When we make comparisons, there is agreement as well as disagreement, and they are often discrepant. In psychological experiences, these findings are the result of the adaptation of desires to reality. Verifying agreements and adaptations generates fulfilment, assuages and satisfies desires. On the other hand, not being able to fulfil desires leads to the realization that it is completely impossible to make them come true; in other words, the realization of discrepancies generates voids, gaps that are often filled with anger, fear, envy, jealousy and revolt.

Not being able to fulfil one's desires is usually frustrating. When, in addition to frustration, questions are raised, clarifications emerge, antitheses that demonstrate the impossibility of realizing one's desires, purposes or goals. It's enlightening when you accept the impossibility demonstrated. Realizing that you can't do it, that you don't fit into reality, that there are no possibilities or conditions to achieve what you want, what you desire, is educational. Limits are learnt, differences are discovered in supposed possibilities, or even in imagined impossibilities, and in this way we acquire the means and conditions to understand our own reality, our own impasses.

Perceiving what is considered discrepant without questioning the structures that generate it - desire and reality, solution and problem - is like crying over spilt milk, or even imagining that if there were milk it would be spilt, or that the milk needs to be trimmed, contained. These metaphors are reminiscent of a symbolic thought by Nietzsche: “The desert advances from all sides, woe to those whose desert is within themselves”. Nietzsche, despite the classic and arbitrary division between external and internal, elucidates well the break in the continuity of being in the world with the other, as much as he shows the impossibility of this happening if the person doesn't accept themselves.

Not to accept oneself is to empty oneself as an individual, as a possibility of relationship, and consequently as a being - because being is the possibility of relationship. Perceiving oneself as an island, or even as an oasis in the desert, as a point of concentration or a point of diffusion, empties the individual. They start waiting for the other, and this waiting for circumstances is fatal, since it empties relational possibilities and crystallizes survival needs. Back to Nietzsche's metaphor - the desert - the other is transformed into water, into a vital product to be swallowed up and metabolized. It's the desperation to succeed, to fulfil and achieve, to have the other, to have a family and peace of mind, to reach the standard of well-being. It's dehumanization, becoming a robot that does everything that is demanded of it.

It is like a softened desert, which is actually the demolition of being or living in the world, of being with the other. Becoming a desert is the objectification, the dehumanization created by constantly complying with situational proposals and demands: “be happy, organize your family, make the most of your time, don't give up your achievements, insist on your dreams”. Putting purposes before the human being is a way of directing him, which automatically implies denying his possibilities for discovery, his curiosity to seek, his certainty of finding. Unfortunately, our educational systems are based on these premises: setting future goals and directing actions and learning towards achieving these previously defined goals. These are the parameters in families and schools.

Emptiness, depersonalization, disbelief and frustration are well summed up in this desert metaphor, as well as recalling and making us think of the myth of the Eternal Return, another of Nietzsche's great passages about human experience, memory and desires:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!’

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Aphorism 341)