The Assumption We Never Question

There's a logic buried so deep in us that we rarely notice it as a logic at all. It feels more like gravity. Wanting something leads to getting it. Getting it leads to happiness. We act on this dozens of times a day — reaching for the next coffee, the next notification, the next version of our life that will finally feel like enough.

Cort opens this conversation with a small, honest story. He almost poured himself a cup of coffee — something he almost never drinks, because it gives him heart palpitations and leaves him feeling genuinely unwell. He knows this. He has known it for years. And yet the wanting was there, insistent, entirely indifferent to his own history with the thing.

He didn't drink it. He made tea instead. But what stayed with him wasn't the choice — it was the moment just before it, when he could see the cycle clearly: the wanting had nothing to do with whether he would actually like the thing. They were running on completely separate tracks.

That's the crack in the assumption. Not that desire is bad, or that wanting is something to be overcome — but that the link we take for granted between craving something and enjoying it may not be a link at all. And once you see that, you start to notice it everywhere. You get to the beach on vacation and you're already looking forward to dinner. You get to dinner and you're already looking forward to your bed. The goalpost moves, and moves, and moves. The future is always, by definition, somewhere off in the distance — and yet we keep evaluating the present from that idealized distance, as if the present is just a waiting room.

What the Brain Actually Says

Richie brings in the neuroscience, and it's striking because it doesn't just describe the problem — it shows the mechanism. The brain's reward system, much of what neuroscientists call the "wanting" circuitry, is not actually about pleasure. It's about anticipation. It's about the drive toward something. And that circuitry is vast.

The circuitry for liking — for actual, present-moment enjoyment — is something different. And it lives in a much smaller area. Researchers have been able to identify a region called the ventral pallidum, so small it's difficult to even detect in human brain scans, that seems specifically associated with the experience of liking. As wanting goes up, liking tends to go down. Not as a moral warning — as a measurable neural fact.

Richie also points to research in substance abuse, where this pattern becomes most visible: people devoting most of their waking hours to obtaining a substance, getting it, experiencing a brief effect, and then immediately entering the agitation of the next craving. The wanting doesn't stop when you feed it. It intensifies. And what quietly erodes in the background is the capacity for liking — for actual enjoyment of what's right in front of you.

Most of us aren't in that extreme territory. But Richie and Cort are pointing at something subtler and more pervasive: a kind of chronic dissatisfaction that doesn't look like suffering, exactly. It just looks like waiting. Always waiting for the next moment to be a little more than this one.

An Ancient Diagnosis

What's remarkable is that this is not a new discovery. Cort points to a passage from the Way of the Bodhisattva, a classical Tibetan text that teachers like the Dalai Lama return to again and again. The passage says, roughly: although nobody wants to suffer, we run toward suffering like it's our dearest friend. And although everyone wants to be happy, we flee from it like an enemy.

The Tibetan tradition has been sitting with this for centuries — the gap between what we chase and what we actually need. And one of the most basic entry points in Buddhist meditation, Cort says, is just getting honest. Not with some ideal version of yourself, but with how well the strategies you're actually following are actually working. Not as self-criticism, but as a simple reality check: is this loop delivering what I think it is?

Because the loop is based on an assumption, and that assumption is almost always wrong. The idea that if I just indulge this craving, I'll finally arrive somewhere — that logic feels airtight until you look at the evidence of your own life. Cort uses two images for it. Salt water: the more you drink, the thirstier you get. A mirage: the more you chase it, the further away it seems, and yet something about it keeps feeling tantalizing.

Awe Is Closer Than You Think

So if craving is a closed loop, what opens it? Not discipline, not renunciation. Something quieter. Richie brings in the work of Dacher Keltner on awe — the research on what happens to people when they encounter something that stops them. Usually we picture awe at the Grand Canyon, or looking up at a 2,000-year-old redwood, or standing under the stars.

But Richie says something that reframes the whole thing: you can experience awe on a garbage dump. It's not about the scale of the external thing. It's about the shift in perspective that allows you to actually land in what's in front of you. And that shift, as both Cort and Richie are careful to point out, is a trainable quality — something that can be practiced and strengthened, not just stumbled into at scenic overlooks.

That little reorientation didn't require anything other than a slight shift in the frame. The annoyance dissolved into something close to wonder. And the practice both Cort and Richie keep returning to — what they call savoring — is really about building that capacity. Not forcing gratitude, not performing positivity, but actually strengthening the neural pathways that allow you to first orient to something nourishing, and then stay with it long enough to let it register.

Cort notices leaves on the ground outside. Fall is here. He likes fall, likes the crisp air. The observation is unremarkable. But treating it as something worth pausing for — that's the practice. Not the content of what you notice, but the act of noticing and staying.

The Fear Beneath the Craving

Cort names two faulty mindsets in this conversation, and the second one is the less-discussed one. The first is obvious by now: craving is the path to satisfaction. We've been unpacking that. But the second goes deeper, and it might be the one that keeps the first one running.

Richie adds that this fear of not having enough is rarely spoken about directly, and yet it's a pervasive driver. It's the thing underneath the vacation fantasy, the relentless ambition, the sense that slowing down is dangerous. And it's worth sitting with, because it suggests the problem isn't just a cognitive error — it's also an emotional one. A reaching that comes from feeling empty rather than full.

The invitation in this conversation isn't to stop wanting altogether. It's something more nuanced: to notice that the wanting doesn't have to be the engine. That there's a different orientation — one of abundance rather than lack — that can carry you through the same day with a different quality of experience. Not because the circumstances changed, but because the frame did.

Right Now

Richie tells a story. He was in Dharamsala with a Japanese scientist, and somehow the two of them ended up alone in a room with the Dalai Lama. The scientist, meeting him for the first time, asked a question that caught even Richie off guard: Your Holiness, when in your life were you the most happy?

Without hesitating, the Dalai Lama said: right now.

Not a past achievement. Not an anticipated future. The room he was sitting in, with the people he was sitting with, doing exactly what he was doing. That kind of orientation isn't passive or naïve — it's a deeply cultivated capacity to be here, rather than always somewhere else.

Cort closes with something personal. He's made a practice of expressing appreciation out loud — telling people, somewhat randomly, what he notices and values in them. The response is almost always the same: where did that come from? And his answer is simple — I was thinking it, and I wanted to say it. It's a tiny thing. And yet both people come away feeling it.

Richie's closing line is the one that stays: flourishing is contagious.

Which might be the most practical thing in this whole conversation. Not a technique, not a protocol — just the observation that when someone is genuinely oriented toward what's good and present and alive, it moves. It moves through a room, through an interaction, through a day. The craving loop is also contagious, of course. We all know that too. The question is which one we practice feeding.

Dharma Lab — conversation between Cortland Dahl and Richard Davidson