Consider the following comments on desire.
The thing we crave loses its shine the moment it becomes ours.
An economy built on desire must keep us slightly unhappy to keep us spending.
We are taught to want things long before we are taught to ask why.
Desire is the engine of every achievement and the author of every excess.
A culture that promises to satisfy every want has guaranteed itself an endless market.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that desire is the source of both human striving and human dissatisfaction, and that modern culture deliberately cultivates the second to profit from the first. Open by granting that desire drives ambition, love and creation, and that a life without wanting would be inert. Then complicate it: an economy organised around consumption has a stake in keeping desire perpetually unmet, so it manufactures wants and calls them needs. A strong third move distinguishes desires that originate in us from those installed by advertising and comparison, asking how much of what we want is truly ours. Caution: resist both the ascetic conclusion that desire should be extinguished and the consumer faith that fulfilment is one more purchase away.