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 . The scroll has no bottom. The newborn, even after being held, still reaches for the light. babyling lustery
To wean baby lustery is to learn to look without grasping. To see beauty without needing to own it. To notice the new phone and feel the wanting rise—and then let it pass like a cloud. To sit in the ache of incompleteness and realize: This ache is not a defect. It is the shape of being human. The ancients called this "the lust of the
is the itch to acquire without the maturity to ask why . It’s the dopamine hit of a package on the porch, the high of a new notification, the phantom pleasure of "saving" a post we’ll never read again. It mistakes looking for loving, and wanting for having. But the eye never says enough
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.
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.