Luke Burgis: Knowing Why We Want What We Want

When people speak of being contrarian, they mean to say that they don’t follow the crowd. But that’s a low bar. All you have to do is the opposite of what everyone is doing regardless of whether it makes sense. What you really want is to be anti-mimetic; to not be affected by what other people do.

Being anti- mimetic is having the ability, the freedom, to counteract destructive forces of desire. Something mimetic is an accelerant; something anti- mimetic is a decelerant. An anti- mimetic action— or person— is a sign of contradiction to a culture that likes to float downstream. 

This isn’t something that can be achieved by external forces because there is something fundamental about human psychology that makes us look to others.  The history of Zappos tells us that much. 

Holacracy replaces traditional management hierarchies with self- organizing teams of people working on a specific project. Zappos had eliminated the management hierarchy, but they couldn’t eliminate the network of desire and the need that people have to be in relationship to models. There is always a hierarchy of desire from the perspective of an individual: some models are worth following more than others, and some things are worth wanting more than others.

We are hierarchical creatures. This is why we like listicles and ratings so much. We have a need to know how things stack up, how things fit together. To remove all semblance of hierarchy is detrimental to this fundamental need. When Zappos moved to holacracy, what disappeared aboveground— the visible roles and titles— reappeared in different ways underground. “The environment became more political,” journalist Aimee Groth, who wrote about holacracy for Quartz, told me. “People were less secure in their jobs . . . less clear on how they could hold on to their roles and their jobs. However, you still had a few people who had infinite power because they had a strong relationship with Tony.” There was a hidden web of desire that nobody could decipher.

Which is why you need to start by looking inward.

Don’t take desires at face value. Find out where they lead. Sit with competing desires and project them into the future. Let’s say you have two competing job offers: Company A and Company B. If you have two days to make the final decision, spend one day with each company in your imagination. On the first day, imagine with as much detail as possible that you’re working at Company A and fulfilling the desires that come along with that position— maybe it’s living in a new city, interacting with smart people, and being closer to your family. Pay close attention to your emotions and what’s going on inside your gut. The next day, spend the entire day doing the same thing, except at Company B. Compare.

Once you do that, you’ll find that there are intrinsic forces which drive you. Forces which would exist even if there’s no one for you to imitate. Call these thick desires.

Core motivational drives are enduring, irresistible, and insatiable. They are probably explanatory of much of your behavior since the time you were a child. Think of them as your motivational energy— the reason you consistently gravitate toward certain types of projects (team versus individual, goal- oriented versus ideation) and activities (sports, arts, theater, forms of fitness) and not others. There are patterns in your motivation. If you can put your finger on what specifically they are, then you will have taken a major step toward understanding your thick desires.

Humans understand things through stories, and the best way to understand yourself is to deconstruct your own narrative.

The best way to uncover the patterns is by sharing stories. The storytelling process that I use involves sharing stories about times in your life when you took an action that ended up being deeply fulfilling. A Fulfillment Story, as I call it, has three essential elements:

1. It’s an action. You took some concrete action and you were the main protagonist, as opposed to passively taking in an experience. As life- changing as a Springsteen concert at the Stone Pony might have been for you, it’s not a Fulfillment Story. It might be for Bruce, but not for you. Dedicating yourself to learning everything about an artist and their work, on the other hand, could be.

2. You believe you did well. You did it with excellence, you did it well— by your own estimation, and nobody else’s. You are looking for an achievement that matters to you. If you grilled what you think is a perfect rib- eye steak the other night, then you did something well and achieved something. Don’t worry about how big or small the achievement might seem to anyone else.

3. It brought you a sense of fulfillment. Your action brought you a deep sense of fulfillment, maybe even joy. Not the fleeting, temporary kind, like an endorphin rush. Fulfillment: you woke up the next morning and felt a sense of satisfaction about it. You still do. Just thinking about it brings some of it back. 

But narratives are hard to discover if you’re not looking for them, which is why we often hear about people having regrets when they’re old. It’s only on the deathbed that we finally sit still and reflect on what really matters.

We’ve all met older people who realized too late that their desires were thin— for example, a person who looked forward to retirement for decades only to find out that attaining it left them unsatisfied. That’s because the desire to retire (not widely adopted until after World War II, by the way) is a thin desire, filled with mimetically derived ideas about the things one might do, or not do, in this ideal state. The desire to invest more time with family, on the other hand, is a thick desire— and the proof is that a person can start to fulfill it today and continue to fulfill it into retirement. It grows with compound interest over many years. It has time to solidify.

What most of us do is grasp at the newest and nearest thing instead. That inevitably puts us on a path where there is no end because we don’t know what we’re looking for.

Mimetic desire manifests itself as the constant yearning to be someone or something else (what we called metaphysical desire). People select models because they think the models hold the key to a door that just might lead to the thing they have been looking for. But as we’ve seen, this metaphysical desire is a never- ending game. We cycle through models faster than we cycle through clothes. The act of winning, of gaining possession of the thing that the model made us want, convinces us that we chose the wrong model in the first place. And so we go in search of another one. Mimetic desire is a paradoxical game. Winning is how you lose. Every victory is Pyrrhic.  

There’s a saying that we must either suffer the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Luke has a version of this for mimesis, and we’d all be happier if we remembered it.

Our choice is to yield to the mimetic forces making claims on our desire at every moment or to yield to the freedom of our single greatest desire: doing the one thing that we were made to do, all of the time, over and over and over again, until we’ve developed a desire thick enough to stake our life on. In the meantime, and probably at all times, we have something warm to sink our teeth into: wanting what we already have.