Mimetic desire
Most of what we want, we want because someone else wants it.
- Most of what we want, we want because someone else wants it.
- Operating: Why did every consumer startup in 2014-15 build a chat app? Most founders weren't independently convinced chat was the future.
- Investing: Crowded trades are mimetic desire at its purest.
- Everyday life: Most career envy is mimetic.
French philosopher René Girard spent his career on this idea. The short version: humans don't have many independent desires. We learn what to want by watching the people around us, especially the people we admire.
We tell ourselves we have our own taste, our own goals, our own dreams. Girard noticed that humans are intensely imitative animals. Almost everything we think we want is actually downstream of someone we modelled on, at some point, often without realising.
This is one of the most powerful and underappreciated mental models for business and life because it explains so much. It explains why luxury brands work (we want what the people we admire want). It explains why startups cluster around the same ideas in any given year (founders model their desires on other founders). It explains why office politics get poisonous (we want what our peers want, and there's a fixed supply of it). It explains why social media is uniquely psychologically draining (it shows you what to want, all day, every day, in real time).
Girard's deeper observation: when many people imitate the same desire, they end up competing for the same limited thing. The competition gets ugly because the desire isn't really for the thing. It's for the position the thing represents.
Peter Thiel, who studied under Girard at Stanford, has written about this. His advice to founders is essentially "avoid mimetic markets." Find a thing nobody else is competing for. It's much easier to win a non-mimetic game than to win a mimetic one.
For operators, three practical implications:
1. Be careful who you choose to model your career on. Their desires will become yours, often without you noticing. 2. Some of your strongest "I want this" feelings are downstream of who you've been spending time with. Change who you spend time with, and the wants change. 3. Most of the best returns in life come from wanting things other people don't want. Buffett applies this in investing (his most contrarian bets paid the best). It applies similarly in careers, businesses, and lifestyles.
Worth noticing: mimetic desire isn't bad in itself. We learn what's good and worth pursuing by watching others. But unexamined mimetic desire turns life into a status race against people you didn't choose to race against, for prizes you didn't actually want.
Examples in the wild
Why did every consumer startup in 2014-15 build a chat app? Most founders weren't independently convinced chat was the future. They saw other founders building chat apps and wanted the same thing. Most of those apps failed.
Crowded trades are mimetic desire at its purest. Every fund manager wants what every other fund manager wants. The price gets pushed past fundamentals. Then it inevitably reverses, and the funds that came late lose money.
Most career envy is mimetic. The person you envy chose their career partly by watching someone else's career. You're envying a copy of a copy. Worth sitting with this before applying for the same job.
Mimetic desire is one of the mental models we apply through real cases inside the Pareto MBA — a part-time program for professionals who want to think clearly about business.