Wanting Luke Burgis
The real reason we want what we want.
Social Mediation
What we commonly call “social media” is more than media—it’s mediation: thousands of people showing us what to want and colouring our perception of those things.
Smartphones are modern day slot machines available to all.
They work through the power of intermittent variable rewards—pulling the lever of a slot machine gives you a highly variable reward, which maximizes neurological addictiveness; your smartphone does the same thing every time you swipe down to refresh your Instagram feed, never knowing when something interesting might show up.
The Capacity To Imitate
There’s something strange about our relationship to imitation. Humans possess advanced imitation capabilities that allow us to create new things. Our ability to imitate in complex ways is why we have language, recipes, and music. Rivalry is a function of proximity. When people are separated from us by enough time, space, money, or status, there is no way to compete seriously with them for the same opportunities.
The Cult Of Experts
One hundred years ago, there was a much wider gap in knowledge between someone who had a doctoral degree and someone who didn’t. Today, with the world’s information at nearly everyone’s fingertips, the knowledge gap between people with a great amount of formal education and those with less has narrowed. In fact, holding certain degrees, such as a PhD or an MBA, can count against you if you’re pursuing jobs at companies that view them as a sign of one’s complacency. We are witnessing an inversion of value.
Discernment
Discernment is an essential skill because it’s a process for making decisions that includes but also transcends rational analysis. It’s critical for deciding which desires to pursue and which ones to leave behind.
Discernment exists in the liminal space between what’s now and what’s next. Transcendent leaders create that space in their own lives, and in the lives of the people around them.
Test Your Desires: Imagine Your Deathbed
The ultimate way to test desires—especially major life choices such as whether to marry someone or whether to quit your job and start a company—is to practice this same exercise but to do it while imagining yourself on your deathbed. Which choice leaves you more consoled? Which choice causes you more agitation?
Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s agent of change. It clears out the old to make way for the new. The deathbed is where unfulfilling desires are exposed. Transport yourself there now rather than waiting until later, when it might be too late.
Live As If You Have a Responsibility For What Other People Want
Like a giant flywheel, we are gently nudging other people’s desires in one or another direction.
The transformation of desire happens when we become less concerned about the fulfilment of our own desires and more concerned about the fulfilment of others. We find, paradoxically, that it is the very pathway to fulfilling our own.
The Manifestation Of Desire
Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we’re born with. It’s a freedom we have to earn. Due to one powerful yet little-known feature of human desire, freedom is hard-won.
People don’t choose objects of desire the way they choose to wear a coat in the winter. Instead of internal biological signals, we have a different kind of external signal that motivates these choices: models.
Models are people or things that show us what is worth wanting. It is models—not our “objective” analysis or central nervous system—that shape our desires.
Hidden Models—Romantic Lies, Infant Truth
We don’t want things that are too easily possessed or that are readily within reach. Desire leads us beyond where we currently are. Models are like people standing a hundred yards up the road who can see something around the corner that we can’t yet see.
Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being that he is the most imitative creature in the world.
The Art Of Sitting Quietly In A Room
Silence is where we learn to be at peace with ourselves, where we learn the truth about who we are and what we want. If you’re not sure what you want, there’s no faster way to find out than to enter into complete silence for an extended period of time—not hours, but days.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want
Smartphones And Mimetic Desire
Smartphones project the desires of billions of people to us through social media, Google searches, and restaurant and hotel reviews. The neurological addictiveness of smartphones is real; but our addiction to the desires of others, to which smartphones give us unfettered access, is a metaphysical threat.
Innovation Imitation
If someone’s primary objective is innovation for the sake of innovation, they usually end up in a mimetic rivalry with everyone in their field to compete primarily on the basis of originality.
Being different for the sake of being different is the ethos behind shock-value art and academics whose salient feature is making outlandish claims to stand out from the pack.
Mimetic Models
Mimetic models(subconscious imitation) lie in wait every time we glance at our phones. The families of childhood friends post photos in which every day looks like a Christmas card, and Instagram models with bleached white teeth show us how they eat their nutritious breakfasts.
The universe of desire is dotted with billions of stars that appear to shine brightest at the exact moment when we find it hardest to see.
Models: The Real Source Of Desire
Models are the gravitational centres around which our social lives turn.
If you look hard enough, you will find a model (or a set of models) for almost everything—your personal style, the way you speak, the look and feel of your home.
The Path Of Desire
Desire is a path-dependent process. The choices we make today affect the things we’ll want tomorrow. That’s why it’s important to map out, the best we can, the consequences of our actions on our future desires.
Start by thinking seriously about what a positive cycle of desire might look like for you. Start with a core desire. It might be spending more time with your kids, having more leisure time, or writing a book. Then map out a system of desire that makes it easier to bring that core desire to fulfilment.
Moving Goalposts
We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. From the standpoint of desire, our goals are the product of our systems. We can’t want something that is outside the system of desire we occupy.
The obsession with goal setting is misguided, even counterproductive. People set goals and make plans to arrive at a future point called “progress.” But will it be progress? How can we be so sure? Some goals—even good ones—overstay their welcome.
But it’s worth asking where goals come from in the first place. Every goal is embedded within a system.
Two Opposite Thoughts In One Mind
It’s a sign of maturity to be able to hold on to two conflicting desires or two opposing ideas at the same time without immediately rejecting one or the other before there has been time for careful discernment. To live with desire is to live with tension.
Wise people have said that it’s best to compare yourself only to who you were yesterday, not to who other people are today. That’s a good start for escaping the trap of comparison and measurement.