There is no ‘I’. Even to believe in an ‘I’ which possesses emotions (albeit helplessly) is mistaken. One of the problems with desire, and why it cannot make us happy, is that it presupposes a self which does not exist; at the core of our being, we are empty. Everything that constitutes the individual is marked by the unsatisfactoriness and suffering which is dukkha. Nor is there such a thing as the soul. The person is only a fleeting series of discontinuous states held together by desire, by craving. When desire is extinguished the person is dissolved. Since life and suffering are synonymous, the extinction of desire is the goal of human endeavour. Until that happens we continue to exist through a series of rebirths. It is not death as such which is deplored, but rebirth; it is not death but rebirth which we must escape. So much so that in some early texts rebirth is described as ‘redeath’. Desire perpetuates life, which is synonymous with suffering, and which leads to death. Desire perpetuates death; it keeps one dying.

Death, desire and loss in western culture, Jonathan Dollimore