Invitations and Becomings

Chris Bertram has a lovely post over at Crooked Timber on having a second-order desire not to have your first-order desires satisfied all the time.

So, for example, I always want my football team to win, but if they were to win all the time it would be rather boring and I would lose interest in football. It is a condition for me to live the life of a happy football fan that they win, but not too much.

Ah, Chris. We can tell so much about ourselves by the kinds of examples we use! You see, the first thing that popped into my head was: "Yes, that's the difference between porn and burlesque."