363. beneath wanting
Most people know what they want, or at least they think they do. They want the better job, tighter body, deeper relationship, nicer house, bigger audience, stronger reputation, higher status, or the visible proof that their life is moving in the right direction. Ask someone what they want and they can usually give you an answer, but if you ask them why they want it, their answer becomes less clear.
The question is interesting because I’m not sure we understand our own desires as well as we think we do. We often talk about desire as if it begins inside of us, as if we simply look out at the world, evaluate our options honestly, and choose what matters most. That sounds simple enough, but I don’t think that’s how desire actually works.
Much of what we want has already been socially mediated before we become conscious of it. We see what other people admire, pursue, protect, celebrate, envy, or compete for and their attention becomes a signal for desirability. The object, or thing we desire, doesn’t arrive to us as neutral. It arrives already marked by someone else’s desire.
That is easy to overlook because desire feels personal. It happens inside of our own thoughts, so we assume it starts internally. We feel the wanting in our own body. We experience the pull as our own. We imagine the desire must be authentic because the feeling is as real as hunger. But a feeling being real doesn’t mean its origin is fully understood.
Sometimes we discover desire through direct experience. We randomly try something, encounter it with an honest innocence, and realize it matters to us. We love the craft, the process, the challenge, the person, the work, the place, or the way something makes us feel when nobody else is watching. That kind of desire exists, and it matters.
However, a lot of desire is less direct than that. We learn what to want by watching what other people want. We see what gets rewarded. We see what gets attention. We see what makes someone more attractive, respected, admired, trusted, included, or powerful. Before we have time to question whether we actually want the thing itself, society has already told us that the thing carries social value.
That is why desire can feel so convincing. We usually don’t think, “I want this because someone else wants it.” We think, “I want this because it’s valuable.” But the value we perceive is often inherited from the attention other people have already placed on it. We mistake the social proof surrounding the object for proof that the object itself must matter. The borrowed nature of desire hides itself because once the desire is inside us, it feels like ours.
René Girard, a French thinker and literary critic who spent much of his work exploring the imitative nature of human desire, called this the romantic lie. It's the belief that our desires originate entirely within ourselves. I think that’s an idea worth sitting with because it challenges one of the stories we like to tell ourselves. We like to believe we are more independent than we are. We like to believe our ambitions, preferences, tastes, and goals are uniquely ours. And maybe some of them are, but many of them have been shaped by the people around us, the culture we live inside of, the groups we want to belong to, and the versions of success we have been taught to admire. This doesn’t make desire meaningless. It makes desire worth examining.
When someone says they want a certain body, job, relationship, lifestyle, or level of success, I think the more interesting question isn’t whether they want it. I’m sure they do. The more interesting question is what they believe having it will prove.
A body is rarely just a body. It can become proof of discipline, attractiveness, strength, youth, or sexual value. A job is rarely just a job. It can become proof of intelligence, importance, competence, power, or social position. A pair of shoes, a car, a house, a relationship, a social circle, or a public achievement can all become symbols of something larger than themselves. The object becomes a proxy for identity. Acquiring it seems to move us closer to the version of ourselves we believe others will recognize, admire, or accept.
We don’t merely want the thing. We want the version of ourselves we imagine will exist on the other side of having it. We want the feeling we believe comes with it. We want to become the person who is seen and treated differently, trusted and included more fully, and ultimately desired themselves.
That may be the deeper reason desire is so difficult to understand. What we want is often tied to who we're trying to become in the eyes of others. And that presents a strange circle inside all of this. We desire what the group finds desirable so that we can become more desirable to the group. We want the thing because other people want it, and if we can possess it, embody it, or be associated with it, we believe some of that desirability will transfer to us.
That may sound a bit shallow until you remember that belonging has never been a shallow human need. For most of human history, being valued by the group wasn’t just about feeling good. It was tied to survival. To be included meant protection, cooperation, food, mating opportunity, shared knowledge, and safety. To be rejected, ignored, or pushed outside the group carried real danger. We didn't evolve in a world where social value was merely psychological. We evolved in a world where being wanted by the group could be the difference between life and death.
So, it makes sense that we are sensitive to what others value. It makes sense that we pay attention to what people admire. It makes sense that we notice what earns respect, attraction, approval, and belonging. The problem is that this old social machinery now operates inside a modern world designed to manufacture desire at scale.
Marketing understands this. Social media intensifies it. Culture packages it. And the internet delivers it to us incessantly. It doesn't merely show us things. It shows us things surrounded by visible desire.
Likes, comments, followers, luxury symbols, physiques, relationships, affiliations, destinations, achievements, aesthetics, and lifestyles all become public signals of value. The platform doesn’t need to convince us directly. It only needs to show us what other people appear to want. And that's why modern desire is so difficult to trust.
We are surrounded by models. Every screen presents people displaying, ranking, celebrating, comparing, and competing. Their desires become signals before we have time to ask whether those desires belong to us. We start chasing goals that were socially installed, then mistake the intensity of the chase for proof that the desire was authentically ours.
That might lead to one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves:
“Do I actually want this, or do I want what I believe this will make me?”
Because those are not the same thing.
Wanting to become healthier, stronger, more skilled, successful, attractive, or capable isn’t wrong. Desire isn’t the enemy. Some desires are deeply meaningful, even if they were first awakened by watching someone else. Seeing another person live with strength, beauty, courage, discipline, creativity, or freedom can reveal possibilities we may not have seen on our own.
The issue isn’t that desire is influenced by others. It always will be because we are wired that way. The issue is whether we ever stop long enough to examine the desire before giving our life to it.
If we never ask where a desire comes from, we may spend years pursuing a life we didn’t consciously choose. We may build ourselves around goals that only matter because we think they make us more impressive to people whose approval we never questioned. We may call it ambition when it’s really imitation. We may call it purpose when it’s really the fear of being left out. We may call it self-improvement when it’s really an attempt to become valuable enough to be wanted.
None of this means we should reject everything we want. It means we need a more honest relationship with wanting. Maybe the goal isn’t to eliminate borrowed desire, but to become more conscious of it. To notice when our desire intensifies because someone else has the thing. To notice when we are more interested in being seen with the object than experiencing the object itself. To notice when our goals are less about becoming more whole and more about becoming more acceptable.
The question isn’t just, “What do I want?”
It’s, “Why do I want this, and what do I believe it will give me?”
Even that question may not lead to a definitive answer. Desire is complicated. It’s personal, social, biological, emotional, historical, and cultural all at once. But asking the question creates space. It interrupts the automatic pull. It gives us a chance to separate the thing itself from the meaning attached to it.
At the end of the day, I think much of what we call ambition may simply be unexamined imitation. And maybe a way toward self-knowledge begins when we stop assuming every desire is ours simply because we feel it, and instead become willing to ask:
Why do I want what I want?
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