Memetic Desire
You think your wants are yours. Almost none of them are.
AFTER RENÉ GIRARD
A want you are sure is yours
Think of one thing you genuinely want right now. The phone. The body. The city. The job title. The kind of partner. Hold it in your head. Now I am going to ask you where it came from. Not why it is good. Where the wanting itself was born. Most people have never once checked. They assume the want walked in from inside, fully formed, theirs. It almost never does. And that single blind spot quietly runs most of your life.
You guard your opinions. You should be guarding your desires.
Humans wanted to fly long before any machine could. The dream is ancient: Icarus, every myth with wings.
Where did the human desire to fly come from?
Birds gave us flight. Fish gave us the submarine. Bats fed sonar; burrs on a dog fed Velcro. The pattern is brutal once you see it: almost nothing we 'dreamed up' was dreamed from nothing. We watched something already doing it, and the wanting copied across. The model has a name, and it is the whole module.
We do not invent desire. We catch it from a model already showing it.
Memetic Desire
Memetic desire (the idea is René Girard's; this is my read of it) says you do not desire originally. You desire through a model. Someone, or something, wanted it first, or had it first, and you caught the want off them like a yawn across a room. The bird was a model for flight. The rich kid two streets over is a model for the watch. The founder you follow is a model for the life. You are not chasing the object. You are unconsciously copying a pointer that someone else aimed first.
You are mostly what you were exposed to
Run it back to the root. You can only want what you have been exposed to. Exposure comes through the five senses, gets stored as history, and that history is the entire menu your desires order from. So the person raised around startups wants to build one. The person raised around government jobs wants the pension. Neither sat in a quiet room and reasoned their way there. They were marinated in a set of models and absorbed the wants like a smell absorbs into cloth. That is not an insult. It is the operating system. The only people it humiliates are the ones who swore they were original.
Originality is mostly just forgetting who you copied.
The idea generated between your ears is probably going to suck. Most things worth wanting were shown to you by someone else first.
Two people are handed the exact same Rolex. One is a billionaire who owns thirty watches. The other is a kid who grew up watching that watch on the wrists of people who made it.
Why is the watch electric to the kid and basically jewellery to the billionaire?
Value is never in the object. It is object-in-context, and a huge slice of that context is who you watched want it. The kid inherited a chain of models pointing at that watch. The billionaire inherited a different chain (now pointing at art, or privacy, or time). Strip out the models and the watch is just a circle that tells time.
Desire is contagious. You inherit the valuation before you ever reason about it.
Why this scales violently online
Now you understand why social platforms feel like a slot machine for your soul. Instagram is not selling you products. It is selling you a firehose of models, thousands of people visibly wanting and having things, beamed at you all day. Offline you had maybe a dozen models: your street, your school, your family. Online you have ten thousand, hand-picked by an algorithm that learned your envy. Of course you suddenly want the renovation, the watch, the second home you had never once thought about last year. You were shown ten thousand models wanting it. The feed is not making you shallow. It is just running memetic desire at industrial scale.
The algorithm does not change your mind. It changes who you copy.
A 1950s person hears your life. You pay a monthly fee, forever, for software you never hold, that lives nowhere you can point to. Then you tell them you also pay monthly for the internet, which to them sounds like paying rent on thin air.
Why do you see obvious value in things that would have sounded insane to your grandparents?
Desire is not just caught person to person. It is caught across a whole era. What an entire culture is exposed to becomes the new baseline of normal wanting. SaaS, subscriptions, the internet: insane to them, invisible to you, because the models around you all shifted together. Your wants have a manufacture date.
Even your 'obvious' wants are dated artefacts of what your era exposed you to.
The lever: this cuts both ways
Here is where it stops being a depressing fact and becomes a tool. If desire is caught from exposure, then exposure is a dial you can turn. On purpose. You can move your own inner music. Want to want better things? Change the models. Spend a month around people who build, and the itch to build appears on its own, no willpower required. Spend it around people who only complain, and watch your own wanting rot to match. You are not disciplining yourself into new desires. You are reseeding the field they grow from. This is the same move I made in business. I could not force myself to care about a generic market. So I changed my exposure, sat among a narrow kind of surgeon, and the right wants, and the right opening, showed up because the models around me changed.
You cannot will a new desire. You can change the room and let it grow.
The other lever: catch the counterfeits
The second edge is subtraction. Once you know desire is caught, you get a superpower: you can catch a want that was never actually yours. Run the test on anything you are chasing. Trace it back. Who was the model? When did this wanting actually start, and whose life was I watching when it did? Sometimes the answer is clean and you keep the want. Often you find the thing wedged in there by an algorithm, a school of fish you no longer swim with, a person you stopped respecting two years ago. That catch is worth a fortune. It kills bad goals at the thought level, before you have burned a year and a fortune chasing a life that was somebody else's borrowed dream.
Half of maturity is returning desires you accidentally shoplifted.
You get to choose what you are exposed to. Which means, more than you would like to admit, you get to choose what you will want next.
- You do not desire originally. You desire through a model: birds gave us planes, fish gave us submarines, and the kid next door gave you the watch.
- You can only want what you were exposed to. You are mostly the sum of your inputs, not a fountain of original wanting.
- Desire is contagious and it scales. Social feeds are memetic desire run at industrial scale, ten thousand models aimed at your envy.
- Value has a manufacture date. Even your 'obvious' wants drifted in from your era's exposure, not from pure reason.
- Lever one (add): change your exposure on purpose and the right wants grow on their own. No willpower needed.
- Lever two (subtract): trace any want back to its model. If it was never really yours, hand it back before it costs you a year.
Your turn
Pick the single biggest thing you are chasing right now. The real one, money, body, status, a specific life. Then do the autopsy on paper, no flinching. 1. Name the want in one plain sentence. 2. Trace the model. Who or what wanted this first, in front of you? When exactly did the wanting start, and whose life were you watching at that moment? 3. Verdict: is this want endorsed (you trace it and still choose it) or inherited (it got installed by exposure you would not choose today)? Be honest enough to find at least one inherited one. Everyone has them. 4. Now run the dial forward. Name one change of exposure (a room, a feed, five people) that would seed a want you actually respect. Schedule the first dose this week. Do this and you stop being a passive antenna for other people's wanting. You start choosing the signal.
Audit your desires like you audit your bank account. Both quietly decide your life.
Want the whole story, the long version? Read the deep-dive essay
This module stands on René Girard’s work. The words, the examples, and the mistakes are mine.