size, you immediately feel like having another one. “Not today, but tomorrow surely”, you tell yourself. And then you proceed to keep thinking about the sweet dish sporadically during the rest of the day.
This is normal. We all have cravings, and the cravings may be satisfied – temporarily – but they certainly come back in the future. So desires do beget desires. But these desires only lead to unhappiness eventually (remember The Happiness Equation?). What can we do about this?
Ask anyone who’s had some Biryani to explain the dish to a vegetarian friend. “Biryani and vegetarian? Wait, does that combo even exist? How can you have biryani without chicken or meat balls?” But you ask the same thing to a pure vegetarian and they will tell you that there is nothing tastier than Paneer Biryani. And chicken biryani? “I’m a pure vegetarian, I’ve never eaten meat or fowl, and I can never think of harming another living being.”, pat comes the reply! What vegetarians lack in choice, enables their control on desire, at least for chicken biryani. But dessert may well be a weakness.
Out of sight, out of mind is a good way to keep a check. For instance, Domino’s Pizza stopped delivering to our place a year ago – as they can’t logistically honour their promise of ’30 minutes or free’. The family hasn’t had Domino’s since!
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