Wanting the Waiting to End
On trapdoor desire and the rooms we never arrive in.
I recently read a piece by Haley Nahman in her Substack Maybe Baby titled ‘The Desire Trap‘ that I’ve pondered over a bit. The essay is called “The Desire Trap”, and it names something I recognise but not sure I’d really properly thought about: ‘trapdoor desire’.
Haley distinguishes between what she calls front-door desire and the trapdoor variety. A front-door desire is transparent. You want the job because the work appeals to you. You want the friendship because you genuinely like the person. A trapdoor desire is something else:
“I think I’m walking in the front door, but it’s actually a trapdoor that leads me somewhere else.”
It is an attempt to solve an internal problem with an external object, where you believe you want the thing itself when, in fact, you are trying to escape a feeling you haven’t fully named.
When I read this, I thought immediately of a period in our company’s history.
We had tendered for a government contract, the largest we had ever pursued. The value was significant enough that winning it would change the business’s trajectory in ways we had discussed for years. The process dragged on for months. There was a change of government. There were delays on delays. We refreshed our inboxes. We second-guessed the submission. We had the same anxious conversations in circles.
The signed contract, when it was finally confirmed, arrived as an email. And my reaction to opening the email was almost anticlimactic.
I had been waiting so long that the moment itself had nowhere to land. What I had called “wanting to win this contract” had, somewhere in the long months of uncertainty, transformed into wanting the waiting to stop. The wanting and the winning had become one and the same in my mind. They were not the same thing.
This is what Nahman means by the trapdoor. The neuroscientist Kent Berridge has spent years documenting the same split from the other direction. As he writes,
“’The counterpart to ‘liking’ is ‘wanting’ — the incentive motivation to acquire a reward. ‘Liking’ and ‘wanting’ evolved so they usually co-occur. But their brain systems are separable, which gives rise to dissociations of ‘liking’ from ‘wanting’ in some situations.
That helps explain why we can so easily miswant things. The urgency of pursuit can feel like proof that something will satisfy us. Often, it is just proof that we want the waiting to end.
In the Be A Good Human framework that runs through Alone Rangers, I keep returning to presence as the quality most at risk here. When we are living inside a trapdoor desire, we are not in the room we are actually in. We are in the imagined future room, the one where the email has arrived, and everything feels resolved. That future room rarely exists the way we’ve furnished it.
Haley closes her piece with a line that has stayed with me: “I’d just like to fall knowingly.” The goal is not to purge yourself of trapdoor desires, which would be both impossible and probably joyless. It’s easy to recognise one when you’re in it.
To notice that you’re not waiting for the thing. You’re waiting to stop feeling the way you feel right now.