Because the world will always dangle another shine. But you don’t have to stay in the cradle forever.
We are born wanting. Before language, there is the gaze—wide, unblinking, scanning the world for warmth, for milk, for the gleam of something new. This is the seed of what I’ll call baby lustery : not yet the full flame of adult desire, but the infantile root of it. The belief that what we see will satisfy us. babyling lustery
But the eye never says enough . The scroll has no bottom. The newborn, even after being held, still reaches for the light. Because the world will always dangle another shine
The ancients called this "the lust of the eyes" — a hunger that cannot be filled because it is not a hunger for things. It is a hunger for wholeness. For assurance that we exist, that we matter, that the next glimpse will finally make us feel full. But the eye never says enough
So what is the cure? Not starvation. Not asceticism. But weaning .
As we grow, the cradle expands into the marketplace, the screen, the scroll. Every thumbnail, every ad, every filtered life is a shiny object dangled before our still-developing cortex. And we bite. Every time.