Skip to content

The Wanting Monster

It can be difficult to resist the Wanting Monster when he whispers in your ear.

Robert Rackley
Robert Rackley
— 1 min read

Maria Popova walks through a wonderful new children’s book (with plenty to say to adults) called The Wanting Monster at The Marginalian.

A rueful wanting monster waiting for some victims to corrupt.

Popova begins the post with an attempt to define the condition of wanting.

Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough.

Her definition cuts me a bit, because lately I’ve fallen victim to the Wanting Monster. I don’t have much of an explanation for why this has suddenly become more intense. It mostly revolves around my love for music. There are worse hobbies, but my desire to possess every piece of physical media created for the sounds that I love is sometimes a bit intense. Obviously, it’s not a keeping up with the Joneses, but overcoming my wants seems to be a full-time job these days.

Robert Rackley

Robert Rackley

Mere Christian, aspiring minimalist, inveterate notetaker, budget audiophile and paper airplane mechanic. Self-publishing since 1994. Fan of the open web.

Related Posts

Members Public

R.I.P Dave Kendall

Dave Kendall, creator and host of MTV’s 120 Minutes, has passed away. The British-born Kendall conceived 120 Minutes after joining MTV as a producer, pitching the network a dedicated program for the punk, post-punk, goth, synth-pop, ska, and other underground sounds largely ignored by corporate rock

Members Public

Goran Kajfeš Subtropic Arkestra & Avin Omar

One problem with posting your listening habits on a periodically updated Now page is that those habits can literally change overnight. A couple of days ago, I updated my Now page, only to get deeply into a Swedish jazz EP very shortly after. Though this new 3-song Bandcamp-only

Members Public

Poptimus Prime

Freddie deBoer writes about how poptimism has achieved so much success because of the cultural context in which it was born. A culture that considers it wrong to have standards that can identify one thing as better than another is fertile ground for the elevation of terrible art. That’s