You reach the goal, and the next one appears before the celebration begins. Virtology examines what desire asks an achievement to provide, and why some demands cannot be answered by acquiring more.
By Isabella Becker · 13 min read
English editorial edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, translated and adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
The car has been in the garage for eleven days.
You spent two years calculating, researching and postponing the purchase. In the week before delivery, you woke up thinking about it.
Today, you got in and drove forty minutes to work without thinking about it once. At a traffic light, a different thought arrived: perhaps you should have waited another six months and bought the next model up.
The car still does what you wanted it to do. Your circumstances have changed in the way you planned. Yet the feeling you expected to accompany that change has already moved somewhere else.
What is happening when the next “once I have that” appears before you have inhabited what you now have?
The pattern can be difficult to distinguish from ordinary striving.
The goal moves immediately. You reach the number you had named, and a larger number becomes necessary the same day.
The celebration never begins. Recognition of the achievement feels like time taken away from the next stage.
Satisfaction has a short expiry date. The feeling lasts an afternoon, then the familiar pressure returns.
Comparison changes the result. You were content until you discovered what someone else had achieved.
There is always one thing left. Once the debt is paid, once the project ends, once the qualification arrives, you will rest. Years pass with one thing left.
An empty agenda feels uncomfortable. When nothing demands pursuit, you create another target before noticing what the quiet contains.
Ambition itself is not the problem. A goal can express curiosity, material need, creativity or a commitment to others.
The inquiry concerns the promise attached to it. Is the goal expected to change something specific, or finally remove the need to question your worth, safety or place in the world?
Lack and movement in Virtology
Eduardo Casarotto's account of desire begins with lack: an experience of something missing that organizes movement toward a possible response.
In Virtology, the problem is not the presence of desire. The difficulty arises when an object is expected to eliminate an inner incompleteness that it cannot resolve.
“Object” has a broad meaning here. It can be a possession, a title, a relationship, a body, a social position or a state such as being admired.
A goal may therefore carry two expectations. You want the practical thing it provides, and you hope it will finally make a much wider question disappear.
The car can provide transport and enjoyment. It may not establish permanent importance. The promotion can provide income and responsibility. It may not settle every fear of being overlooked.
This is the author's interpretive framework. It should be tested against the particulars of a life, rather than used to dismiss the real difference that housing, safety, income or care can make.
Four forms that desire can take
Casarotto distinguishes four ways in which a desired object can be organized.
Form of desire
An everyday example
What becomes the object
Wanting the object
I want that house, role or experience.
A particular possession, situation or encounter.
Wanting to be
I want to be respected, loved or admired.
A desired state or quality of myself.
Wanting the other's desire
I want that person to choose me.
The position of being wanted.
Wanting the other to want my desire
I want my family to want the future I want for myself.
Agreement about what should matter for my life.
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The last form can be especially easy to miss. You may obtain an opportunity and remain dissatisfied because the people whose approval matters have not wanted it for you in the right way.
Now the achievement has an additional condition. It must happen, and the people around you must experience your desire as their own.
These forms can overlap. The table is a way of examining the expectation, not a set of diagnostic boxes into which every motive must fit.
A sports car and a meditation qualification
The source offers two contrasting examples: Flávio wants a Porsche; Ana Cláudia wants a qualification in meditation.
From the outside, the objects can appear to belong to opposing value systems. One looks material, the other spiritual. Casarotto asks whether both could, in a particular case, be organized around the wish for recognition.
The point is not that either person necessarily has that motive. The contrast shows why the visible object cannot establish the inner function by itself.
A qualification can support meaningful learning. A car can express enjoyment or a practical preference. Either can also be recruited to prove that its owner has finally arrived.
The same caution applies to the source's pickup-truck example. A truck might symbolize power for one person, identity and familiarity for another, and a straightforward work requirement for someone else.
The object is not the diagnosis. Ask what it is being asked to do in the particular life that wants it.
Where the available objects come from
Desire does not develop in a cultural vacuum. Experience, language, memory and the examples around you contribute to what you can imagine as desirable.
If you have never encountered a particular fruit or heard of an ice cream made from it, you cannot want that specific flavor under that description. Once it enters your awareness, it becomes a possibility you can consider.
That does not mean every desire must reproduce a prior experience. Imagination can combine familiar elements in new ways. The useful insight is that the material available to imagination has a history.
Comparison can enlarge that material. A lifestyle you had never considered appears in your feed, and suddenly your own life seems to be missing it.
The question is not only whether you can obtain the object. It is how that object became a plausible answer to what you were feeling.
Within his theory, Casarotto distinguishes desire oriented by direct experience, by information and by intuition. He also connects these distinctions with capacities described through the Evolution Bands.
The source associates a shift toward imagining beyond direct experience with the region around Partial awareness in that model. This should be understood as a proposed developmental account, not an established neurological threshold determining what a person can imagine.
A reader should not conclude that they can identify someone's brain capacity from whether a visualization exercise works for them. Nor does difficulty with an exercise place someone in an inferior category.
The practical criticism is still valuable: a method should fit the person and the circumstances. Some people benefit from abstract planning. Others need concrete examples, trial experiences, accessible instructions or changes in the conditions that constrain them.
A failed method is not automatically evidence of a failed person.
Why another vision board may leave the question untouched
A goal-setting exercise can make a wish vivid without clarifying its function. You may become more specific about the thing you want while remaining unclear about what you expect it to settle.
That can intensify pursuit without making the result more satisfying.
The source proposes broadening experience as one practical response. Encounter an unfamiliar activity, place or way of working when it is accessible. Learn what it actually asks of you and what you enjoy in it.
This is not a literal installation of a new desire in the brain, nor a requirement for expensive travel or constant novelty. A conversation, a small local experience or an affordable trial can provide information that a polished image leaves out.
Direct experience can also show that you do not want something as much as you thought. That is useful learning, even if it produces no impressive new goal.
Change may involve less pursuit as well as a different pursuit.
Adaptation can make a gain feel ordinary
One research concept relevant to the opening scene is hedonic adaptation. A positive change can become less emotionally salient as it becomes part of ordinary life, and aspirations can rise alongside it.
Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky tested a model of this process in a three-wave study of 481 students over three months. Their account examined declining positive emotions and increasing aspirations as routes through which gains in well-being can erode. It does not establish that everyone returns completely to the same baseline after every event. Read the original study.
The car becoming familiar does not mean the purchase was pointless. Its practical value can remain after the first excitement changes.
The question is whether you can recognize that quieter value, or whether only the intensity of acquisition is allowed to count as satisfaction.
Wanting and liking are not identical
Research by Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson distinguishes motivational wanting from the pleasurable impact described as liking. Their work shows why the strength of pursuit cannot simply be treated as the amount of enjoyment an outcome will deliver. The distinction has particular importance in their account of addiction. Read the researchers' account of wanting and liking.
This is more precise than saying that dopamine always peaks before a purchase and switches off afterward. Reward processing depends on circumstances and cannot explain every disappointing achievement through one chemical slogan.
For everyday reflection, a useful question remains: how much did you enjoy pursuing the object, and how much do you enjoy living with it?
If those answers differ, you have learned something about the activity. You have not necessarily discovered a disorder or proved that the desire was false.
When the object is answering a different question
Sometimes the dissatisfaction seems present from the first moment. There is little excitement to lose; the result arrives and feels strangely empty.
The source asks whether the object may have been assigned the wrong task. A promotion cannot reproduce a childhood in which you were seen. A larger bank balance cannot, by itself, create the experience of being able to trust another person.
Financial resources can substantially improve security. Recognition can matter. The point is not that these things do nothing, but that they may be unable to provide a different kind of repair by themselves.
An immediate anticlimax is a prompt for inquiry, not a diagnostic test for an old emotional wound. Exhaustion, depression, unrealistic expectations and other conditions can also affect the ability to feel pleasure.
Ask what you expected to experience and what was actually missing. Keep more than one explanation available.
The deeper premise of a lack of unity
Casarotto's account goes beyond unmet needs in a particular history. He proposes a lack of unity associated with the condition of being a separate individual.
In that framework, rejection or abandonment can touch an incompleteness that the author considers more fundamental than the event itself.
This is a philosophical and theoretical premise. It is not necessary to accept it as a scientifically established account of infancy in order to understand the question it raises: are you requiring life to provide permanent completeness before you can experience it as worthwhile?
A well-supported life can still contain longing, uncertainty and limits. Those experiences need not prove that another purchase, another title or another form of admiration is missing.
Nor should the premise minimize deprivation or trauma. Some needs were not met, some harms require care and some circumstances can be changed. Existential language should leave room for that concrete work.
Let the lack exist without making everything cover it
The source gives its proposed response a deliberately paradoxical form: the lack is addressed by ceasing to demand that an object make it disappear.
Casarotto sometimes describes this as stopping desire. The essay clarifies that he means the pursuit organized around covering an inexhaustible lack, not the elimination of needs, pleasure, identity or purposeful action.
The practical shift is from “What else can I obtain?” to “What capacity would help me live with the feeling that keeps returning?”
In his framework, Humility has a particular role where importance and comparison are directing the search. As dependence on position changes, an object may lose some of the urgency it carried.
It does not have to become forbidden. You may still want it, now with a clearer sense of what it can provide.
This is a direction for development rather than a promise of a cure. The aim is greater freedom in responding to desire, not a perfect state in which nothing is ever missing.
Need, identity and a promise of completeness
The source distinguishes three possible functions of wanting something.
What the desire may be doing
Example
A useful question
Meeting a human need
Rest, safety, contact or adequate comfort.
What concrete support would help meet this need?
Expressing identity or preference
A way of living, creating or enjoying something that matters to you.
Would this still fit me without having to prove my value?
Covering an inner lack
A result expected to end every doubt about importance or belonging.
What feeling am I asking this object to remove permanently?
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Real desires can contain more than one function. A home can offer safety, express identity and carry hopes of being admired. You do not need to assign one pure motive before making a reasonable decision.
The distinction is useful when it helps adjust an expectation. It becomes unhelpful if it turns every pleasure into suspicious evidence or makes material need seem spiritually inferior.
Wanting more sleep is not necessarily avoidance. Wanting a tool for work is not necessarily compensation. You are allowed to pursue what improves your life.
Enjoying what remains after the excitement
There can be value in noticing the ordinary benefits that an achievement now provides: a reliable journey, a learned skill, a more comfortable home or the ability to meet a commitment.
That attention is different from forcing yourself to feel delighted. You may appreciate a practical improvement while admitting that the purchase was overestimated or that the goal did not suit you.
You can also let a completed goal remain complete for a moment. The next project need not be banned; it simply need not arrive as an emergency repair of your right to stop.
If rest feels impossible until everything is settled, examine that condition. Some practical pressures are real. Others may continue generating one last requirement because the permission to pause has never become available.
An inventory of “once I have”
Choose three achievements or acquisitions that you remember wanting strongly. They can be modest or substantial.
Follow the sequence behind the next goal
Write what you wanted and what changed when you obtained it.
Estimate how the satisfaction developed: immediate, gradual, brief, sustained or difficult to feel. Treat the estimate as a memory, not an exact measurement.
Note what you wanted before each item and what you began wanting afterward.
Write your current “once I have” statement. Under it, name what you expect to feel: peace, respect, relief, security, belonging or something else.
Ask whether the goal meets a need, expresses a preference, promises to cover a lack, or combines these functions.
Identify one action that addresses the underlying need directly, alongside any sensible plan for the goal itself.
If your answer is “then I will finally be allowed to stop,” keep that sentence in view. It may point toward a practical limit or a permission that no further achievement can grant automatically.
The exercise should clarify choice rather than make you feel guilty for wanting a good life. If persistent low mood or loss of pleasure is present, seek appropriate assessment instead of assuming that the problem is only philosophical dissatisfaction.
The culture that supplies the next thing
This essay leads directly into God Bless America. Through Structural Americanism, Casarotto examines how cultural models organize desire, define success and make certain objects appear capable of delivering recognition or belonging.
The question is not only why satisfaction fades. It is how the next object is selected, who supplies the image and why the promise continues to feel credible.
A goal becomes easier to assess when it is allowed to promise something specific. It does not have to promise that, after this one, you will never feel incomplete again.
About this English edition
Translated and edited from the Portuguese essay; original artwork retained.
