"Desires are fundamentally different from needs"

"Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not."

"the pleasure is primarily intellectual."

"The 13th-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that these intellectual appetites are part of what has traditionally been called the ‘will’. When a person wills something, they strive toward it. If they come to possess the object of their desire, their will finds rest in it – and they are able to experience joy, so long as they are able to rest in the object of their desire."

"striving for something that we do not yet possess is called desire. Desire doesn’t bring us joy because it is, by definition, always for something we feel we lack."

"Desire is a social process – it is mimetic"

"Girard noted that desire is not, as we often imagine it, something that we ourselves fully control. It is not something that we can generate or manufacture on our own. It is largely the product of a social process."

"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."

"Desire comes first from social influences, often long before we realise it, or understand why."

"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?"

"it’s useful to recognise what kind of models are influencing you. Girard identified two main types: those inside your world, and those outside it."

"Models inside your world (‘internal’ models of desire) are the people you might really come into contact with: friends, family, co-workers, or really anyone you can actually interact with in some way"

"Models outside your world (‘external’ models of desire) are people you have no serious possibility of coming into contact with: celebrities, historical figures and much of our legacy media."

"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."

"Be aware that internal models lead to more volatility of desire in your life because the world of internal models is highly reflexive: you can affect one another’s desires, which isn’t possible in the world of external models."

"Because desire is mimetic, people are naturally drawn to want what others want."

"mimetic desire often leads people into unnecessary competition and rivalry with one another in an infernal game of status anxiety."

"your desires can become hijacked through this process of mimetic attraction. It’s easy to become obsessively focused on what your neighbours have or want, rather than on your immediate responsibilities and relationship commitments."

"His Michelin rating had kept him stuck in a ‘system of desire’. The organising principle for all his choices was simple: keeping Michelin happy."

"To gain more control over your desires, figure out what your particular version of the Michelin Guide looks like. It might not involve stars at all, but the approval of specific people or the expectations of your friends or family"

"By mapping out the system of desire that you’re enmeshed in (and probably have been your whole life), you can begin to take some critical distance from it."

"Most of all: know where your desires came from. Your desires have a history. You can’t know what a ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ desire is unless you understand where it came from – and that involves diving deep into your past, understanding how you have evolved as a person, and seeing which desires have been with you for a long time and which ones have come and gone like the wind."

"fear of missing out, which is really just a form of mimetic desire."

"Wanting to write a book, like starting a company or embarking on a career change, is often the product of social interactions."

"Lamborghini’s story is a great example of how desires do not stay in one place on the spectrum. They’re mobile. They can move to the right (become more mimetic), and they can move to the left (become less mimetic)."

"the intentionality that you bring to them can allow you to become the author of a new creation."

"there are certain perennial human values and desires that are worth pursuing no matter what because they have been proven to never disappoint."

"Ask yourself: In what person or thing are my desires able to rest without the incessant feeling of restlessness? Why might that be? What is something that seems to bring me longer-lasting joy, without the need for ‘more’?"

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

"Social media is a mimetic machine. What we typically call ‘social media’ is really social mediation – the mediation of desires. All day, every day, desires are being modelled to us through people we barely know. Mimetic desire is the hidden engine of these platforms."

"Ask yourself: Is this person I am following actually leading me to develop any positive desires, to aspire to greater things? Or are they causing me more anxiety? At the same time, realise that everything you say or do is a model of desire for someone else."

"what is your core motivation? What is really driving you, and might have been for most of your life? It’s important to put your finger on this because you can apply your core motivational drive across many different types of work."

"Mimetic desire gives significance to things because of the other people who want those things. When the model of desire is gone, so does our interest in the thing."

"It’s people we care about most, not things. If you can identify how much significance you place on something merely because of someone else’s relationship to it, you can begin to free yourself from its hold."

"every possession, from TVs to NFTs (non-fungible tokens), is merely to be used. From the standpoint of mimetic desire, material things are also talismans for some deeper desire. As Girard wrote, all desire is a desire for being."

"if you can’t be happy right where you’re at, right now, then you probably won’t be happy anywhere. Your happiness will always be something ‘out there’, beyond the horizon, and mimetic desire will continue to exert an unhealthy control over you."

"Lifestyle is something that emerges from one’s values and discipline, not something you find at a particular zip code or via the keys to a different house or van."

"We should spend a lot more time thinking about these systems — even mapping them out and understanding our place within them — and less time talking about how to achieve the many socially derived goals that emerge from them."

"And the systems I’m referring to are systems of desire."

"The obsession with goal setting is misguided, even counterproductive. Setting goals isn’t bad. But when the focus is on how to set goals rather than how to choose them in the first place, goals can easily turn into instruments of self-flagellation."

"But it’s worth asking where goals come from in the first place. Every goal is embedded within a system."

"“we don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.”"

"We can’t want something that is outside the system of desire we occupy."

"People set goals and make plans to arrive at a future point called “progress.” But will it be progress?"

"Mimetic desire — the phenomenon of our wanting what other people want because they want it — is the unwritten, unacknowledged system behind visible goals."

"First, let’s look at a few more examples of what I call mimetic systems of desire — places, where the desire to achieve certain things are to be a certain kind of person, are heavily influenced by what other people desire or have desired in the past."

"These systems are mimetic (which is another word for imitation) because everyone is unconsciously imitating the desires of the people around them or those who came before them."

"Students have lost sight of the teleology, or final purpose, of the education system."

"College is where the teleology grows even less clear."

"The VC demand for quick-hitting investments increases the attractiveness of tech start-ups to entrepreneurs."

"Social media platforms thrive on mimesis."

"Systems of desire, both positive and negative, are everywhere."

"​The first step toward freeing ourselves from the degrading slavery of being merely a child of our age (to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton) is to get the lay of the land — to step back, create distance from the systems of desire that we’re part of, and to try to see them for what they are.​"

"The answers are elusive without radical honesty about the systems of desire that are shaping us."

"Our most pressing problems are problems of desire. We can’t want that which we’ve never seen or heard, or that which lies outside of the world that we live in, unless we’ve stopped believing that the universe of desire ends at whatever shore we happen to be standing on."

"It means falling in love with a better version of the future."

"It starts with not growing complacent in the systems of desire that we’re in. First, we have to see them."

"The power of conformity is well-known in the realm of ideas, but far more powerful in the realm of desire. We want what other people want because there’s comfort in knowing that someone else is pursuing the same thing that we are."

"Yet the idea that I want to run a marathon at all is the more interesting thing. Where did I get it in the first place?"

"If you understand the systems of desire that color the choices of people around you, you’re more likely to see emergent possibilities by daring to look in different directions."

"The 13th-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote that these intellectual appetites are part of what has traditionally been called the ‘will’. When a person wills something, they strive toward it."

"If they come to possess the object of their desire, their will finds rest in it – and they are able to experience joy, so long as they are able to rest in the object of their desire."

"Desire doesn’t bring us joy because it is, by definition, always for something we feel we lack."

"And that striving for something that we do not yet possess is called desire."

"Girard realised one peculiar feature of desire: ‘We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths,’ he said, ‘but if it did, it would not be desire."

"Desire is always for something we feel we lack.’ Girard noted that desire is not, as we often imagine it, something that we ourselves fully control. It is not something that we can generate or manufacture on our own. It is largely the product of a social process."

"Man is the creature who does not know what to desire"

"Mimetic desires are the desires that we mimic from the people and culture around us."

"Identify the people influencing what you want"

"Girard identified two main types: those inside your world, and those outside it."

"Models inside your world (‘internal’ models of desire) are the people you might really come into contact with: friends, family, co-workers, or really anyone you can actually interact with in some way – it could be the person who cuts your hair, for instance."

"External models are one-way streams of desire – they can affect your desires, but you can’t affect theirs."

"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."

"Online or offline, the closer someone seems to being like you, the more you can relate to them – and the more you are likely to pay attention to what they want."

"Because desire is mimetic, people are naturally drawn to want what others want. ‘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."

"We humans are social creatures who know others so that we can also know ourselves, and that’s a good thing – but, if we’re not careful, we can become excessively concerned with others."

"Map out the systems of desire in your life"

"As well as identifying the specific models influencing your desires, it is also helpful to consider whether you have become embedded in a particular system of desire."

"This will allow you to stop accepting your currently dominant desires at face value and save you from defaulting into important life choices instead of choosing them with intentionality."

"On the very far left side of this spectrum are desires that aren’t mimetic at all, for instance, a mother’s love for her newborn child."

"On the less mimetic side would also be desires that are not entirely un-mimetic, but desires that we might call ‘thick’ – they are deeply rooted in a person’s upbringing, or impressed deeply upon their imagination."

"You might not be the sole author of your desires, but you can certainly take ownership and put your mark of authorship on them through your creative freedom."

"Ferruccio Lamborghini got the idea to expand beyond manufacturing tractors due to a personal rivalry with Enzo Ferrari, whose cars he drove."

"Think about which desires you really want to own and cultivate. It doesn’t matter whether they were originally mimetic or not – the intentionality that you bring to them can allow you to become the author of a new creation."

"To be anti-mimetic is to be free from the unintentional following of desires without knowing where they came from; it’s freedom from the herd mentality; freedom from the ‘default’ mode that causes us to pursue things without examining why."

"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."

"Restlessness of desire is not necessarily a bad thing – it’s what pushes people to seek more – but a persistent feeling of restlessness could be a sign that the desires you are chasing lack the power to satisfy."

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

"Many people don’t realise that they are in a mimetic rivalry with their own romantic partner or spouse."

"‘Couples that are bound by jealousy of each other are always prisoners of the same mechanism: their mirroring desires continually oscillate between the positions of dominating and being dominated – the pattern of relation that transactional analysis calls “one up” and “one down”,’ he writes."

"Put a serious check on this aspect of your own relationships – romantic or not – and ask yourself if you’re playing a zero-sum game. Make sure that you’re not on a seesaw."

"If you suspect that you are, the first task should be to find a way to do something extraordinarily generous for the other person without any expectation of receiving anything in return."

"Make an honest assessment of what kinds of desires the people you follow are cultivating in you."

"At the same time, realise that everything you say or do is a model of desire for someone else."

"It’s important to put your finger on this because you can apply your core motivational drive across many different types of work."

"‘It isn’t things themselves that disturb people, but the judgments that they form about them,’ wrote the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Mimetic desire gives significance to things because of the other people who want those things."

"It’s likely that if you can’t be happy right where you’re at, right now, then you probably won’t be happy anywhere."