You cannot ever be free of yourself. Any experience, even experiences that transcend all prior experience, cannot transcend the sum total of your experiences in that they exist within your experience. And instant coffee will not give that freedom to you, even the unlikeliest transcendental or transhuman instant coffee ever.

Alternatively, maybe that person just likes coffee more than anything else in life. (I think I’ve known one or two.)

Don’t worry – it’s not so fun when they come true either! It’s all about the process, not the event.

This is true only if the failure of your desire to be satisfied doesn’t come with any cost. If it does – as regret, remorse or whatever – then desires for the impossible are desires that are never satisfied, and so are desires that may necessarily come with those costs.

And this doesn’t presume anything about expectations. For every year of their existence I’ve wished for the Texans to win the superbowl. For each of those years, I have never expected them to do any such thing. And yet I am always disappointed when they are inevitably eliminated from playoff contention each year.

It may be fun to wish, but not so fun when those wishes are crushed…

Wishing is free as in beer, not free as in speech.

But it is far from absurd that one particularly good thing could be better than everything put together. Certainly a really good cup of coffee can be better than the best life possible. Drinking an great cup of coffee is 100.0% good from start to finish. On the other hand, any entire conscious life, no matter how free of sorrow, no matter how full of satisfaction, is invariably a mixed proposition, if for no other reason but that you’ll eventually have to drop dead in the end.

To the post:
I assume we are talking about the intersting case of desiring something known to be impossible but not (known to be?) absurd or contradictory.

That might be a bad strategy on scarce-cognitive-resources grounds a la Harman, Bratman – wasting the finite supply of desires, adding pointless extra processing to a decision-making process etc.

The pragmatic advisability of choosing to adopt such desires might depend on what the criterion for practical rationality is – minimising the number of unsatisfied desires, maximising the proportion of desires that are satisfied, maximising total desire-satisfaction. In the first two cases, desiring the impossible would always, cet par, frustrate the goal.

It would plausibly be absurd to desire only the impossible.

Various not very plausible postulates of practical reason such as ‘never take a course of action which will result in a situation in which one of your desires is impossible to attain’, or ‘maximise the probability of achieving all your desires’ could render a desire for the impossible irrational.

But otherwise, on a Humean desire-belief-intention model, it’s probably not in itself irrational (helping myself to irrational as a proxy for absurdity here) to desire the impossible, since presumably your beliefs would never function so as translate the desire into an (absurdly quixotic) intention.

But the propositional content of ‘coffee better than life could ever be’, might count as absurd in itself, if conceived in some way along the lines of ‘having coffee that contributes more value to life than life could ever have’. If so it’s plausible that the absurdity would remain whatever the modality/mood (desire, belief, wish, question etc).

“We can’t? Uh-oh.”

And, uh, Ms. Olsen’s expectations for “the most” from her life are informed by her awareness of how joy is inevitably tempered by sadness, in the aggregate. However, a good cup of coffee, viewed in isolation, can be a completely unadulterated pleasure.

This still founders on the whole “Nescafé” thing, though. Perhaps it is an unadulterated pleasure for Ms. Olsen to be reminded of the word “portmanteau.”

And lethal!

Thank you. I never realized before that ambrosia is poison. :)

“I want the most out of my life” = I want to live a long long time.

“I expect even more from my coffee” = I expect my coffee to come from coffee beans that are older than I’ll ever live to be.

This explains why she drinks Nescafe. :-)