On The Nature of Desire; also stuff about girls' last tour

the ending of the manga had the two main characters die. they were travelling to the top of this city, since they heard from their grandpa however many years ago before he supposedly died that they should go there, and the characters spent the entire 47-chapter story travelling to the top. the tone of the story was peaceful, in a way, because the characters had a big appreciation for all the good things that happened to them. but despite that, the journey was very hard and they were very tired and hurt and had to give up lots of things to make the journey. and at the end of it, instead of seeing a human civilization or food or warm clothes at the top, there was nothing there. the story ends ambiguously as to whether or not they really died, but we can assume they did.

the last few chapters were especially taxing because the characters kept losing everything they valued. they had to leave behind their vehicle which accompanied them on the whole journey; they left behind books one of them wanted to start a library with like her grandpa; they had to burn their diary for fuel so they could stay warm; and by the end of the journey they only had their clothes and a bit of food left. to reach the top of the city, they walked a huge flight of stairs in darkness, supposedly for a lot longer than just a few hours. it sounds exhausting, and they ended the journey by just lying down and eating a little food and then sleeping and probably dying.

putting myself in the position of the main characters, at the top of the city, after working that hard to obtain something that actually would end up killing you, i wouldnt even know what kind of emotions they were feeling then. dying from hunger or thirst or cold isnt a fast process (especially when you still have food and some fuel remaining), so you have to lie down with the intention of giving up. i don’t want to say it sounds “miserable” because that word feels like lots of sobbing and crying which they weren’t really doing, but it feels something different. “hopeless” for sure, but maybe “sad” is just the best word to put it. because even “accepting” of something like that can still be “sad”. how would you even react if your friend died before you, leaving you there alive for however much longer? i guess you would just keep sleeping and waking up and sleeping until youve died.

but they had a bit of food left, so why don’t they return where they came from? this also is a weird situation because there isnt anything they can return to. there arent any other people in this world besides individuals scattered extremely sparsely, and the entire world is frigid and theres nobody growing any new food nor are there any animals they can hunt so they would definitely run out of food eventually, so dying up at the top sounds the most acceptable situation. but that word “eventually” is a keyword here, as in “things will eventually go bad so there is no point in trying”, because its something the manga also touches on.

the concept of “eventually” is something ive been struggling with recently, too, because we are all eventually going to die. the world that we experience and the pleasures that we love will all eventually end, regardless of if thats in an hour from now or in 80 years, so why do we put so much effort into sustaining so much bad things so that we can keep obtaining them? i like to read books and eat cookies, but i cant really “appreciate” eating cookies right now… cookies are something that can only be enjoyed while youre actually eating them. further, its difficult to tell sometimes if i want to eat cookies, or if i instead want “the sensation of wanting to eat cookies” to end. do i actually like eating cookies? this is probably a little too personal to share, but this idea is also why i don’t like masturbating or sex in general: it seems too much like “i only enjoy this action so that i can relieve myself from wanting to perform this action”. the actual benefit of the action, the pleasurable sensation of sex or masturbating, isnt even that good. and im thinking more, “do i feel the same way about the sweet chocolate chip cookies i like to eat?” im certainly not celebrating or crying tears of joy when cookies touch my tongue, its just… a dull sensation in my brain that tells me that “i like this thing; i want to do it more”.

is this necessarily a bad thing? can a thing be enjoyed just for the sake of relieving a desire? if we assume “yes”, then this allows us to enjoy things that are trivial, fleeting, and ultimately forgettable, like eating cookies. though if we assume “no”, then this leads us frightingly fast into suicidal ideation because everything including “hunger” and “the desire to live” can be framed as “the absence of something” with the solution being “wanting to avoid the absense of something” (like how cookies are a solution to “wanting to stop wanting cookies anymore”), to which a very easy ultimate solution is to kill yourself to relieve yourself of all absense-based desires.

but certainly, some things are pleasurable without being “absense-based”, like wanting to be warm. having a soft electric blanket wrapped around you during a cold night is pleasurable and nice and comfy. “being warm” is not secretly “not wanting to be cold” (or is it? i don’t know… all i do know is that i like to be warm; is it secretly because i don’t like being cold? i cant tell). this is probably the case with masturbating too (i only said that, for me, the “purpose” of masturbating is just to “relieve the desire to masturbate in the first place”, but i have to assume that most people don’t feel this way). i don’t know how many of my desires are real things versus how many are not real.

things get more complicated when we talk about abstract desires, like “wanting to get a PhD”. abstract desires are especially relevant to girls’ last tour because lots of these are only able to be realized in the context of other people. “success”, “fame”, “fortune”, “awards”, etc. are all decomposeable into two categories: sensation-based desires or people-based desires. “fame” will help me obtain good sensations, like yummy food and comfy clothes, but it will also fill some fuzzy spot in my chest that tells me that the opinions of other people matter to me. this is my motivation for getting a PhD: if i didn’t get a PhD, i feel like i would always have an empty sensation in my chest about how i missed this opportunity. i could definitely get a high-paying job in industry right now, so its not like a PhD will help me obtain nice sensations (and regardless, i can still obtain nice sensations even with a low-paying job). but a PhD signifies a status symbol that other people respect; it tells people that i am knowledgeable about my field; it tells people that i am something special. but these only exist in the context of other people, really.

in girls’ last tour (or, more broadly, in a world without other people you care about), there cannot be “people-based desires”, so there can only be “sensation-based desires”. the manga does this a lot, where they have the main characters drinking coffee and eating chocolate and talking about how yummy it is, and how warm they are from their warm bath, and how nice the water feels, and so on. while reading i was thinking to myself “how much of my own desires are rooted in other people? if i was in a world with no people in it except me but with lots of food and warm blankets, would i still program my website just for the sake of accomplishing a goal and having an interest in computers? i think so. but would i spend several years researching big projects and writing reports on them just so that i could tell myself that i have a phd now? no.”

this is harder to justify though when you look at the two other humans in the story, the map-maker and the pilot. both are trying to accomplish “goals” that are only for their own sake. they never intended to use their goals for the benefit of other people, nor did they ever believe there were other people in the first place. i tried to include that same thing in an example in the last paragraph with me and my website. “doing it in the absense of people” means its not a people-based desire, but can it be considered a sensation-based desire? this is harder to tell, because earlier in the blog post i described “not getting a PhD” as “making my chest feel empty”, which is distinctly physical. if i go too long without programming something, i feel like my heart is racing and i feel my stomach turn, which are physical sensations. could “reading a book” be a physical desire, or is self-fulfillment something else entirely? i don’t know.

returning back to “eventually”, the last few chapters of the manga had one of the characters use their journal as fuel for a fire. they were scared that they would lose the memories of the journey if they didn’t have a physical reminder of it, which happened to them before that point with their grandpa. this is also a scary idea because, for me, theres lots of things that are important to me that i cant really recall… things like small details on my dad’s face, or how my own grandpa’s house looks. the concept of “forgetting something” is very frightening, because it makes it feel like those things never happened in the first place. although, in the manga, soon after destroying the journal, the characters would die. it seems like the details of the journey was inconsequential if they were just going to end up dead regardless, right?

the previous situation “feels bad” to me because the length of time between “destroying the journal” and “eventually dying, making the journal meaningless in the first place” was a week at most. but in a different ending of the manga, where there’s a prosperous town at the top of the city with lots of yummy food and warm blankets, where each character lives until they’re 120 years old, does the length of time really matter, here? if their first conflict was resolved, they would still experience countless other conflicts over and over again until their deaths. does the “yummy food and warm blankets” justify all of that?

i don’t really know. (to preface: i am not depressed [i don’t think] and i am definitely not suicidal, so don’t worry about me or anything, im just thinking about things.) in my own life, ive been asking myself this a lot. “what am i working so hard for? is the benefit to living really more than the deficit? whats the point of desiring things if its going to end one day? are sensation-based desires something i should be maximizing because they are the only tangible desires?” i have also thought about the concept of suicide (again, i am not suicidal, i am completely fine), and about what things are stopping me from ending my own life. i think the biggest things are the effects my death would have on other people; unfortunately for me, i have at least a few people who would be affected very negatively if i died, so it would be mean of me to do that to them. but this then asks me: “if all of my (closest) friends and family dissappeared one day, would i then be ok with killing myself? is my interest in computers and my desire for warm blankets and yummy food really enough to offset the toils of everyday life?” i don’t know about that part. things are really complicated and i don’t know a lot of things. I’ll need to think more about it.

thanks for reading my post. actually, this one was embarrasing. theres lots of arguments i missed here that could probably disprove everything i was saying. the part about “self-fulfillment” desires kind of breaks apart my argument about physical vs. people-based desires, but rewriting the post is hard so I’ll keep it in as it is. while reading the manga i just had a lot of emotions about “accepting youre going to die soon” and “in the real world, whats stopping me from ending my own life in order to save myself from the future?” the manga characters talked about how “the desire to go to the top of the city” led to their deaths (and that they were much more likely to lead good lives with food and blankets if they stayed near the base of the city forever), but that they still wanted to go up there because “that was their goal”. its a human-istic phrasing of stuff, where you cant really justify things more than “we do this because we’re human”. despite the fact my future PhD will literally be meaningless 500 years from now, let alone ten million years from now, i still want to pursue it because its important to me right now. does that make cookies also ok? i want to relieve my desire right now, and thats not a bad thing? i hope it is, because this would be a pretty good justification for living: “the reason im alive is because i want to be”. nothing else to it, plain as that. instead of trying to decompose that into more intrinsic atoms and axioms, i should just take it as face value. im going to do the things that i want to do: if i ever do something i don’t want to do, like taking out the trash or giving a presentation, its becasuse that will ultimately lead to something i do want later on. theres always a chance that it secretly leads to my death, like how climbing the city led to the deaths of chito and yuuri, but they wanted to climb the city, and not climbing the city would have made them sad. so im going to do things that i want to do.

-Sophie