Wanting — Book Notes.
Managed to read one book in the first quarter of 2022. The book is titled Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, written by Luke Burgis. I initially noticed this book from Ko Chris Angkasa’s post in Instagram, he stated this was the most important book he read in 2021.
Luke Burgis tried to dig down the reason behind his past desire to achieve a certain level of success, which was to get his company to be acquired by Zappos. He shared the prologue in his blog. He tried to understand how the failure that he experienced might bring him down further. In the process, he learned about the theory of mimetic desire. The theory is discovered by René Girard, the late French literary theorist and philosopher of social sciences.
In his early academic career, Girard studied classic novels by Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Proust, and more. From those novels, he observed a strong pattern. Characters in the novels are influenced by other characters that directly or indirectly shaped their desire. Desires are formed by interacting with other characters who alter their goals and their behavior — most of all, their desires.
Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic, or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn through imitation, to want the same things other people want.
Burgis wrote that mimetic theory isn’t like learning some impersonal law of physics, which you can study from a distance. It means learning something new about your own past that explains how your identity has been shaped and why certain people and things have exerted more influence over you than others. It means coming to grips with a force that permeates human relationships—relationships which you are, at this moment, involved in. You can never be a neutral observer of mimetic desire.
Girard mentioned that 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.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs might be messier in reality. As illustrated by Liana Finck in Burgis’ book.
Girard was interested in how we come to want things when there is no clear instinctual basis for it. Out of the billions of potential objects of desire in the world, from friends to careers to lifestyles,
how do people come to desire some more than others?
And why the objects and intensity of our desire seem to fluctuate constantly, lacking any real stability?
Those are really intriguing questions. In the universe of desire, there is no hierarchy. We have a different kind of external signal that motivates our choices: models. Models are people or things that show us what is worth wanting. It is models — not our “objective” analysis or central nervous system — that shape our desires. With these models, people engage in a secret and sophisticated form of imitation that Girard termed mimesis (mi-mee-sis), from the Greek word mimesthai (meaning “to imitate”).
The next question raises is how honest we are in acknowledging who is our model?
It’s deceivingly difficult to figure out why you bought certain things; it’s extraordinarily hard to understand why you strive toward certain achievements. So hard that few people dare to ask. Mimetic desire draws people toward things. “This draw,” writes Girard scholar James Alison, “this movement … [is] mimesis. It is to psychology what gravity is to physics.”
.
Desires, and Models, Around Us
Take a look at the social media people use today. Models of desire are what makes social media such a potent drug. Before social media, a person’s models came from a small set of people: friends, families, work, magazines, and maybe TV. After social media, everyone in the world is a potential model.
Social media is not filled with any kind of model — most people we follow aren’t movie stars, pro athletes, or celebrities. Social media is full of models who are inside our world, socially speaking. They are close enough for us to compare ourselves to them.
Quoting from the book:
What we commonly call “social media” is more than media — it’s mediation: thousands of people showing us what to want and coloring our perception of those things. Tristan Harris, a former Google ethics executive and leader of the Center for Humane Technology, speaks about the danger of addictive design in tech. He claims that smartphones are like slot machines. Both work through the power of intermittent variable rewards — pulling the lever of a slot machine gives you a highly variable reward, which maximizes neurological addictiveness; your smartphone does the same thing every time you swipe down to refresh your Instagram feed, never knowing when something interesting might show up. I respect Harris for being an advocate of human-centered design, but he misses a fundamental problem. A better design would help, but it only addresses part of the problem. The danger is not that we have a slot machine in our pockets. The danger is that we have a dream machine in our pockets.
We might believe that there is a straight line between ourselves and the things we want. For example, as a kid, we might be dreaming to be a doctor or firefighter. Or nowadays, we want a certain smartphone.
Buried in a deeper layer of our psychology is the person or thing that caused us to want something in the first place. Desire requires models — people who endow things with value for us merely because they want the things.
Desire is our primordial concern. Long before people can articulate why they want something, they start wanting it. The motivational speaker Simon Sinek advises organizations and people to “start with why” (the title of one of his books), finding and communicating one’s purpose before anything else. But that is usually a post hoc rationalization of whatever it is we already wanted. Desire is the better place to start.
.
Be Aware of Our Models, Be Aware of Our Desires
Reading this book opens more perspectives for me. I was not entirely aware of the models around us. The models that shaped me to decide certain decisions in the past.
I haven’t dug and developed deeper into the thick desires that I should pursue, that I believe will lead to a more fulfilling life.
In the book, Burgis wrote that thick desires are like diamonds that have been formed deep beneath the surface, nearer to the core of the Earth. Thick desires are protected from the volatility of changing circumstances in our lives. Thin desires, however, are highly mimetic, contagious, and often shallow.
How long will we entangle with those thin desires?
Burgis is very humble to acknowledge that he spent more time looking sideways than he did forward within the first years of starting his company. He was looking for ways to measure success and finding them everywhere.
Quoting from the book:
The old-fashioned word for that experience is “envy.” “I think the reason we talk so much about sex is that we don’t dare talk about envy,” Girard said. Envy is an engine of destructive mimetic desire, and there are few things to stop it because it operates underground. Prestige is measured relative to what we perceive as someone else has that we lack, so it’s a breeding ground for envy.
Burgis also highlighted that 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.
Interestingly, understanding our own desires is not about being selfish. Because once we are aware of the positive cycle of desire, we understand that our desires and others are interconnected. As Burgis wrote:
We have a responsibility to shape our own desires. As we’ve seen, we can’t do that without others. The duty to shape our desires goes hand in hand with the responsibility to care for the relationships that we have with others. The transformation of desire happens when we become less concerned about the fulfillment of our own desires and more concerned about the fulfillment of others. We find, paradoxically, that it is the very pathway to fulfilling our own.
Overall, it’s a really eye-opening book.
The question might not be easy to be answered, but it’s important to ponder.
Why do we want what we want?
