There is a freedom that comes when you stop needing the world to see you, affirm you, or validate your existence. Once you taste this peace, you realize that everything you were chasing before was just noise.
The desire to be understood is perhaps the most seductive trap of the bunch.
But the truth is no one will ever fully understand you. Because you are a universe of contradictions, experiences, and private wounds that no one else has walked through.
The desire to be admired is perhaps even more dangerous, because it wears the mask of ambition.
A poison that makes you a slave to the admirer. So much so that you forget: you cannot control who admires you or why, you cannot control when the admiration stops, turns to jealousy, or fades into indifference.
Because of this failure, your peace rises and falls with the opinions of people who do not matter in the grand scheme of things.
And that brings us to the last and most subtle one, the desire to be pitied.
This one is engraved in the DNA of blacks and women.
They always want people to know how hard they have struggled. They want others to acknowledge their pain, to validate their wounds, to say, "You have been through so much. You are so strong." And that releases dopamine in their brain.
They forget the truth: no one owes you pity. And even if they give it, it will not heal you. Pity is shallow comfort.
Truly tho, the desire to be known is the deepest desire of all.
Even at that, philosophers still tell us that the highest peace comes when even this desire falls away because no one can fully know you. You are infinite, changing, contradictory.
They understand that the you of today is not the you of yesterday.
Hence to be known completely is impossible, because there is no fixed self to be known.