What's Worth Wanting
A short series on simplicity — and the very different reasons for it
In pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching 48
This is the first series on the Grammar of Meaning — field notes on how meaning gets made across the world’s traditions. A series is one question, walked slowly through several traditions1, one short piece at a time. This first one is about wanting — and it gets there by a strange back door. To ask what’s worth wanting, I kept finding myself looking not at what these people reached for, but at what they let go. Their simplicity. Because what a person lets go of tells you, more honestly than what they grab at, what they were truly hungry for.
The first thing to say is that this “letting go” — simplicity — isn’t a finish line. It’s an orientation: a direction you keep turning toward, not a place you arrive.
Which matters, because the moment simplicity becomes an achievement, the ego quietly repossesses it: the pride of the empty room, the vanity of owning less. Trungpa called it spiritual materialism2 — collecting renunciation the way other people collect things. The Buddha knew the trap from the inside: six years starving himself in the forest, simplicity taken to the bone, until he turned back. Even emptiness can be hoarded.
It’s more like a clearing — not minimalism, which only counts what’s gone, but a little space you make, and what fills it is yours, and it varies wildly: freedom for one, God for another, love, quiet, the work of a life. Simplicity is the clearing. What grows there is not prescribed.
Which is why this is not a series about a single truism: want less, be simple. The traditions don’t say the same thing because each of these people came at wanting from inside a different world: a different ultimate concern3 — Tillich’s phrase for the thing you’d stake everything on — shaped by a different life, who they were and where and when. The lenses aren’t arbitrary. They’re ground by a life.
Diogenes wanted freedom — because he’d been exiled with nothing, and made the nothing into a fortress; he lived in a clay jar and threw away his last cup the day he saw a child drink from cupped hands. Rabiʿa wanted God — because she’d been a slave, and found the one thing no one could own or take; they say she ran through the streets of Basra with a torch in one hand and a bucket in the other, off to burn down heaven and douse hell so that God might be loved for nothing.
Francis wanted poverty — because he’d been rich, a cloth-merchant’s son, and it had begun to sicken him; he stripped naked in the town square and married poverty like a bride. The Buddha wanted the end of suffering — because he’d been a prince walled off from it, and then one day saw it; he tried the harshest, simplest life there is, and turned back to find a middle way.
And, more briefly: a Daoist who wanted only to return to the uncarved block — the self before desire carved it; an Epicurean — yes, a philosopher of pleasure — who found that bread and cheese, truly tasted, were a feast; a Jain monk who would not own even his own clothes, because every possession is a small harm; and a man named Thoreau, who went to a pond to keep careful accounts of exactly how little a life needs.
Each of them wanted less — and each, underneath, wanted more: of something you cannot hold. Freedom, God, an undivided life. The wanting-less was never the point; it was the price of the wanting-more. Each for a completely different reason.
Set those answers side by side and you don’t get a consensus. You get the range of what a human being can decide is worth everything — which is the only honest gift here. The series doesn’t prescribe the object. It shows you the spectrum, and lets you find your own.
The question was never how to want less.
It’s what’s worth wanting.
Each is told in full, with its own sources, in its installment: Diogenes and Epicurus → Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (Books VI & X, public domain); Rabiʿa → Farīd al-Dīn ʿAttar, Memorial of the Saints (Tadhkirat al-Awliyāʾ); Francis → the early lives (Thomas of Celano; Bonaventure; The Little Flowers); the Buddha → the Pali canon (the six years’ austerities and the middle way, e.g. the Majjhima Nikāya); the Daoist “uncarved block” (pu) → the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi; the Jain monk → the Digambara tradition and the vow of aparigraha; Thoreau → Walden (1854), “Economy.” The biographical scenes — Diogenes’ cup, Rabiʿa’s torch and bucket, Francis stripping in the square, the Buddha’s six years — are told as the traditions tell them: hagiography, not documented history.
Chögyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973) — the ego’s habit of turning spiritual practice into one more thing to acquire.
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (1957): faith as “the state of being ultimately concerned