Over the past few days, I've been writing about mimetic desire — the way we absorb what to want from others, often without realising it.
If you've been following along, you might have recognised some uncomfortable truths about your own motivations. You might have started noticing the mimetic pull in real time: the envy trigger, the borrowed desire, the comparison that seemed to come from nowhere.
This awareness is powerful. But it raises a question I hear often:
If so many of my desires are borrowed, what's left? What do I actually want?
The emptiness is normal
When people first start seeing their mimetic patterns, there's often a period of disorientation.
The goals that once felt urgent start to seem hollow. The competition you were engaged in starts to look absurd. The life you were building might suddenly feel like it belongs to someone else.
This can be destabilising. If you take away the borrowed desires, what remains?
Sometimes, at first: a kind of emptiness.
This is normal. It's even necessary. The emptiness is what happens when you stop filling yourself with other people's wants. It's uncomfortable, but it's also a cleared space.
Something can grow there. Something that's actually yours.
Authentic desire is quieter
Authentic desires don't announce themselves the way borrowed desires do. They don't come with urgency and anxiety. They don't feel like competition.
They're quieter. More like a gentle pull than a desperate push.
You notice them in the margins. The thing you'd do even if no one knew. The curiosity that persists even when it's not impressive. The activity where the doing is its own reward.
These signals are easy to miss when you're caught up in mimetic noise. But when you quiet the noise, they become audible.
Following the quiet signals
The process of discovering authentic desire is less like finding a buried treasure and more like tuning a radio.
You adjust the dial. You filter out the static. You listen for the signal.
Practically, this means:
- Following curiosity without needing to justify it. What draws you when no one's watching?
- Creating instead of consuming. What would you make if you didn't care whether anyone saw it?
- Experimenting without commitment. Try things. See how they feel. Not everything will stick. That's fine.
- Listening to your body. Authentic desires often register physically before the mind catches up. A sense of expansion, of rightness. Learn to notice it.
- Being patient. The mimetic patterns took years to form. The authentic ones take time to emerge.
A different kind of life
I won't pretend that living from authentic desire is easy. It's not.
You'll face social pressure. People who expect you to keep playing the game will be confused, or even threatened, by your refusal. You might go through a lonely period where the old tribe no longer fits and the new one hasn't formed.
And the mimetic pull never fully disappears. It's part of being human. You'll catch yourself slipping back into comparison, borrowing desires, getting hooked by the old triggers.
But something does change. You get faster at catching yourself. The baseline shifts. The authentic signals get clearer.
And there's a satisfaction that comes from this kind of life — quieter than the dopamine hit of mimetic achievement, but more sustaining. A sense that your life actually fits you. That you're spending your finite time on things that genuinely matter.
That's what's on the other side.
The book
I've written a short book called Someone Else's Dream that covers all of this in more depth: the theory behind mimetic desire, practical frameworks for working with it, exercises for identifying your patterns, and strategies for daily life.
It's not a long book. I'd rather you actually read it and use it, than have it sit on a digital shelf.
If anything I've written in these posts has resonated, the book goes deeper. It's designed to be practical — something you can work through and return to.
Thanks for reading. And good luck with the work ahead.
What you want matters. Not what you're supposed to want. Not what others have convinced you to want. What you, beneath all the mimetic noise, actually want.
It's worth finding.