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Hello, hello, hello. Thank you for joining me. Philosopher René Girard once observed something about human nature so painfully accurate that most of us don't like to admit it to ourselves.
Explore René Girard's mimetic desire theory and learn strategies to live an authentic, anti-mimetic life in a digital age.
Key Takeaways
- Our desires are shaped by others through mimetic desire, not purely by our own intrinsic wants.
- Digital algorithms have expanded and intensified mimetic desire beyond traditional social circles.
- Recognizing mediators and their influence is key to understanding our desires and motivations.
- Living authentically requires conscious awareness and selection of role models aligned with our values.
- Escaping mimetic desire leads to greater freedom, fulfillment, and self-directed life.
What the video covers
- René Girard's mimetic desire theory explains that we want things not inherently, but because others want them or embody qualities we desire.
- Mimetic desire influences not just products but goals, careers, relationships, values, and lifestyles.
- Historically, desire was shaped by a small village community, but now global digital algorithms expose us to billions of models.
- Social media algorithms amplify mimetic desire by constantly showing us idealized 'winners' to emulate.
- Girard identifies two types of mediators: external (unreachable role models) and internal (people within our social circle).
- We mistakenly believe acquiring objects or status of mediators will grant us their internal qualities like love, respect, and fulfillment.
- Living by mimetic desires leads to constant comparison, fear, and loss of authentic self.
- An anti-mimetic life involves conscious selection of mentors and models, aligning with personal core values and higher ideals.
- Awareness of digital influence and mimetic desire increases personal agency and freedom from externally imposed scripts.
- The video offers practical strategies to live by choice and design rather than mimetic programming.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Mimetic Desire
- 01:04Living an Anti-Mimetic Life
- 02:14The Changing Village and Digital Influence
- 03:25Understanding Desire and Digital Landscape
- 04:32Girard's Triangular Desire Model
- 05:45Desiring to Be the Mediator
- 07:02External vs Internal Mediators
- 08:12Social Media's Role in Mimetic Desire
- 11:43Strategies to Escape Mimetic Desire
- 15:07Conscious Model Selection and Self-Care
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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You don't want what you want because of who you are. You want what you want because of the people you want to be, have them.
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He called this mimetic desire. Now, this should feel pretty intuitive to you. I mean, what the [ __ ] is a labubu, right?
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Why would anyone line up for hours in order to buy a $30 brick? Why would anyone wear jeans so skinny that they compromise their own fertility? And I'm not judging you. I've done it, too.
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Right? Why does everyone want to go to Japan all of a sudden? Skinny jeans aside, the complicated part about mimetic desire is that it's not just about the products that you buy. It's about the goals that you chase, the
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career that you chase. It's about who you compete with, who you envy, who you sleep with, your values, your dreams, your lifestyle. It's about realizing that the version of yourself that you've been quietly chasing for the past years
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that did not come from you. So, in this video, I want to unpack some of Girard's ideas from mimetic theory, and I want to share with you some strategies that I'm implementing in my own life to live an
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anti-mimetic life. That is, living a life by my choice and my design as opposed to running some programs, some script that was installed in me by God knows who.
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My name is Mikey. If you're new here, welcome. This is Simple Perspective. Let's get into it. That's one [music] small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
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We should start off by establishing that none of this is new. Humans have been copying each other and emulating each other's desires for hundreds of thousands of years, like literally since the caves. The difference is that for the majority of
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that time, if you wanted to know what you want and what you should strive for, you looked around the people in your village. You compared yourself to maybe 100, 150, 200 people at most. The same people you grew up with, the people you
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went to school with, the people you'd be buried next to, the people your kids would marry off to. That was your circle of influence.
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Now, what happened is that over at some point in the last 15 years, that village dynamic changed. Not only did the village get significantly larger due to, you know, global trade and intercontinental travel becoming really accessible, the village itself got
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replaced by an algorithm. An algorithm that sorts through 5 billion people and ranks them in order of how good they are at making you want what they have. And then, it serves you the winners on loop every single morning before you've even
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gotten out of bed. And I know what you're thinking. You already know this. I get it, Mikey.
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Social media's bad, blah blah blah blah blah. Brain rot is bad. Touch some grass. Get off my phone. I get it.
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Screen time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. Slow down for a second because this is not just about attention. I'm not going to tell you to dopamine detox. That's not where this video's going. It is about not spending the next 40 years of your
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life chasing some vision of yourself that is not your own. Chasing some vision of yourself that was implanted in you by third-party actors whom you'll never meet, who have nothing to do with your life, who have nothing to do with you.
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I firmly believe that the higher level of awareness and understanding that we have about the nature of desire and about the digital landscape, the texture of the digital landscape that we navigate, the more we understand it, the higher we can
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raise our consciousness and be aware of what is influencing us. And thus, the more agency we can develop in our own lives. That is what this is about. And in order to do that, the first thing we have to do is understand René Girard's
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mimetic theory. And I'm going to do my best to give you a 1,000-ft view of it in the next section of this video.
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So, the first thing we need to understand is that we tend to think of our desires as a straight line, right?
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There's us, the subject, and then there's a straight line to our object of desire, right? Be that a certain achievement, a possession, a certain way we can look, money, status, whatever may be. There's the object of our desire,
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and then there's us. And therefore, we think that all of the frustration that we feel or the motivation that we feel to get that thing is based on the distance, the gap that we have between where we currently are and where we want
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to be. Girard says no. Girard suggested that there's a third point, a second person through which we mediate our desire. I'll put a little visual on the screen so you can see what I'm talking about. But he believed that
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through this person, through this model, they teach us what to want. So, going back to the example I gave earlier about the $30 Supreme brick, nobody wants a $30 brick.
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What happens is that you want to be part of this community of hypebeasts or people that care about Supreme, care about streetwear. They have taught you what to want. They are the mediators, and through them, you then also develop the desire for
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this thing. You may have had an experience in high school or university where there was this person that nobody really gave much attention to. They were not that good-looking, not that interesting, but at some point, maybe you went in the transition from high
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school to university or from university to professional life, and all of a sudden, you notice that they started getting more attention. They, quote unquote, glowed up. And all of a sudden, you see them getting attention from other people, and that sparks your interest.
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You're like, "Oh, wait. They actually are kind of cute or they are kind of interesting." That is mimetic desire.
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Now, the next layer of this, which is kind of uncomfortable to think about, but I want you to recognize the truth in it. Girard suggests that we don't just want what they want.
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We want to be that person, and that's why we want the things they want. So, essentially, we see this model, this mediator, and we assume that they have these internal qualities that we desire.
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We think that because they're beautiful or because they're financially successful or because they're this and that, they must have these internal qualities that we're after, which are all the same for all of us. We want to feel love, we want to feel
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deeply known, we want to feel seen, we want to feel respected, we want to feel like we have work that fulfills us, that energizes. That's what we want at our core. And we see this person, this model, this mediator,
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and we assume that they have these items, and then we see what they're doing, be that driving Lamborghinis or buying this type of makeup brand or buying this water bottle, this Supreme brick, wearing skinny jeans, whatever it is, and we assume that, oh, because
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they're doing this, if I do that, too, if I chase the desires, the objects of the desires that they're chasing as well, I, too, will have the character traits that they have.
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But, this is obviously very faulty logic, but we all do this. Pardon me one second while I take off this jacket because it is hot in here. Okay, so that is the basics of mimetic desire. Now, the next
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layer that we have to understand is that Girard separated the mediators into two types. There are external mediators and internal mediators.
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Now, simply put, an external mediator is a type of model that is outside of our world, so to speak. It is someone that we don't have access to, and therefore we can safely compare ourselves to them or look up to them, admire them, want
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the things they want without triggering all of this psychological internal discomfort. Right? So, for example, you might look up to someone like Michael Jordan or [clears throat] Kobe Bryant or Jesus or the Buddha or Taylor Swift or Timothée Chalamet or whoever it
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is that you look up to. But, because they're so out of your world...
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And therefore, you can look up to them, you can pursue the objects that they desire as well without feeling so much quarrel inside you. There is also internal mediators, internal models.
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These are people that are within your world, within your realm of possibility. So, these might be people that you went to high school with, people that you went to uni with, people in your gym, people in your city, your siblings, your
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parents. Right? People that seem within your reach. And therefore, these models of desire, these mediators of desire, are no longer distant enough that you can admire them, you now see yourself in competition with them.
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And this is where all those nasty psychological feelings of envy, self-consciousness doubt frustration that's where it all stems from.
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Because you feel like you're competing against these people to access the same resources, to get the same qualities.
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Right? You your brain almost like perceives it as a zero-sum game. Now, as I alluded to earlier, what happens is that social media has completely shattered this dynamic.
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Right? Whereas before, you would have only compared yourself to people in your town, people in your city, people you went to high school with, now the internet, social media, gives you access to hundreds of millions of different life paths. You get to see
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what these people are eating for breakfast, what they're doing on a Tuesday morning, where they're going for dinner, what what they're doing for their workouts, what their body looks like at Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. You get to see
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all of these things. And it's it's honestly way too much information. And that brings all of these mediators that would have been outside of your world into an internal mediators state. And therefore, you feel like you're constantly competing against all of
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these people. Right? And you might have noticed this. I want to add a quick caveat here. The thing about social media is that it's not like you're competing against Kylie Jenner or Timothy Chalamet or Mr.
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Beast, right? Those people, even though yes, the internet, social media made Neymar and Messi and Mr. Beast and Kylie Jenner, it allowed you to watch them on social media and feel closer to you, but they still might feel far.
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The people that really [ __ ] you in the head, like the people that really screw your mental health, are the people that seem like they're close to you. Right?
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It's the person it's Timmy from Omaha, Nebraska that has his multi-million dollar marketing agency and he's dating this like hot blonde chick from Nebraska. And that feels close enough to you and that messes with your head. If you're a girl,
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it might be the girl that has like 8,000 followers on Instagram and she lives in your city and she's always doing Pilates and eating at these nice restaurants and going to the nicest cafes and buying the latest beauty
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products. Right? It's not too distant, but it's close enough that now you feel like you're in competition with these people from all over the world, from all different walks of life and you're only catching a glimpse of their life. This
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will destroy your mental health faster than anything else and I think this is a huge reason why social media is so correlated to poor mental health outcomes as there's plenty of data to corroborate. And there's another trap you can fall into here. Because after
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understanding all of this, when you understand mimesis, you might think, "Okay, well, if everyone's chasing money and status and possessions and achievements, I'm just going to do the opposite. I'm just going to reject modernity. Everyone's trying to chase
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Wall Street money and Miami and McLaren money and all this kind of stuff. I'm just going to sell all my possessions and move to India to an ashram and just meditate. I'm going to sell all my possessions and go surf in Bali and be a
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digital nomad. And yeah, I'm not I'm not following the crowd. I'm living an anti-mimetic life.
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No. So, what Girard would argue is that that is still a mimetic desire. Right? Your desire to go to Bali, to live this homesteading life, this like life that is against modernity, that is still being mediated by this person, by
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this third person. Why? Because you're essentially saying I'm so much better than you that I don't value what you have.
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Right? This thing that you value the most, money, your possessions, your McLaren, your status, whatever, I value that so little and I'm so much better than you that I'm doing the completely opposite thing.
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That is still a mimetic desire because you're still mediating your desire through this other person.
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Right? So, that's a trap as well that we have to be careful of. Okay, so how do we live an anti-mimetic life? How do we navigate the world and our psyche and our desires given this context?
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And a lot of people will tell you that you can't. Right? There's a lot of authors and speakers on mimetic desire that will tell you you can't really escape mimesis because it is we're social creatures and it is human nature
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to craft your identity in relation to others. And to some extent this is true, right?
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We design our sense of self, we design our identity in relation to others. To give you an example, I can only know if I'm rich or poor relative to others, in relation to others. I can only know if I'm
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attractive or unattractive, smart or stupid, beautiful, ugly, fit, fat, I can only know any of those things in relation to others.
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Right? I only know if my achievements are impressive or unimpressive in relation to others and therefore we craft our identity in a to others. Does that make sense? And therefore all of our desires are going to be mediated by
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others, by this external or internal mediators. And that would lead to the natural conclusion that okay, then the game is not about escaping mimesis. The game is not about escaping memetic desire. The game is about actively and consciously selecting
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better models to emulate. Selecting better role models, better ideals to go after. And there's an element to this that I'm going to unpack in a little bit.
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But Girard would disagree. Girard did believe, as I believe, that there is a way to live an anti-memetic [snorts] life and to actually escape this low-level comparison.
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It's not something I've accomplished fully and it's not something that's easy once I tell you what it is, but it is possible.
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And the way to do it is by not trying to transcend memetic desire horizontally.
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That is not simply picking better human mentors to compare yourself to, better human models to compare yourself to because humans are and always will be deeply flawed and full of contradictions just like I am, just like you are.
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The way is to pick the path of vertical transcendency. Right? Is to make your model, your ideals, the objects of your desire something higher, something beyond normal human consciousness.
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God, love, a set of And if if the word God triggers you, just think of it as good orderly direction. Think of it as source. Think of it Think about it as love itself, right? The point is picking a set of values, a set of
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principles that you abide by, that everything in your life filters through, which is higher than normal human endeavors, normal normal human [ __ ] So if, say, one of your core values was love, then everything you do in your
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life, every decision you make, every interaction you have, every goal that you set, every feeling that you entertain, every thought that you entertain in the morning, it all passes through that filter of does this magnify love in my
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life? Is this loving to myself and to those around me? Beautiful, right? What if one of your values was to magnify feelings of gratitude in your life and to engage fully and to give thanks for the things that are in front
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of you. Beautiful, right? That is vertical transcendency. You have to establish these values, these principles that you live by and that aligns everything in your life.
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But, as I alluded to just now and as you can imagine, this is difficult. This is not a thing that's going to happen to you in a day or in a week or in a month.
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It is a lifelong path, a lifelong commitment that you are making to your personal development, to your spiritual growth, to becoming this kind of person. It's a practice that you do every day, right?
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To live by your values, to align yourself with higher ideals. Because here's the thing, when you live by these mimetic desires, when you live in constant comparison to others, you are constantly in fear. When you are self-centered, right? When you and
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being self-centered is natural, right? It's our experience of life. Our experience of life is being self-centered.
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And when you're self-centered, you're going to go and interpret your experiences, your feelings, the events in your life and you're going to give them meaning. How? By comparing them to your past experiences, by comparing them to everything that's happened in your
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life up to that point. And if something is painful, if something stirs up some heavy emotions inside you, what will happen is that you'll want to feel better.
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And how will you feel better? By comparing yourself to others. And how do you compare yourself to others?
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It's hard to do it with intangible things like feelings. It's hard to know whether I have more joy than you or you have more joy than me, whether I have more love in my life than you.
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Those things are hard, but you know what's easy? The metrics of success that the world gives us.
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Possessions achievements looks money status. Those things are easy to quantify and therefore those become our mechanisms of comparison with others.
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And when those become our mechanisms of comparison, slowly over time those things grip us. Our sense of self, our identity becomes to get attached to those things. Possessions, achievements, looks, money, status. And when that happens, that is when we have royally [ __ ] up.
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Why? Because we have placed our sense of self, our identity, the object of our desire on something that is outside of our control. On something that is so impermanent, right? As opposed to placing it on higher things. Vertical transcendency,
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things like love, things like learning, truth. That is the real real, right? Like that is the real real of how you escape mimetic desire.
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But I want to give you a more practical, more tangible tip. I'm going to give you two more tangible tips.
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The first is selecting your mentors, your models consciously. The reality is we're all affected by mimetic desire.
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There's so many things that we're going to do in our lives that is modulated through these models, through these mediators. That is normal.
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But our task is to select those models as consciously as possible, to be as aware as possible.
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Right? I've talked about this plenty in many of my videos before, right? The art of conscious curation, consciously curating the ideas, symbols, information, and people that you allow into your life, into your consciousness. This is no different.
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Really ask yourself, what do you want in your life? If all the people whose opinions you cared about died, what would you do? What would you want to do with your life? What would you want to experience?
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You have to really do the work, the meditation, the journaling, the therapy, the conversations, the spiritual practices. Whatever it is you got to do, you got to really ask yourself that question, what do you want? What do you
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value? Who are you? Who do you want to be? Who were you before the world told you who you were?
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It's not an easy question. Right? But if you ask yourself that, then and only then should you start selecting which models to copy. And then hopefully, you'll start picking models that are much greater than someone like me on the internet or some
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random influencer or some random kid in your high school. You'll start picking much, much better models to emulate.
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Last but not least, the most powerful tool to live an anti-mimetic life is memento mori.
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Remember that you die. This is one of the most powerful tools from stoic philosophers and it is essentially just meditating upon the shortness of life. If you extend the time horizon long enough and you realize that everyone whose
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opinion matters to you, including your own, is going to die very soon, then you stop giving so much weight to everything. Everything can feel a little bit lighter. Right?
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Thinking about death does not have to be this morbid thing. It should be a liberating exercise.
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If you right now you are waiting for someone to give you permission to do the things you want to do, if you are waiting to pursue a certain thing, to be a certain way, to act a certain way
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because you worry about what people might think or that this desire is inauthentic or whatever, chill and remember that you're going to die.
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[laughter] Right? This is it. This is all you got. You got one life as far as we know.
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Let's recap really quickly. Memetic desire, our desire is not a straight line. It is not subject to sire and object of desire and straight to the No no no.
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We do not want what we want because of who we are. We want what we want because we want to be the people that have those things. We mediate our desires through these models and to some extent we can't really
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escape that. So, what we can do is select the models consciously. Bring as much awareness and attention as much consciousness as possible to what is influencing our desires. Who are those models?
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Not trying to escape that, being honest with ourselves. Then, what we have to realize is that the only true way to escape this memetic desire is not to do it horizontally, it's to do it vertically.
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Is to pick a set of values, ideas, beliefs that are above normal human endeavor.
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No human is perfect. Me, not you, not anyone. So, what you should do is set an ideal, love, God, the pursuit of truth, whatever it may be for you. That is your North Star.
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That is what you pursue. That is your ultimate desire. Then, the last thing you can do that is super simple is just to remember that you're going to die cuz that always helps.
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[laughter] [gasps] My name is Mikey. This was In Perspective. I hope this was helpful.
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Take care of yourself. Peace. [music]
Topics:mimetic desireRené Girardsocial media influencedigital algorithmsauthentic livingself-awarenesspersonal agencyanti-mimetic lifedesire theorySimple Perspective
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