You likely spend most of your waking time pursuing your desires.
I don’t mean your obvious biological needs like sleep or food, but rather your goals and dreams.
How often do you pause to reflect on where your desires come from?
When I was 10 years old I wanted a drum set, badly. Later on my dream was to get the latest videogame console for the Christmas season, they seemed so overpriced… and as I turned to my teenage years, I day-dreamed of owning a professional skateboard.
Soon my desires became less tangible. I wanted attention from my peers. I wanted a girlfriend. I wanted to enter computer engineering in the only school that offered the chance to study the program in 1 year less than the rest.
Keep moving the time needle forward and I started to believe I was more independent in my desires: I wanted freedom, I wanted learning, and I thought I shunned success – but I actually wanted to be above (not beyond) the game of success.
Where did these desires come from?
Simply put, I wanted what others thought was worth wanting.
What kept changing was the “others” who influenced me – not the method of crafting my desires.
MIMETIC DESIRE
Mimetic desire theory says that we copy our goals from what other people want. This means we are daily influenced by our surrounding information. This is why your parents were concerned with who you hang out with while growing up: company shapes desire, which shapes behavior.
What do you want? In order to answer this question you would need to define “you”, and this is the mother of all questions. So we skip it. We take whatever thought arises in the mind as what “I” want. Where does that thought come from? Ah, hum, err… that is a very uncomfortable question almost all of us shy away from. In fact, even if we explore it, we are unlikely to be able to answer it. We rationalize the answer in a way that makes our self-image sound reasonable.
It is almost certain that your goal or dream, what “you” want, actually comes from what you have seen others want. For a young New York financier it may be millions in the bank, for a newly ordained monk it may be peace of mind. Both copied “what they really want” from their environment.
So if we are just looking at each other to determine what we go after, is there any room for us to choose?
I believe there are 3 ways to influence your mimetic desires: emulating, (re)programming & unprogramming.
1 EMULATING
Monkey see, monkey do.
As social creatures, we learn fundamentally through modelling others around us.
This is why the best way to learn a profession traditionally has been through apprenticeship. This means spending years “hanging out” with an expert so that their notion of what is worth striving for becomes your natural desire over time: from fine art, to street crime.
Who you spend your time with is who you become… and whatever they chase after, you are bound to emulate to some degree.
Examples of emulating include: family, friends, peers, influencers you follow online.
2 PROGRAMMING
This is a rather novel way of influencing our desires.
It probably started with scheduled retoric – picture preachers at church every Sunday.
There is nothing wrong with programming, but it is important to be aware that it is happening. Else we may confuse the software we are installing in our mind with reality itself. You can consciously program your mind by consuming every day information you want to turn into your “operating system”.
A modality of programming is re-programming. This is where you identify a belief that no longer serves you and you decide to consciously scratch it and replace it with a more useful or empowering one. This happens for example in our 20s as we let go of models from our teens that no longer work.
Sources of programming include: books, social media, podcasts, films and internet articles like this one.
3 UNPROGRAMMING
This is perhaps the most rare kind of mimetic desire modification. It means whipping out your conditioning to allow “blank slate” consciousness to arise. You still have all the data you have lived through available in your subconscious, but you are no longer reacting to it.
Practices for unprogramming include: meditation, sleep, holidays (when radically changing your location).
QUESTIONS FOR REFLEXION
- Is it possible the goals I’m working so hard towards were inherited unconsciously?
- If so, are they still serving me and my loved ones?
- What may be some changes to my desires that would be good for me and my loved ones?
- How can I change my daily influences to better align my desires with my higher self?
Reflect on what you are mimetically desiring, then continuously architect changes to your environment.
After all, you are likely to be riddled with desires for the rest of your life – so pick them wisely.
Reply