Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

by Luke Burgis

Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we’re born with. It’s a freedom we have to earn.

My previous successes had felt like failures, and now failure felt like success.

Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.

It can help you make money, if that is your primary driver. Or 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.

An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie. The lie in this case is the idea that I want things entirely on my own, uninfluenced by others, that I’m the sovereign king of deciding what is wantable and what is not. The truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand.

But after meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the human universe of desire. And knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.

If people don’t find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones.

The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.

Eve originally had no desire to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree—until the serpent modeled it. The serpent suggested a desire. That’s what models do. Suddenly, a fruit that had not aroused any particular desire became the most desirable fruit in the universe.

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.

When people don’t seem to care what other people want or don’t want the same things, they seem otherworldly. They appear less affected by mimesis—anti-mimetic, even. And that’s fascinating, because most of us aren’t.

People only truly become legends after they retire or die because they enter into a different existential space.

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.

in his book Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones that “we don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.”

In short, empathy allows us to connect deeply with other people without becoming like other people.

The feelings are often more intense the thinner a desire is. As we get older, many of our adolescent feelings of intense desire fade away. It’s not because we realize that some of the things we wanted are no longer attainable. It’s because we have more pattern recognition ability and so can recognize the kinds of desires that leave us unfulfilled. As a result, most people do learn to cultivate thicker desires as they age.

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.

The future will be a product of what people want. The things we build, the people we meet, and the wars we fight will depend on what people will want tomorrow. And that starts with the way that we learn to want today.

future, (2) good, (3) difficult to achieve, and (4) possible. The fourth point is critical. Without the conviction that the fulfillment of a desire is possible, there is no hope—and therefore no desire. Hope is the soil in which thick desires grow. For lack of vision the people perish.15 In order to break out of this mimetic cycle, we’re going to need to find something worth hoping for.

we must make a decision about what it is that is worth sinking our teeth into. Otherwise, our bones will get picked dry by the winds of mimetic forces without our ever having staked a claim on anything that touches us at the depths of our being.

Our choice is between living an unintentionally mimetic life or doing the hard work of cultivating thick desires. The latter may require us to suffer from the fear of missing out on the shiny mimetic objects that surround us. At the end of my life, I believe the primary thing I’ll fear having missed out on is the pursuit of thick desires. Desires that I’ll feel satisfied about having poured myself out for. If I’m going to die of exhaustion—and, eventually, all of us will—it’s not going to be from chasing thin desires. It’s going to be from grabbing hold of a thick one and holding on until there’s nothing left.