Chasing desires will not bring happiness

For five billion years, life on Earth has evolved ever more complicated means of ensuring survival. Two of these fundamental methods are the basic idea of the self, and the basic drive to satisfy the self’s desires. If we didn’t have a sense of the ego and the desire to satisfy the ego, we would have become extinct long ago.
And yet, the Buddha realised 2,500 years ago that these basic constructions — ego and desire — cause a lot of pain. The ego feels alone. Desires are never satisfied. We always want more. And life just doesn’t cooperate; it’s just not possible to always keep the pleasant and always avoid the unpleasant. Really, all of us want just a few basic things: success, love, power, meaning, purpose and pleasure. And, of course, none of us want sickness, death, loss, pain, loneliness or grief, as elaborated by J Michaelson in the The Huffington Post.
These basic desires are natural, universal and create suffering. In other words, it’s the thirst for the fulfillment of these ever increasing desires that causes our misery. All of us feel hunger if we don’t eat, and the sensations of hunger are just sensations. But when we get really hungry, we get really angry if we don’t get it. There begins misery.
So the conundrum: The needs most fundamental to our biological makeup are also the ones that tend to cause the most suffering. The Buddha gave us the solution. In one the most unnatural philosophies ever promulgated, he claimed and showed by his own life that it is possible to want less, to be less and to be more contended.
The fundamentals of the teaching is to understand, intuitively and deeply, that ‘sankharas’ — that is, ideas, emotions, people, and everything else — are incapable of providing lasting happiness. Since they are continuously changing, the joys they bring, even though wonderful or amazing, are short-lived. Even when we achieve exactly what we want, it gets stale after a while, and we want something else. And, most subtly but also most importantly, sankharas just happen. There’s no one really minding our mental store -- it’s running on auto-pilot. Stimulus, response; cause, effect. “I am angry” implies “Anger has arisen.”
The solution is easy to describe and hard to experience: just letting go. Letting go of everything that hinders or binds us. At the later stages of the spiritual path, the letting go becomes quite profound indeed, as it comes to include letting go of everything, even our most insightful thought and consciousness and precious self.
It is a fundamental reordering of our most basic sense of the world. And so it does take a long time to really sink in. Can I really be equanimous between pain and pleasure, love and its lack? Can I really let go enough so that I can remember, over and over again, that, contrary to all indications, fulfilling my desires will not be as satisfying as lessening them? The path is “simple. but not easy,” as noted by professor Michelson.
Chasing after our desires and dreams is not the way to happiness, though it may lead to productivity and success. Letting go of them is. This doesn’t mean by doing nothing and renouncing everything we become happy. We can feel the rain, raise the children and construct the skyscraper, without chasing, grasping, holding or pushing away. We can still be deeply involved in the things of the world with a sense of abandonment.