Long read: How to know what you really want

“Each of us is occasionally overwhelmed by a multitude of competing desires: pursue job offer A or B? Start a new relationship or stay single? Sign up to run a marathon, or enjoy not getting up early to train? But life is full of marathons, and they don’t necessarily involve running. It’s good to know which desires to pursue and which ones to leave behind – to know which marathons are worth running. In this Guide, I aim to show you how.”

Unsurprisingly, he begins by citing Girard: “‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire,’ wrote Girard, ‘and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.’ He called this mimetic, or imitative, desire. Mimesis comes from the Greek word for ‘imitation’, which is the root of the English word ‘mimic’. Mimetic desires are the desires that we mimic from the people and culture around us. If I perceive some career or lifestyle or vacation as good, it’s because someone else has modelled it in such a way that it appears good to me.”

His guide to dealing with our mimetic desires are summarised as:

“When I think about the lifestyle that I would most like to have, who do I feel most embodies it? Aside from my parents, who were the most important influences on me in my childhood? Is there anyone I would not like to see succeed?” 

He then divides our models into internal (friends, family, colleagues, social acquaintances) and external (celebrities, historical figures, even fictional characters).

“Social media falls in a strange, grey area. Many people you encounter there are external models of desire in the sense that you’ll probably never meet them and they might not even ‘follow’ you back. At the same time, everyone at least feels accessible to everyone else. You never know when something you Tweet or post is going to get noticed by someone. This is part of what makes social media so seductive: it straddles the worlds of internal and external mediation of desire. (When you’re on social media, ask yourself: Are these people even real? Do they really want the things they model a desire for, or are we all engaged in a game of signalling?)

…Advertisements also model desires to us, obviously, but notice how they usually work: the companies serving the ads typically show you not the thing itself, but other people wanting the thing. Advertisers play right into our mimetic nature.”

Social media and advertising as sources of mimetic desires underpinned the success of Facebook, whose earliest investor Peter Thiel has been Girard’s most famous student and strongest proponent of his mimetic theory.

Understanding our desires and their sources also helps us avoid unhealthy ones:

“‘Two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash,’ writes Girard. This means that mimetic desire often leads people into unnecessary competition and rivalry with one another in an infernal game of status anxiety. Mimetic desire is why a class of students can enter a university with very different ideas of what they want to do when they graduate (ideas formed from all the diverse influences and places they came from) yet converge on a much smaller set of opportunities – which they mimetically reinforce in one another – by the time they graduate.

…The solution involves learning a new way of entering into non-rivalrous relationships with other people – a new kind of relationship in which your sense of self-worth is not derived from them”

But given the world we live in, is it possible to live a truly anti-mimetic life:

“It’s possible to develop anti-mimetic machinery in your guts – things that have traditionally been called virtues, or habits of being, such as prudence, fortitude, courage and honesty – that keep you grounded in something deeper even while the mimetic waters swirl around you. In other words, there are certain perennial human values and desires that are worth pursuing no matter what because they have been proven to never disappoint.

Someone with strong underlying values – whether they be religious or philosophical or have another basis – is usually less susceptible to the winds of unhealthy or temporary mimetic desires that lack substance.

…Perhaps the most anti-mimetic attitude of all is an openness to wonder and a desire to let reality surprise you. It rarely disappoints.”

Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook) is part of holdings within the Marcellus Global Compounders Portfolio, a strategy offered by the IFSC branch of Marcellus Investment Managers Private Limited and regulated by the IFSCA. Accordingly, Marcellus, its employees, their immediate relatives, and clients may maintain interests or positions in these securities. Any reference to these companies is intended strictly for informational and educational purposes within the context of this discussion and should not be construed as investment advice.Meta Platforms, Inc. (Facebook) is part of holdings within the Marcellus Global Compounders Portfolio, a strategy offered by the IFSC branch of Marcellus Investment Managers Private Limited and regulated by the IFSCA. Accordingly, Marcellus, its employees, their immediate relatives, and clients may maintain interests or positions in these securities. Any reference to these companies is intended strictly for informational and educational purposes within the context of this discussion and should not be construed as investment advice.