For a long time, I thought desire was one of the most private things about a person. What you want, what you chase, and what kind of life feels meaningful can seem deeply personal.

Then you watch people closely, including yourself, and the picture gets stranger. Why do so many people end up wanting the same things? Why can satisfaction fade, not because life got worse, but because somebody nearby got something you thought you should have had? Some of what we call desire is less original than we like to believe. Much of it is learned from other people.

Desire is social

This is not a new observation. The French thinker René Girard built his work around mimetic desire: the idea that we learn what to want by watching other people. We often speak about desire as if it rises from deep inside us. Find your passion. Know what you want. Ignore the noise. That advice assumes there is a pure personal signal waiting underneath the confusion.

Real life feels less clean. We learn what is desirable by watching what other people value. We copy taste before we know we are copying it, and we take on ambitions before noticing where they came from. That does not make desire fake. It means desire is social, which is more uncomfortable. Some of our strongest ambitions may already be shaped by the people around us. So the question is not only what you want. It is also who taught you to want it.

People often assume desire is distorted by celebrities. That happens, but closer models can have a stronger effect. Girard distinguished a distant model, who can inspire fantasy, from a close model, who can become a rival. A billionaire in another country may be a spectacle. A founder from your batch raising more capital than you can feel like a wound. A friend buying the house you thought you should be able to buy can make you restless.

Luke Burgis, who brought Girard's idea into business, writes that conflict can come from our sameness, not only our differences. A peer matters because their life is easy to compare with yours. We do not only notice what peers have. We can begin to use their milestones as a measure of what is possible, important, and on time. That is one reason adulthood can feel more anxious than childhood even as material life improves. The circle of comparison gets sharper.

When winning replaces wanting

This is where desire can become dangerous. At first, the object itself seems to matter: the promotion, the company, or the recognition. But when comparison shapes the desire, relative position can matter more than the thing. You do not only want to build a good company. You want to build one that beats another company. You do not only want wealth. You want the kind that changes where you stand among your peers.

Then desire runs on rivalry instead of purpose, and satisfaction can be hard to reach. Rivalry has no natural endpoint. The people we compare ourselves with change. The meaning of enough shifts with whatever someone else does next. People can then wonder why achievement feels flatter than they expected. Sometimes they have stopped wanting the thing itself and started wanting what it means in comparison with someone else.

The problem is old. The scale is new. Social media makes other people's desires visible all the time. We no longer compare ourselves only with the handful of people around us. We can see a rolling display of people traveling, building, and succeeding in public. We may feel unaffected, but the comparison is available whenever we look.

This is not only a consumer problem. It affects leadership and company building too. Founders can start by solving a real problem and then become preoccupied with another company's valuation. Teams can start by serving customers and later imitate the status rituals of a fashionable company. More choices do not always produce more self-directed lives. They can also give us more chances to copy without noticing.

This is why the topic matters to me. The danger is not only that people chase shallow things. Borrowed desire can look serious. It can even look like courage, because people may be willing to suffer for a script they did not choose. So the answer is not to condemn ambition or want nothing. We learn from other people. We build and become through models. The question is whether we choose those models with our eyes open.

Some models leave us more grounded and free. Others leave us agitated and trapped in performance. Both can look impressive from the outside. The difference is what happens to us as we pursue them.

Cleaner ambition

You probably do not break the loop by force or stop comparing through sheer will. You can change the conditions that shape your desires. Pay attention to whose lives you study most closely. Be more curious about ambitions that grow when a peer succeeds and fade when nobody is watching. Ask better questions. If I achieve this and nobody knows, do I still want it? If the person I compare myself with vanished, would this goal still feel alive? Is this admiration, or is rivalry wearing nicer clothes? Many people do not need less ambition. They need to understand what their ambition is serving.

I do not think we should detach ourselves from desire. Desire animates life. It can create craft, invention, and devotion. The problem is not wanting. It is sleepwalking into wants that other people have installed and we have not examined for ourselves.

We teach one another what matters. Parents, founders, friends, and companies all model not only effort but aspiration. That is one way people spend years climbing toward something and feel strangely absent when they arrive.

I am not exempt. I have wanted numbers because another founder announced them first. Some of the most useful feedback I have received was a version of this essay handed back to me: stop studying other founders so closely, define your own style, and believe in it long enough for it to become yours.

So I keep coming back to a question that helps me think about ambition. Not only what do I want, but who taught me to want this?

Notes and Sources

  • René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1961, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1978. Mimetic desire; distant versus close models.
  • Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, 2021. Girard applied to business; conflict can come from sameness.