Cliff Notes Version of Wanting by Luke Burgis

Someone by the name of Luke Burgis, who I had never heard of, wrote a book called Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. I think it is one of the most powerful ideas that I have ever read. While this is not a 'Cliff Notes Version' of the book, it is an extract of an article that he has written and shared on his paid blog.

Decluttering Our Desires - by Luke Burgis

6 Practical Ideas

1. Identify the people influencing what you want

The first step is to identify the models of desire who are influencing what you want. These are the people who serve as your models, or mediators, colouring what you consider to be desirable.
At one point, I wanted a Tesla Model S. I almost talked myself into the purchase with all the ‘objective’ reasons that I thought made it desirable: such as that it goes from zero to 60 miles per hour in under two seconds.
But I would have been better off asking the question of who, not what, had generated and shaped my desire for the car. The same is true for your desires, whether in relation to material purchases, educational paths, career choices, even romantic interests. When it came to the Model S, it wasn’t until I thought seriously about it that I realised that I follow someone on Twitter who obsessively shows videos of himself driving in cool places in that particular vehicle and that I’d never had a desire to own one until I saw these. From there, I started piling on all the evidence that would support the desire that had already formed – mimetically – within me. Desire comes first from social influences, often long before we realise it, or understand why.
To become more aware of the models influencing your desire, ask yourself these questions:
- When do 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?

2. Categorise your models as internal and external

Next, 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 come into contact with: friends, family, co-workers, or really anyone you can interact with in some way – it could be the person who cuts your hair, for instance. These are people whose desires are in some sense intertwined with your own – they can affect your desires, and you can in turn 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. 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 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.
Working out who your internal and external models of desire are (and which ones are in the grey area) will help you gain greater agency over your desires. I recommend drawing the two overlapping circles above on a blank piece of paper and trying to fill out the spheres with as many specific examples from your own life as you can.

3. Beware of becoming obsessively focused on what your neighbours have or 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. 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.
Be aware that 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. 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.

4. 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. For example, consider the chef Sébastien Bras, owner of Le Suquet restaurant in Laguiole, France, who had three Michelin stars – the highest culinary distinction for a French restaurant – for a full 18 years. Until 2018. That year, he took the unprecedented step of asking the Michelin Guide to stop rating his restaurant and never come back.
Bras had realised that striving to maintain his three Michelin stars year in and year out had kept him from experimenting with new creative dishes that the Michelin inspectors might not like. His Michelin rating had kept him stuck in a ‘system of desire’. The organising principle for all his choices was simple: keeping Michelin happy.
When he reflected on why he became a chef in the first place, Bras told me that it was to share ingredients from the Aubrac region of France with the rest of the world – not to become a slave to a rating system.
When Bras understood the way that the Michelin Guide created a system of desire in which he was trapped, he found the courage to extract himself from that system.
I think we all have a Michelin Guide in our life—it just doesn’t have the Michelin name on it. 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; or the awkwardness of sharing with others that you have always wanted to do something that not many people would understand.
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. 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.
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.

5. Take ownership of your desires

Is there such a thing as non-mimetic desires? It’s debatable, even among Girard scholars, so it’s best to think of mimesis on a spectrum:
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 desire 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. For someone with a religious sense, these desires could be thought of as given by God as part of a ‘calling’. They are less mimetic in the sense that they have deeper roots, and they aren’t easily variable based on new encounters, seasons or experiences.
On the far right side, some desires are nearly entirely mimetic – for instance, the desire to own a stock merely because everyone else wants to own it. (It stimulates a fear of missing out, which is just a form of mimetic desire.)
Less extreme mimetic desires might include the desire to go to a specific university because all your friends want to go there. Yet the desire could also have something to do with the school’s academic reputation. Desires can have many different influences, some mimetic and some non-mimetic. The key is to understand the forces at work and to separate the wheat from the chaff.
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).
Think about which desires you 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.

6. Live an anti-mimetic life

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.
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.