Wanting

Why do you want what you want? Luke Burgis, drawing on the work of René Girard, argues that most of our desires are not self-originated but borrowed. Human beings are mimetic creatures: we imitate not just actions or styles but longings themselves. Once you recognize this logic of borrowed wanting, you can begin to reclaim agency over what truly matters.

The human pull of mimesis

Girard’s discovery of mimetic desire reframed human behavior as driven by imitation—like gravity acting between people. Desire emerges in the space between selves: we want an object because another person has modeled it as desirable. From Eve imitating the serpent’s suggestion in Genesis to Caesar’s rivalry with Alexander the Great, desire ripples through imitation rather than independent choice. You copy your friend’s cocktail, your neighbor’s ambition, your colleague’s success benchmarks without realizing it.

Burgis calls this gravitational pull both the force that builds culture and the trap that produces conflict. Every market trend, viral meme, corporate objective, or social movement is shaped by unseen networks of imitation. Recognizing those forces gives you a first tool: naming your models. Once the social sources of desire become visible, they become optional, not fated.

The two worlds of modeling

Not all imitation is equal. Burgis divides human environments into two fictional worlds: Celebristan and Freshmanistan. In Celebristan, distant models—like Lincoln, Satoshi Nakamoto, or Mother Teresa—inspire without provoking rivalry because they exist far from your lived circle. Their distance makes imitation safe and aspirational. In Freshmanistan, the local realm of peers and competitors, desires become dangerous because proximity converts admiration into envy. You’re not jealous of Jeff Bezos; you’re jealous of the colleague who just got promoted. That shift from distant admiration to neighborly comparison ignites mimetic rivalry.

Understanding which world your models inhabit helps you design a healthier ecology of influence. When you notice conflict or comparison growing, you can move a model back into Celebristan by adding distance—treat them as a teacher, not a rival. When you need momentum or learning, you can safely draw models closer but with awareness of the rivalry risk.

The biological roots of imitation

We are wired for this. Andrew Meltzoff’s infant studies, which show newborns mirroring facial gestures and responding to the rhythm of their mother’s voice, prove that imitation precedes learning. Mirror neurons—discovered by Rizzolatti—fire in the same brain regions whether you perform or merely observe an action. You import the desires, goals, and behaviors of others by default. It’s what makes teaching, art, language, and love possible—but also envy, status anxiety, and mob contagion.

(In this sense, Burgis places his book in the lineage of both neuroscience and anthropology: our social brains make us powerfully creative imitators and dangerously mimetic competitors.)

When imitation turns to rivalry

As imitation intensifies within Freshmanistan, cycles of rivalry form. Your model becomes your obstacle—you want what they want, so both of you can’t have it. History and business teem with examples: Ferruccio Lamborghini, insulted by Enzo Ferrari, redirected rivalry into creative energy by founding Lamborghini cars; others, trapped in destructive feedback, spiral into burnout or collapse. Mimetic rivalry often masquerades as ambition; only later do you realize the goals never belonged to you.

Making desire visible again

Burgis’s central practical promise is freedom through awareness. Once you start identifying mimetic patterns—in how social media filters your wants, how corporate ladders define value, how hidden models like advertising campaigns steer behavior—you can intervene. You can map who influences you, test whether each desire serves a deeper value, and cultivate communities of healthy imitation. The goal is not to eliminate imitation—it is the root of culture and empathy—but to replace blind contagion with chosen modeling.

Key insight

The moment you see desire as social rather than solitary, you stop confusing borrowed wants with your own authentic purpose. That shift—from mystifying imitation to conscious influence—is the book’s first act of liberation.

Burgis’s project thus unfolds as both diagnosis and design: diagnose mimetic desire in its hidden networks, then design practices and communities that transform imitation into creativity, rivalry into renewal, and borrowed longing into chosen fulfillment.

Every desire travels through a model. Some are visible mentors; others are engineered and concealed. Burgis traces this through history—from Andrew Meltzoff’s infant imitators to Edward Bernays’s 1920s PR campaigns and today’s social media ecosystems. Each uses models to generate specific desires in the crowd, typically without revealing the source.

How hidden modeling works

Edward Bernays engineered public relations by planting believable models. His “Torches of Freedom” parade in 1929 made female smoking a symbol of emancipation by recruiting debutantes to light Lucky Strikes in public. The sight of aspirational figures performing liberation implanted a new desire. Bernays had hidden the manipulation—the women were paid, the message orchestrated. You see similar methods in influencer marketing today: manufactured authenticity that makes imitation feel spontaneous.

Digital networks now act as Bernays’s global amplification machine. Search trends like “Should I buy Tesla stock?” signal collective mimicry—people checking what others want before choosing for themselves. Platforms learn these signals, then feed back curated desires. Algorithms don’t just reflect our aims—they shape them, transforming social imitation into measurable profit streams.

Freshmanistan vs. Celebristan revisited

Understanding where your models reside determines your vulnerability. Celebristan’s distant models encourage aspiration; Freshmanistan’s close ones invite rivalry. Social media collapses those distances—turning celebrities into pseudo-peers and inviting comparison at massive scale. The influencer’s vacation or minimalist apartment enters your daily feed and begins to steer your longings. The same emotional mechanisms that once helped children learn by copying now make adults manipulable by design.

How to unmask hidden models

Burgis suggests tracing desire to its source. When a lifestyle trend or investment feels contagious, ask: who originated this want, and why? Is the model paid, algorithmically amplified, or personally trusted? The exercise exposes hidden mediators and restores agency. Discerning the provenance of desire—its line of transmission—turns manipulation into insight. You can choose whether to let that imitation pass through you or block it.

Ethical takeaway

When sources of influence are hidden, your relational intelligence becomes a marketing instrument. Revealing the model restores your dignity as a participant rather than a pawn in someone else’s desire economy.

By naming your visible and hidden models, you learn to engineer your own environment of influence. You can select mentors worth emulating, enforce digital boundaries, and create communities that imitate generosity rather than status—all practical shields against toxic mimesis.

Desire rarely stays still. It moves through cycles and systems—looping through imitation, conflict, creation, and renewal. Burgis identifies two main loops: destructive mimicry and creative amplification. The difference is whether the energy of imitation becomes rivalry or reinvention.

Destructive vs. creative loops

When imitation intensifies inside Freshmanistan, it becomes a zero-sum race: thin desires for status, recognition, or fame spiral into burnout. Start-up cultures and social movements collapse under this strain—Zappos’s “delivering happiness” ethos, for example, turned into internal rivalry when structure vanished. The same principles that spread innovation also spread mania.

Yet imitation can turn creative if harnessed deliberately. Lamborghini redirected envy of Ferrari into innovation; Giro’s cycling helmets went mainstream after Greg LeMond’s public modeling created a positive adoption flywheel. When each mimetic step produces real value rather than hollow symbols, desire compounds into growth rather than resentment.

Systems of desire

Beyond individuals lie institutional loops. A system of desire is a social machine that elevates specific wants through mediators, incentives, and recognition structures. The Michelin Guide began as a practical travel guide and evolved into the pinnacle of culinary aspiration, defining what every ambitious chef wanted. Sébastien Bras’s withdrawal from the Guide exposes the system’s dark side: when your worth depends on an intermediary’s rating, freedom shrinks and joy evaporates. Michelin’s stars became a cage disguised as prestige.

Systems like these operate everywhere—academic rankings, corporate KPIs, viral algorithms. They transform the tools for excellence into objects of desire, narrowing imagination around what counts as success. Mapping them is the first step to liberation: list the visible mediators, identify hidden incentives, trace who benefits, and ask what possibilities these systems prevent. The goal is not rebellion but clarity: seeing which social architectures serve meaningful aspiration and which manufacture addiction.

Applied reflection

When you understand a system’s design, you can decide whether to play its game, transform its rules, or exit entirely—just as Bras and other chefs chose independence over invisible servitude.

By shaping your own environment, you convert mimetic energy from a doom loop into a flywheel of meaningful progress. Systems of desire don’t vanish; they can be re-engineered to reward mastery, collaboration, and authentic contribution instead of contagious comparison.

To live freely within a mimetic world, you must learn to sort your desires by depth. Burgis’s distinction between thin and thick desires becomes a diagnostic lens for authentic living. Thin desires are mimetic—their energy derives from others’ approval. Thick desires emerge from enduring purpose and identity.

Recognizing thin desires

Thin desires appear exciting but hollow: viral fame, metrics, prestige. They fluctuate with social feedback and rarely satisfy once achieved. Burgis recounts Tony Hsieh’s Downtown Project, where the ambition to engineer ‘collisions’ degenerated into chaotic mimicry of idealized community, exposing how even noble motives can become narcissistic when imitation outruns grounding values.

Cultivating thick desires

Thick desires, by contrast, grow through time and action—writing a meaningful book, mastering a craft, raising a family, exploring truth. They connect to stable narratives of fulfillment and survive crises. Sebastien Bras choosing terroir over stars, or Toni Morrison’s lifelong storytelling vocation, exemplify thick desire’s durability. Such aims integrate effort and identity rather than performance and applause.

Tests and practices

Burgis recommends practical experiments to distinguish the two. Imagine different futures—the new job, the move, the accolade—and watch your emotional residue. Then use the deathbed test: which desire will still comfort you when life narrows to its essentials? Thin desires dissolve under that scrutiny. Journaling and silence clarify which motivations are borrowed and which ring true. Crises often perform this test for you—failure strips away imitation, exposing what persists.

Practice insight

Thin desires collapse when external validation ends; thick desires grow deeper when challenged. Testing your wants regularly is an act of moral maintenance.

Building a life around thick desires requires pruning thin ones through reflection, storytelling, and selective environments. Over time, these efforts produce integrity: your outer actions begin to mirror your inner compass rather than the shifting desires of your peers.

Burgis moves from diagnosis to prescription: you can’t erase mimesis, but you can live anti-mimetically—a life of conscious imitation and deliberate independence. Anti-mimetic practice transforms visibility into freedom and rivalry into creation.

Naming your models and values

The first tactic is naming. Write down who influences your choices—friends, executives, authors, online voices. Hidden models lose power when exposed. Next, establish a hierarchy of values: clarify which goals outlast fashion. Explicit ranking provides gravitational stability so that passing desires don’t swing you off course.

Building good systems around you

Institutions can either amplify rivalry or dampen it. Zappos’s holacracy experiments revealed how “flattening” structures often intensify mimetic friction by removing clear hierarchies. Healthy organizations delineate roles, foster clear missions, and limit comparison. Similarly, individuals can place digital boundaries, choose noncompetitive environments, and circulate admiration instead of envy.

Positive flywheels

You can design positive cycles of desire by aligning small steps toward a thick goal. Each achievement should reinforce the next. Burgis calls this building a “flywheel”—momentum built from disciplined imitation of the good. Recruit selective models—experts or saints—to energize this motion, then sustain it through gratitude and focus.

Ongoing discipline

The anti-mimetic life is not rebellion but craftsmanship of attention. It requires ongoing discernment about what you want and what you help others want. With practice, you become not merely reactive to others’ desires but generative—a person whose example expands the field of possible good desires for everyone else.

Daily reflection

Ask yourself regularly: “What do I want, and what have I helped others want?” This twin inquiry grounds freedom in responsibility—the heart of anti-mimetic ethics.

Practiced consistently, anti-mimetic living allows imitation to remain human and creative without becoming competitive or manipulative. You don’t transcend mimesis; you purify it.

At the social scale, mimetic conflict often leads to collective violence that must be contained. Girard called this the scapegoat mechanism: when rivalries explode, communities regain order by expelling or punishing one representative victim. Burgis shows how this ancient process—visible in Yom Kippur rituals, Greek tragedies, and modern “cancel” cultures—remains the default safety valve for mimetic tension.

Revealing the mechanism

Ancient societies disguised violence as purification: a goat bearing the people’s sins, a pharmakós sacrificed to cleanse the city. Modernity repeats the pattern through symbolic trials on digital platforms or political theater. What changes in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Girard argued, is perspective—the Bible exposes the innocence of victims, revealing the mechanism instead of sanctifying it. Awareness becomes the antidote.

Disruptive empathy

Burgis supplements Girard’s theory with the practice of disruptive empathy: entering another person’s interior world to interrupt cycles of mimicry and blame. The anecdote of Dave Romero—a man once hostile, later vulnerably confessing “I killed a man” during a company barbecue—embodies this. In that moment of shared storytelling, hostility dissolved, transforming a potential scapegoat situation into human connection.

Fulfillment stories as antidote

Practical empathy begins with asking others to tell Fulfillment Stories—moments when they acted, did something well, and felt lasting meaning. Listening without interruption surfaces thick desires and silences competitive mimicry. Repeated across teams or communities, this method transforms rivalry into respect and camaraderie.

Communal insight

The opposite of scapegoating is not indulgence but understanding. Listening breaks cycles that punishment sustains; empathy is the social invention that neutralizes violent mimesis without a victim.

When you cultivate empathy and story-based listening, you create a culture capable of absorbing mimetic tension without expulsion. The practice heals at the human level what Girard diagnosed at the mythic: our drive to imitate need not end in sacrifice; it can evolve into shared redemption.

In a world where technology can engineer want, Burgis ends by urging transformation rather than control. He contrasts algorithmic manipulation with relational formation—the difference between engineering desire and transforming desire. The question is no longer whether desires can be built, but who builds them and toward what ends.

Engineering desire

Digital capitalism turns human attention into raw material. Larry Page’s ambition for Google to move from “search to satisfy” epitomizes engineering desire—systems predicting and delivering future wants. Shoshana Zuboff terms this surveillance capitalism; Burgis calls it a theft of interiority. Devices and data determine what feels natural to want, leaving little space for interior discernment.

Even in intimate realms, engineering advances—the fantasy of companionship through sex robots or AI friends—illustrate desires recursively manufactured by machines designed to mimic us. It’s the contemporary Pill of Murti-Bing: bliss through managed appetite.

Transforming desire through leadership and silence

Transformation takes slower tools: conversation, reflection, and meditative thought. Transcendent leaders model thick desires that expand those of others—like Maria Montessori, who taught dignity and then withdrew. Burgis identifies five skills for such leadership: shifting attention from self to others, increasing the speed of truth, practicing discernment, cultivating silence, and filtering feedback. Each practice re-centers desire on shared flourishing, not performative success.

The future of wanting

Technological acceleration ensures that mimesis will only intensify. Burgis therefore challenges you to identify your single greatest desire—the one goal worth every subordinate want. This organizing passion acts as your axis amid chaos, what Annie Dillard’s weasel metaphor captures: latch onto one living pulse and let lesser ambitions wither away. The ethical corollary follows: live as if you are responsible for what others want.

Final directive

To want well is to lead well. Desire can be engineered, but its human destiny is transformation—through relationships, silence, and the courage to want something worthy.

The mimetic future demands not the eradication of imitation but its redemption. Those who cultivate thick desires and lead others into genuine fulfillment will become the stewards of a more humane age of wanting.