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Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

Luke Burgis

Last accessed on Thursday July 28, 2022

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Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we’re born with. It’s a freedom we have to earn. Due to one powerful yet little-known feature of human desire, that freedom is hard-won.

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it may help you avoid waiting until middle age or later to learn that money or prestige or a comfortable life is not primarily what you want.

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He gave the illusion of autonomy—because that’s how people think desire works. Models are most powerful when they are hidden. If you want to make someone passionate about something, they have to believe the desire is their own.

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The Eternal Husband is an extreme example of how mimesis can hijack relationships. It’s usually not so obvious. Consider an insecure guy who feels sparks on his first few dates with someone. They both decide to get more serious. The first thing he does is introduce her to all his friends—because he desperately needs their approval. He’s looking for some indication that at least one of them might want to be with her, too. When none of them seem interested, he begins to doubt that he made the right choice. He seeks validation for his choices from his models, like the Eternal Husband.

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It’s the Paradox of Importance: sometimes the most important things in our lives come easily—they seem like gifts—while many of the least important things are the ones that, in the end, we worked the hardest for.

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People are drawn to others who seem to play by different rules.

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It’s as if everyone is saying, “Imitate me—but not too much,” because while everyone’s flattered by imitation, being copied too closely feels threatening.

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Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous programmer thought to be the inventor of Bitcoin, boosted his mimetic value into the upper stratosphere of Celebristan through secrecy.

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People are desperate to find something solid to hold on to in today’s “liquid modernity”

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Liquid modernity is a chaotic phase of history in which there are no culturally agreed-upon models to follow, no fixed points of reference.

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It’s less likely that experts will be mimetically chosen in the hard sciences (physics, math, chemistry) because people have to show their work. But it’s easy for someone to become an overnight expert on “productivity” merely because they got published in the right place. Scientism fools people because it is a mimetic game dressed up as science.

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People worry about what other people will think before they say something—which affects what they say. In other words, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This leads to a self-fulfilling circularity.

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We might reformulate Soros’s definition of reflexivity like this: In situations where desirous participants have the possibility of interacting with each other, there is a two-way interaction between the participants’ desires.

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When one of the two parties to a rivalry renounces the rivalry, it defuses the other party’s desire. In a mimetic rivalry, objects take on value because the rival wants them. If the rival suddenly stops wanting something, so do we. We go in search of something new.

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Desires feel very strong when we’re young—to make a lot of money, date a person with certain physical attributes, or become famous. The feelings are often more intense the thinner a desire is.

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In the beginning, when I quit my job in finance to start a company, I wanted a lifestyle with clear boundaries and balance. I wanted to read for an hour every night, to take long walks with my dog, to spend more time with my friends, to be in a loving relationship. But as CEO of my start-up, I found myself working eighty-hour weeks and disregarding all boundaries and balance.

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Not everyone decided to start sending trite, unimaginative, prosaic emails in all lowercase letters, feigning busyness and self-importance, at the same time. (Here’s one way to be anti-mimetic: when you receive one of those emails, respond with something respectful, thoughtful, beautiful.)

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I went from craving classical wisdom to consuming memes and tweets and tech news—which led to my imitating ideas without knowing it. I knew more about what blogger Gary Vaynerchuk had to say about happiness than Aristotle. The ecosystem that I lived and worked in seemed to be growing more homogenous by the day.

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I decided to take a three-month hiatus from the start-up world so that I could reorient myself—primarily, reorient my desires—before deciding what to do next.

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Thin desires aren’t so easily dismissed, and thick desires are not something that you can self-generate out of thin air. They take time—months and years—to develop.

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One approach I recommend for uncovering thick desires—the one I’ll focus on here—involves taking the time to listen to the most deeply fulfilling experiences of your colleagues’ (or partners’, or friends’, or classmates’) lives, and sharing your own with them.

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Core motivational drives are enduring, irresistible, and insatiable. They are probably explanatory of much of your behavior since the time you were a child. Think of them as your motivational energy—the reason you consistently gravitate toward certain types of projects (team versus individual, goal-oriented versus ideation) and activities (sports, arts, theater, forms of fitness) and not others.

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The storytelling process that I use involves sharing stories about times in your life when you took an action that ended up being deeply fulfilling.

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A Fulfillment Story, as I call it, has three essential elements: It’s an action. You took some concrete action and you were the main protagonist, as opposed to passively taking in an experience. As life-changing as a Springsteen concert at the Stone Pony might have been for you, it’s not a Fulfillment Story. It might be for Bruce, but not for you. Dedicating yourself to learning everything about an artist and their work, on the other hand, could be. You believe you did well. You did it with excellence, you did it well—by your own estimation, and nobody else’s. You are looking for an achievement that matters to you. If you grilled what you think is a perfect rib-eye steak the other night, then you did something well and achieved something. Don’t worry about how big or small the achievement might seem to anyone else. It brought you a sense of fulfillment. Your action brought you a deep sense of fulfillment, maybe even joy. Not the fleeting, temporary kind, like an endorphin rush. Fulfillment: you woke up the next morning and felt a sense of satisfaction about it. You still do. Just thinking about it brings some of it back. Such moments of profound meaning and satisfaction matter. They reveal something critical about who you are.

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A business doesn’t simply “meet demand” for products and services that people want. Instead, it plays a critical role in generating and shaping desires.

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Montessori discovered something about the children that day that nobody else had acknowledged: they wanted to grow up, carve out their place in the world, grow in dignity. She had gotten them started.

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The desire to grow into mature adults—not the desire to earn A’s or win Little League games or get a sticker for good behavior—is each child’s primary and most important project, the thing each of them secretly cares most deeply about.

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The quick and easy diffusion of truth combats destructive mimesis and rivalry. Mimesis bends, disguises, and distorts the truth. When the truth moves slowly in an organization—or when it is constantly bent to the will of certain people—mimesis dominates.12

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If you think of a company in evolutionary terms, only those with the fastest speed of truth are going to mutate fast enough to survive.

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Companies that measure the speed of truth and take steps to improve it have an advantage over those that don’t.

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there are the limitations of reason itself—the world beyond reason, in which we choose spouses, careers, and personal goals. This is a world that transcends reason, and transcendent leaders know how to operate in it.

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Many books have been written about improving one’s ability to discern well. Here is a distillation of some key points: (1) pay attention to the interior movements of the heart when contemplating different desires—which give a fleeting feeling of satisfaction and which give satisfaction that endures? (2) ask yourself which desire is more generous and loving; (3) put yourself on your deathbed in your mind’s eye and ask yourself which desire you would be more at peace with having followed; (4) finally, and most importantly, ask yourself where a given desire comes from.

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“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote the seventeenth-century physicist, writer, inventor, and mathematician Blaise Pascal.

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Tactic 12 INVEST IN DEEP SILENCE Set aside at least three consecutive days every year for a personal silent retreat.

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But the Lean Startup technique is a model of entrepreneurship fundamentally based on immanent desire.

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Our society is decadent and stagnant because it lacks hope. Hope is the desire for something that is (1) in the future, (2) good, (3) difficult to achieve, and (4) possible.

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Wise people have said that it’s best to compare yourself only to who you were yesterday, not to who other people are today. That’s a good start for escaping the trap of comparison and measurement.

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Calculating thought is constantly searching, seeking, plotting how to reach an objective: to get from Point A to Point B, to beat the stock market, to get good grades, to win an argument. According to psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, it’s the dominant form of thought in our technological culture. It leads to the relentless pursuit of objectives—usually without having analyzed whether the objectives are worthy to begin with.28

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The best way to get started practicing meditative thought is to pour yourself a beverage and look at a tree for an hour. An entire hour. There is no goal in this exercise other than learning how not to have a goal. As you look at the tree, pay attention to everything you notice. You should find that your calculating thought slowly gives way to meditative thought. If not, repeat as necessary.

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Transformation happens when I spend enough time with my desires to know them by name and know whether or not I want to live with them.

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we can only dream using the inputs we’ve received.32

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Fictional characters who model great, thick desires can be a counterbalance to real-life models of weak, thin desires.

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Toward the end of his life, René Girard grew increasingly worried that we faced a future in which there would be more mimesis—wars with no definitive end, technology fueling our most mimetic instincts, and globalization as an accelerant of mimetic crises—with no effective means of controlling the conflict.

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There have been two major social inventions in history that mitigated the negative consequences of mimetic desire: the scapegoat mechanism and the market economy. Could there be a third?

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Scapegoats are like the gods in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods—they only exist so long as people believe in them.

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Economic competition is less bloody than the sacrificial world that it supplanted. At the same time, it produces its own victims: the poor who don’t have access to markets, exploited workers, and winner-take-all systems. It exacerbates the differences between those who are in and those who are out.

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“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want,” he said.

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One thing that every spiritual tradition is clear about is that changing how we desire, at least in a positive way, requires suffering. Nobody wants to let go of thin desires.

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“Pick your one overwhelming desire. It’s okay to suffer over that one,” Naval Ravikant said on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Other desires must be let go of.37 Letting go of lesser desires is a kind of death.

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