The power of what's missing

The contemporary fantasy of completeness sells us a fundamental lie: that the good life consists of having everything, filling every void, satisfying every need. It's the illusion that there exists a point of arrival where desire finally quiets down. But the human mind doesn't function by necessity like a machine requiring fuel; it operates by desire, that perpetual motor that feeds precisely on what it doesn't have.

Desire is always desire for something else, for what's missing. It's not a lack that can be filled, but a force that emerges precisely from the difference between what we have and what we want. This gap is not a defect to be corrected but the very space where vitality emerges. Desire pulses, pushes, mobilizes precisely because it never finds its definitive object.

True fullness, then, doesn't consist in having everything - an impossible and alienating project - but in recognizing and embracing what we lack. A full life is not a complete life, but a life that knows how to name its absences, that can inhabit its voids without desperation, that finds in lack itself the source of its movement and meaning.