I was listening to NPR this weekend and "This American Life" had a really interesting program on testosterone that originally aired about six years ago. In the first segment, a man whose body stopped producing testosterone talked about the changes in him before he knew what was happening. He described it as almost god-like: Everything he saw he accepted as beautiful, but there was no passion or desire behind driving that acceptance. It was more like, well, this is all beautiful, but so what? So what?

(You can find it archived here.)

It seemed to put everything on a level playing field. Everything was beautiful, right down to the cracks in the sidewalk. But the world he described seemed so, well … dull. It was almost like acknowledging everything as beautiful took away the power of beauty, the poetry of it.

"When you have no testosterone, you have no desire," he said.

It made me wonder if I have too much testosterone. (No, I am not growing unsightly hairs in irregular places. Women produce it, too.)

He said life without desire was pleasant, but personally, I don’t want "pleasant." Pleasant sounds boring. Pleasant sounds entirely unpleasant. I want desire in my life, I want passion and imperfections and, yes, even unpleasantness, because that comes with the headiness of desire and need and urgency and ambition and love. And who doesn’t want love?

"It doesn’t matter if you have nothing if you want nothing," he said.

Is that my biggest flaw, I wonder. I am rarely satisfied with my life, rarely find myself declaring that I am content. There is always something I seem to be striving for - success at work, love, heck, even success at dodgeball. Contentment always seems just a little bit out of reach. So I wonder if that’s true: If you erase want does contentment remain?

"When you have no desire, you have no content in your mind," he said.

It strikes me now, looking at that statement. Does no content equal contentment?

I can’t even imagine what life without desire must be like. I can’t imagine not desiring - be it a desire for knowledge, success, culture, love, passion, understanding, joy, companionship. Having nothing left but quiet, dispassionate observations.

I don’t think I show the aggressive tendencies of having too much testosterone. I’m not sporting a Mr. T mohawk and shouting, "I pity the fool!" I don’t body check my co-workers as I pass them in the hall.

But I do think I want too much sometimes.

In fact, that’s probably me to a T.