Wanting
The art of wanting well
Description
Luke Burgis was in his late twenties, running a startup he had raised millions for, when he got the offer he had been chasing: an acquisition talk with Zappos, a meeting with Tony Hsieh, the whole Silicon Valley dream drawing near. And somewhere in the middle of getting exactly what he wanted, he noticed he no longer wanted it. The deal fell through. What stayed with him wasn't the failure — it was the strange discovery that he had never really examined why he wanted the thing in the first place. He had assumed his ambitions were his own.
That question sent him back to an unlikely source: René Girard, a French thinker who spent decades at Stanford arguing that human desire is not something we generate on our own. We learn what to want by watching other people want it. Girard called this mimetic desire — imitation running so deep we don't even feel it operating. Burgis, who had studied with people close to Girard's circle, turned the idea into a book about how this quiet mechanism shapes careers, friendships, purchases, and the low-grade restlessness of never being quite satisfied.
Wanting, published in 2021, isn't a self-help manual dressed as philosophy, and it isn't greed rebranded as ambition. It sits somewhere harder to categorize: an argument that the most private thing we own — our desires — is largely on loan, and that learning to see the loan is the first honest step toward wanting anything well.
The question we’re asking : If our desires are copied from other people, can we ever choose what we truly want?What we’ll see : How a French theory of imitation explains our restlessness — and what it takes to want with intention rather than on autopilot.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The desires we borrow
We tend to think of desire as coming from inside, like hunger or thirst. We want a certain job, a certain house, a certain life, and we assume those wants rose up from some authentic core of who we are. Girard's claim, which Burgis builds the whole book on, is that this is mostly an illusion. Beyond the basic biological needs, we don't know what to want on our own. We look around, see what other people find desirable, and want that. Desire is imitation. He called it mimetic — from the Greek for copying.
The reason we miss this is that the imitation is invisible to us. Nobody experiences their ambition as secondhand. Burgis uses a simple example: two children in a room full of toys. One child picks up a toy he had ignored for an hour. Suddenly the second child wants that exact toy, not any of the others. The object hasn't changed. What changed is that another person's desire made it visible, gave it a glow it didn't have before. Adults do the same thing with promotions, neighborhoods, and partners — we just narrate it to ourselves as personal taste.
02Chapter 2 — Models, and the ones we can't admit
Not all models operate the same way, and this is where Burgis sharpens Girard into something usable. He divides them into two worlds. In the first, which he calls Celebristan, the model is far away — a celebrity, a founder, a historical figure, someone we admire from a distance. We can imitate them freely because they will never compete with us for the same thing. Nobody feels rivalry with a billionaire they've never met. The distance keeps the imitation clean; we can borrow their taste in clothes or ideas without it curdling into anything sharper.
The second world, Freshmanistan, is the dangerous one. Here the models are close: colleagues, friends, siblings, the person one desk over. When someone near us wants the same thing we want, imitation curdles into rivalry. And because these models are our equals, we can't admit we're copying them. Admitting it would mean admitting they define what we value. So we hide it, even from ourselves, and the desire goes underground, where it gets more intense precisely because it's denied.
03Chapter 3 — When the crowd needs a victim
Girard didn't stop at individuals. He argued that mimetic desire scales up into a social force, and that it explains something dark about how groups hold themselves together. When rivalry spreads through a community — everyone wanting the same scarce things, everyone imitating everyone else's resentment — tension builds toward a crisis. Left unchecked, mimetic rivalry becomes contagious and threatens to tear the group apart. Differences collapse; everyone starts to look like everyone else's competitor.
The ancient solution, Girard proposed, was the scapegoat. At the peak of the crisis, the collective conflict of all-against-all suddenly converts into all-against-one. The group fixes on a single person or group, blames them for the disorder, and expels or destroys them. And it works, at least temporarily. The violence discharges. The community feels unity again, bought at the price of a victim who was rarely the real cause of anything. Girard traced this pattern through myth after myth, arguing it sits buried under the founding stories of most cultures.
04Chapter 4 — The desires worth wanting
If desire is copied, the natural fear is that freedom is a fiction — that we're just relaying other people's wants forever. Burgis argues the opposite, and this is where the book turns practical without turning into a checklist. We can't stop imitating. But we can choose our models with care, and we can learn to tell the difference between two kinds of wanting he calls thin and thick desires.
Thin desires are shallow, imitative, and volatile. They spread fast, feel urgent, and evaporate once we get them — the new phone, the title, the thing everyone suddenly wants this year. Thick desires are the opposite. They're the wants that have survived over time, that connect to who we actually are, that don't need a crowd to validate them. They're slower, quieter, harder to notice precisely because they don't glow with borrowed intensity. Most of us have buried a few thick desires under a pile of thin ones, and can barely remember which is which.
05Conclusion
The deal that fell through was, in a way, the luckiest thing that happened to Burgis. Getting what he wanted and feeling nothing was the crack that let the question in: whose desire had he been chasing? Wanting is his long answer — that the ambition we experience as most intimately ours is usually inherited, pointed at us by models we never chose to follow, and that the restlessness of never arriving is baked into a desire that was never really about the destination.
