In descentism, my desire is an instrument that directs and guides me toward what I value. While I can stifle and constrain my desires, it is impossible to change them without addressing my values.
My second place was once an experience of endless, insatiable desires. My desires were undisciplined and uncontrollable. I wanted things and I did not know why.
I can look at my experience before I proclaimed, as an ascentist, and I all the power to define my values was remote, far away from me. I valued qualities, characteristics, and accomplishments of people I did not know and never would know. Everything I valued was aspirational, and unattainable. But I repeated the platitude that I could have it all, be it all, do it all. All of this just reinforced the remoteness and distance between who I was and what I valued. It was the distance between these two points that kept me ever moving.
Desire is a tool that guides me toward what I value. As an ascentist, my values were deliberately distant for they served the purpose of imprisoning me here in the second place. Distant, unrealized values are the mechanism of the illness and the medium through with the second place expands itself.
To overcome the illness I cannot rectify my desires unless I control my values. To descend is to reorient toward my true value for permanent, lasting peace. Away from the money, relationships, power, influence, status, accomplishment, and other forms and performances of the second place that deliver only ephemeral satisfaction.
As I rebuild my value of lasting peace, deconstructing my values of the transitory, aspirational, distant peace of the second place, my desires too change. I find myself turning inward, wanting less of the world than I once wanted. My material, physical, and mental desires all collapse, replaced by a desire to simplify and prepare for return.
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