Despite being made one way or another, people seek out various inventions. There is a human compulsion, perhaps an imperative, to sort one’s world and environment into order, to give structure to the creeping chaos that would otherwise pervade.
A common form this impulse takes is the impulse to categorize what one sees. As I have said before, classification is irresistible and somewhat dissatisfying, the potato chip of observation. It is often a trained reflex that moves faster than awareness. One wishes to “sort” the information one is exposed to before it gets put away or dissolves into electricity. To “sort” first requires dragging it through a field of associations, in hopes it blots up something interesting or becomes snagged on some unexpected piece of detritus that will distinguish it on the way to its seat in memory’s theater, where it is uncarefully filed. All of this happens in an instant. I sometimes wonder if one’s capacity for remembering things is bounded by the limits of one’s experience, and the quantity and quality of other things— signifiers, other details, associations, figures— that one has ingested, that would serve to highlight the novelty and nuance of new information, thereby making it more memorable.
There is also a habit of rating everything one encounters: passing a quality judgement in the form of a numerical rating, often out of five or ten. An extremely common method often used for communicating about one’s experiences and reality is to indicate the degree of positive or negative one feels about those experiences in a quantified manner.
The word “love” only took on its current valence of meaning toward the early Renaissance. In the Bible, the Latin word caritas is translated as “love”; caritas, meaning “ostliness; esteem, affection,” comes from carus "dear, valued" (from the PIE root *ka- "to like, desire"). This Christian sense of love is linked to acts and deeds one performs without regard to how one feels about the matter or the individual in question. “Love” in the sense of a strong positive feeling toward another as we think of it today was considered an affliction to be cured in early times; indeed, was not understood to be a positive feeling caused by the object of another until much later. More modern valences of “love” interpret it as a positive subjective feeling one might experience around another, and while confused with friendship, betimes is also self-oriented and solipsistic as well.
“Desire” comes through Old French from the Latin desiderare, meaning “to long for, wish for; demand, expect,” as the phrase de sidere, “from the stars,” from sidus (genitive sideris) "heavenly body, star, constellation”; the original sense of the phrase being something like “await what the stars will bring.” “Consider” comes through the same Old French route, from the Latin considerare, “to look at closely, observe,” probably literally "to observe the stars," from con (“with, together”) + sidus (“heavenly body, star, constellation”). One might understand desire as awaiting to be brought something from elsewhere, where caritas is more of a going-forth, an action of self that considers the other first.