Humans will do everything in their power to get what they desire, no matter what. First, the desire for something is measured by the viewer and is based on their perspective. So what may be something you want, is something another person doesn’t want. In the end, all of this is really a matter of perspective, and it’s up to you to decide if the reward is worth the cost.

There are many examples of people doing whatever they can to get what they want. The most common desire from people is to desire happiness. An example of this would be in “A Work of Artifice” with the Gardener and the Bonsai Tree. The “Gardener carefully pruned it. It is nine inches high. Every day as he whittles back the branches the gardener croons”. This shows when the Gardener does gardening to get happiness. However, the Bonsai Tree is being restrained from its true nature, and now “It is your nature to be small and cozy, domestic and weak”.

There are points when the reward is not worth the cost. However, even if the cost is too great to the majority of the people, there will always be some people who believe that there is no cost too great for the reward. 

The image above was taken from “Scavengers”. In this scene two people woke up an innocent creature and forced it to do work, so they could get a magic bean. This scene is not the only scene where they harmed and interfered with nature. There was another scene where they cut open a creature’s stomach and took its slime. Then they used the creature’s slime to heal an injured creature, but they used the healed creature as bait so that they could get what they desired. In the end they were able to get what they desired, which was an orb that let them see Earth, but was it really worth the cost of interfering with nature and even killing creatures?

At what point does a desire become toxic, as in an addiction or obsession? In the podcast “Mojave Phone Booth – 99% Invisible” a man named Godfrey “Doc” Daniels called this phone booth in the Mojave Desert, but then he “kept calling the phone all the time.” Eventually Doc “became obsessed.” So when someone finally picked up the phone and had finally gotten what he had desired, he was obsessed and wanted to know more. Doc ended up driving through the Mojave Desert searching for this lost phone booth, and when he found it his obsession went deeper. He decided to share his love of the phone booth with others, “He gave the phone booth a webpage.” However, this was a huge mistake. The news of the Mojave Desert spread, even to other countries. Many people started calling the phone booth, but because it made so much noise rangers removed the phone booth. In the end, Doc’s obsessive desire of the Mojave phone booth backfired and ultimately led to the destruction of piece of history.

Humans will do everything in their power to get what they desire. There are many examples of this, throughout history. The three examples I chose may be innocent when you first look at them, but they all ended with a cost. They all end with another’s suffering, nature being interfered with, or the obsessive desire backfiring. There are examples of people who desire to change something for the better, but it all really depends on how you view the problem because in the end there is always something you lose if there is something to gain.