Afford Anything - What You Think You Want vs. What You Really Want, with Luke Burgis

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

#335: Have you ever spent years studying the wrong major, climbing the ladder at the wrong company, chasing the wrong career?  Have you spent years living in the wrong city? Wrong relationship? Wrong lifestyle? It’s hard to discern what *we think we want* from what we really want. Society teaches us what we’re “supposed” to want. And we follow along. The result is keeping up with the Joneses. It’s the hedonic treadmill. It’s lifestyle inflation. And it causes conflict, both within ourselves and with others.  Today’s guest, Luke Burgis, discusses mimetic desire — how our “wants” are imitative — and how we can find our deeper truths.  For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode335 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, to any limited resource that you need to manage. And that opens up two questions. First, what matters most? Second, how do you make decisions that reflect that which matters most? Answering those two questions is a lifetime practice.

And that's what this podcast is here. to explore and facilitate. My name is Paula Pat. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast, and how do you know if what you think you want is what you actually want? You know how sometimes you can spend years pursuing the wrong career, living in the wrong city, in the wrong relationship, chasing the wrong hobbies, spending money on the wrong things,

not wrong in a moral judgment sense, but wrong as in it's not a good fit for. you, but you thought you wanted it. You thought you wanted that job, that degree, that house, that car, that lifestyle. You thought you wanted it because it's what the people around you wanted, and it's what the people around you wanted you to want. They never said it outright, but you received that implicit message. I think many of us have had this experience, or know someone who has. And so today, we're going to have a discussion about how to turn blind wanting into intentional wanting, how to achieve independence from trends and bubbles, how to be more discerning and in control of the things we want. Because this is the foundation of, number one, deciding what's important, and number two, making decisions accordingly.

And so the conversation we're having today is with Luke Burgess, the author of the author of deciding. of a book called Wanting, the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Drive. And I will leave it to Luke to explain what Mimetic Desire means. Here he is, Luke Burgess. Hi, Luke. Hi, Paula. Luke, you wrote a book about Mimetic desire. What is Mimetic desire and why does it matter?

So we normally think that our desire for objects, things, even people, is just, generated directly or predominantly sort of from the thing itself, whether it's a new car or a career choice. That's not really the case, according to René Girard, who's a brilliant thinker who really inspired the book that I wrote. Gerard said that desire is memetic, meaning there's always a third person or group, usually hidden from us, that we don't associate with the object. That is really generating and shaping our desire for that thing. So we always imagine that there's a direct line between us and the things that we want where the reality is our desire is usually bent around a model of desire. Gerard calls these models of desire. And we don't recognize them.

And they're really important in life. Like all of our desire is in a sense generated through a social process, with the exception of very basic desires. Like, you know, if I'm really, really hungry, I want to eat food and I don't need a model of desire for that. But when we move into the world of more abstract things like career choices, lifestyles, fashions, brands, models of desire are really important. And this is called the memetic desire. And memetic is a word that many people have never heard before, it's really just a fancy word for imitation, memetic meaning mimic or mine. So mimetic desire is imitative desire. And it means that we're usually unconsciously imitating the desires of other people for certain things. So a couple of things that I'll draw out from there. One is that,

as you mentioned, there's a distinction between needs versus wants. So something like hunger or thirst. That's an inherent desire. If we are thirsty, we're going to want water and we don't need a model to demonstrate for us that we want water. Our body knows that we want it because we need it to survive. That's right. But when it comes to wants, when it comes to the things that are not essential for survival, according to this theory, it isn't a straight line between I, Joe or Jane, am an individual and I want to quit my job and travel the world. Rather, it's I, Joe, or Jane, think that I'm an individual and I think that I want to travel the world. But truly, that goal or that desire came from the fact that I've seen others do it. And I now want to imitate that.

Yeah. So in a sense, we're not individuals. We're interdivigials. And that's a term that the thinker that I drew on for this book used, interdivisuals. You know, we're social creatures. And it doesn't mean that I can't make desires my own, desires that other people have had before me, you know,

in the world, not the first person to ever have the idea that I want to, you know, travel around Thailand for a year, which I basically did. But I certainly made it my own. And yes, it's this idea that we are social.

And while we often think of our desires as coming, totally spontaneously. You know, I turned 35 and decided I wanted to run a marathon. Well, I might, but I certainly didn't come up with that idea out of thin air. You know, I don't have this desire factory organ inside of me that just makes this stuff up. I'm taking cues from people around me. And there's a certain sense of a growing awareness of that, of the social influences, that can help us understand where our desires come from better and be a little bit more intentional

about how we shape them. Why does this matter? As we think through consumerism and as we think through purchases, as we think through career choices, why does understanding this theory matter in our decision making? What matters for our personal lives so that we're not caught on a never-ending hamster wheel of desire or consumerism? that we don't really understand. There's really no end to it.

You know, it's kind of like Sisyphus from Greek mythology. You know, he pushes this giant boulder up to the top of a huge mountain. And then right before he gets to the top, Zeus, you know, makes it slip out of his grasp and it rolls all the way down to the bottom. And he's got to go get it again and push it to the top for all eternity. Our lives can start to feel like that if we're just constantly driven by memetic desire without really knowing it. because there'll always be another model of desire. You know, we get one thing, we just find another model. And we always feel like we're one step behind.

Early in my career, I got super into watches when I lived in Hong Kong. And I sort of came to a point in my life where I realized the ridiculous amount of money that I was spending on. There was nothing wrong with watches. I think they're awesome machines. But for me, they became like talismans of some kind of status that I was seeking. because the investment bankers that had nicer watches than me, it symbolized something. I realized that I had a model for every watch that I ever bought. And just realizing that helped me gain a little bit of freedom and ask myself why I was doing this.

On a personal level, it's really important to avoid getting stuck in these never-ending traps. On a community level or a societal level, it's also really important because memetic desire naturally leads people into rivalry. with other people politically in the business world and relationships and romantic relationships. If we are in a sense adopting our desires or imitating the desires of other people, we're de facto competing with them for the same things. I mean, Mimetic desire is really the philosophical explanation for the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. You know, it seems innocent at first.

You know, who cares if I adopt a desire from somebody else? but what we end up doing is seeing those other people as threats to our own desires. And if we don't realize that, that takes us down a path that eventually leads to conflict and a lot of tension. In a moment, I want to dig into the second piece of what you said, how memetic desire leads to rivalries and therefore conflict. But before we get to that, you mentioned that memetic desire can lead to, this feeling that we're on a never-ending hamster wheel and that our wants turn into that that Sisyphus rock, which by the way I refer to my inbox as a Sisyphus rock. Me too.

Is this inevitable? Is there any way to stop it? It's not inevitable that we're miserable and this makes us miserable. It is a deeply ingrained part of human nature. You know, it's what makes us human in a way. you know, memetic desire is what opens this up to other human beings. It's a pro-social quality of human beings that animals don't have. You know, they imitate their fellow creatures, but not in the way that we do. They don't imitate desires. You know, desire is a uniquely human

thing. So, mimetic desire is not bad. It just tends to lead us places where, We don't want to go because we don't know how to imitate well, if that makes sense. We tend to, our imitation, our menesis tends to turn negative because of pride or insecurity or all of these other things that hijack what is essentially a good thing. So it certainly doesn't have to be bad, doesn't have to lead us into dark places, right? It can be, I mean, memetic desire is what you want. When you're growing up, you want positive models of desire that urge you on to become great at a sport, to mature. You know, these are what we call them positive role models.

But as we grow up and we become adults, we often don't like to think that we have models at all for anything, right? So it is deeply ingrained part of human nature. You said it well, Paula. It's about understanding it, becoming aware of it, so that we can make more intentional decisions, gain some self-possession and some freedom about who or what is influencing us in our decision-making process, whether for relatively small things like purchases that we make, what kind of cars we by, but even more importantly for the kind of life that we want to lead, the kind of, you know, career path that we're following, you know, the way that we're in relationships with other people is, are we in relationships with them in a rivalrous way or in a, you know, a life-giving, generous way?

Mimesis affects all of these things. And I don't think it's inescapable. In fact, I think that trying to escape it completely would be trying to escape, you know, our own humanity. So it's the second path. It's gaining some intentionality. Understanding that we're social creatures allows us to live in a world of memetic desire in a much healthier way. You mentioned positive role models. At the risk of asking a reductive question, if something that you desire, whether it's a particular career or to quit your job or to travel, if there's something that you desire that was influenced by a positive role model, how do you know if that's what you yourself want, or if you, you, you're a it's what you think you want because you've been influenced by those role models, or, and this is

why I say it's, I'm running the risk of asking a reductive question. Is there really a difference? Well, I don't think it's a reductive question at all. I think it's a great question. And this is a fundamental question about memetic desire. I think there are a few different ways that we can kick the tires of our desires. And this is an important point. You know, we often just leave our desires unexamined, unquestioned. Now, it's like an unexamined life. Part of that is examining our desires. And, you know, where do they come from?

Sometimes we don't know until later, you know, it's, you know, we have a lot of perspective when we look back on certain decisions that we made or things that we bought. We have buyers regret or we feel, you know, that we made a good decision. I think there are some ways to understand, you know, before we make a decision, though. A great example for me, you know, is my wife. She went to Tulane, incredibly smart and driven, took the LSATs, did really well, you know, could have went to a great law school, worked at a law firm as a paralegal, and was kind of preparing to go that route.

She had a deep desire her whole life, really, for food and culture. And she started having this idea that she wanted to work in the food. industry, right? In the service industry. But all of these thoughts started running through her mind, like, well, what will everybody think about me? You know, if I, if I leave the law track and I just go, like, work at a restaurant, will people think, well, she wasn't very smart after all? Or, you know, well, she must not be that ambitious, must not care about the things that we thought she cared about, you know, issues of social justice and things like that. So the other people's expectations were, you looming really large in her mind. And she didn't have a model for the decision she was thinking about

making. Like nobody that she knew had ever done that before, moved from one from that path to the food path, which makes that decision really hard, but she couldn't let it go and eventually quit her job at a law firm and became a barista in a coffee shop. You know, the end of that story, she eventually got a master's in food studies at NYU and now as director of business development for a super cool food company. But at the time, there was no model for that. But I would say that, you know, what she was experiencing there is a deep desire that was probably not that memetic because, you know, she couldn't really find any models for that.

And she was drawing on some inspiration that came from much earlier in her life. you could think of those as being thick desires, okay, as opposed to thin desires that are super mimetic and can change, you know, by the week or even by the day. There are some clues, right? Like, does doing this thing, you know, bring me a certain amount of, like, peace or does it just cause me more anxiety? Like, I don't know about you, but I've had situations where I'm, like, confident that doing something or buying something is going to make me feel better. And the instant I make the decision, I have more anxiety, like right away. There's an opposite, though, right? There's other things, decisions that I make that immediately bring me a sense of peace. So I think there are little signs.

And if we learn to be attentive to them, they can help us in our decision-making process and decipher our desires and understand where are they coming from. Is this coming from my pride or insecurity, or is it coming from this deep desire that I have to pursue this path and to try to do something good? Now, everything that we're discussing is based on Gerard's theory of memetic desire. But there's a competing theory, Richard Dawkins' theory of memes. Can you elaborate on the differences between these two theories? Richard Dawkins wrote a book called The Selfish Gene and the Late Staplegged. 60s. It's where the word meme comes from. So this is a word that many people are using. We talk about

meme stocks and kind of the memeification of the world. But this all comes from Richard Dawkins' book. He coined it in that book, The Selfish Gene. And he was trying to understand the way that sort of non-material culture evolves and is formed. And the word meme is meant to be analogous to the word gene. So, you know, we have biological genes that replicate, they pass on certain code. And a meme is just the analogy to that for culture, for ideas. You know, why are some ideas stickier and are passed on easier than other ideas? And imitation plays a large role in that. certainly seems that creating a good meme, there's like almost a skill in it, right? You can create a good meme that is easier to imitate than others.

Like if a meme had too many words in it or you had to look at it for too long before you could like get the joke or make sense of it, well, it wouldn't be a very good meme. It'd be hard to imitate. So that's memes. And I think memes are really important. But what Dawkins didn't really discuss at all is desires, right? He was just sort of concerned with the ideas themselves and not the desire to imitate in the first place. So we talk about meme stocks, for instance.

I think memes do a pretty good job of explaining how a bunch of information about a security, for instance, is like packaged into a word or a phrase or an image that immediately makes a bunch of associations in people's minds. And the meme contains within it a bunch of ideas. You know, in the case of game stock, there was all kinds of ideas embedded in some of the memes that circulated about that. By the way, meme theory is very much in an infancy stage, as is memetic theory, in my opinion. But, you know, he just really didn't unpack a lot of these.

There's a lot of unanswered questions. Mimetic theory, which comes from the French thinker, René Girard, which, by the way, he articulated around at the same time as Dawkins and meme theory. He was developing it throughout the 60s has to do with the imitation of desire, not the imitation of things or ideas. And that's a fundamental distinction because, you know, desires change. So the thing that we're imitating in memetic theory is the desire of a person. And they're volatile, right? Like, desires can change. So if we've taken the desire of another person as a model, that person also has models of desire.

And those desires will change dramatically. And as those desires change, so do ours. So it's almost like we've attached ourselves to a roller coaster or something. thing. Meme theory is different. It's kind of static. It's because it's not the person or the desire that's being imitated. It's just the unit of cultural information. It's just the idea. It's just the thing. So from my perspective, you can't really understand why memes work and why memes can drive up a stock price and then create a crash without understanding the memetic desire behind the meme. So the meme is the thing. The memetic desire is like the movement or the force that makes

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It's about not being just one thing, but many things for our customers. Big bank muscle, fintech hustle. That's your commercial payments. a fifth third better. On the topic of meme stocks, you give the example of the Tesla run-up. Can you talk about that? What happened and how that applies to everything that we've just discussed? Sure.

In early 2020, I was following Tesla stock very closely. There was a point in time where it had a parabolic rise and shook a lot of short sellers out. And of course, part of the reason it continued to rise. so rapidly is that there were a lot of people covering their shorts. But a lot of retail investors got in on the stock as well, you know, especially through some of the new platforms like Robin Hood. You know, that Tesla run up in January, February, it was almost a, like an early sign of what was to come in the next 18 months, right?

The precursor to GameStop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I sort of saw it happening as I was writing this book, right, about Mimesis and Mimetic Desire. And I was just totally fascinated with it. And I'm watching the news. You know, I turn on CNBC. And I mean, people were absolutely stumped, you know, like nobody can figure out.

There's no reason why there should be happening. The stock's going to crash. And it didn't really happen. It came down and then went straight back up. I just heard people really struggling to find any language to describe what was happening other than, you know, what people are irrational. Well, sure. But like, what was actually happening?

One of the most fascinating little pieces of data that I found related to this was at that time, one of the most popular searches on Google was auto-completed for people. And if they started typing in, should I buy? Their Google search, if they were in the United States at least, was completed for them with should I buy Tesla stock? You know, think about that. Should I buy a dress? Should I buy a car? Like, they could have been searching for anything. But the fact that that search was then completed for them with this suggested desire, I think had a big part to play in what was happening.

You know, retail investors, some of them buying stocks for the very first time, were, you know, using Google to mediate their desires and to find out whether other people wanted to buy. the stock. You know, and we now sort of live in this world where social media plays a huge role. Reddit forums. We care deeply what other people desire. And, you know, it affects our own. And I think, you know, you can't really understand the price action of a lot of securities without understanding that. But I just thought that that piece of data, that memetic desire that was going on under the surface, hidden really from, you know, the kind of discussion that you would see on the news went a long way to explain why so many people were kind of piling on. One of the points that I try to make in the book about Mimetic Desire is that

99% of it happens under the visible surface of anything that you'll see. But if you look hard enough, you can always find hidden models. And that example that you just gave in which a person types should I buy and it auto completes into should I buy Tesla stock, that sounds to me like an example of a self-reinforcing cycle in which enough people are searching for that that it becomes the auto-complete answer. And once it becomes the auto-complete answer, more people search for it and also buy it. And so it perpetuates itself. I think that's absolutely right. You know, George Soros had coined this term in his book, The Alchemy of Finance, and the term is reflexivity. That, you know, markets,

and really all of social life is reflexive in the sense that we're kind of all in this web together and perception shapes reality. So if we perceive that there's going to be a crash and a stock or a market crash, it alters our behavior. We might sell, thinking that we're the first ones to get out. And our perception of what is going to happen alters our behavior, which changes. the reality, which then quickly changes perception again. And there's just this reflexive feedback loop almost. This is, I think, a really important point, you know, that we now have technology that's creating these reflexive self-reinforcing loops.

And even without technology, you know, we do it anyway because we're social creatures. You know, we're constantly thinking about what other people are thinking about us. It kind of melts your mind when you start thinking about it. But there's this constant recursive process that we're all engaged in, which is deeply related to this idea of mimesis and imitation. In terms of, though, we're always thinking about what other people are thinking about us. I remember one thing that stood out from your book, and I'm trying to find the exact phrase, but it was a concept called, what was it, the something of silence. The spiral of silence. Yes, the spiral of silence.

Great example. Yeah. Well, thank you for pointing that out. So one of the examples I use in the book is one from political science. And a term was coined, which is called the spiral of silence to describe a situation that I think all of us are familiar with at some level. In politics, you know, it happens like this. You know, you're sitting around a table with six or seven people and, you know, maybe you've never met the meeting them for the first time. You were invited out to dinner with one of your friends. a discussion begins about politics. Maybe it's, you know, somebody makes some aggressive point, you know, and weighs in, opines on something that's going on. And then a second person sort of reflexively just agrees and then a third person. And you're sitting there and you're like, oh, I have some reservations about that. You know, there's a little nuance there.

And I'd like to kind of interject or raise this objection. But it seems that I'm the only one that thinks that. And, you know, there's a lot of pressure, right? So most people remain silent. And the silence itself reinforces the perception or the impression on the part of everybody else that everybody's on the same page, which just sort of exacerbates the behavior. And that's called the spiral of silence. It's very similar to what happens in a market where perception affects reality. And the silence itself affects the way that people are going to voice opinions. which is why, you know, it's so important to, you know, to be honest, right? I mean, despite how uncomfortable it can be. And, you know, I wonder how much that affects us, not just in politics, but in our lives, right? And in the way that we consume the media, it's the conversations that we're not having, I think, rather than the conversations that we are that are really contributing to a lot of the sort of anxiety that people are feeling.

Sure. And you see this in a boardroom, too, or in any business meeting where if everyone, one is on the same page. It's that concept of being a yes man or a yes person. Yeah, and I see it. One of the hats that I wear is that I teach undergrad business students, and I see it in my classroom as well. If I ask a question like, is everybody following along with me right now, as I'm describing memetic theory and not a single student will raise their hands. Nobody wants to be the first one, but it's shocking, right? Like once the first one goes up, the second, third, and the fourth come very quickly. And that's the same idea, right? We need models to follow.

Otherwise, it's very hard to be the first one to do anything. Let's return back to something that you said much earlier in this conversation where you talked about how when we do imitate others, we unknowingly create a rivalry. Because if you and I both want the same thing, assuming some degree of scarcity, that means that we've now created a rivalry between. ourselves for that thing. Assuming some degree of scarcity is really a key phrase, Paula. So I'm glad you said that because there are many things that we can both desire that are in abundance. You know, I'm thinking particularly of, you know, like certain human qualities, things like

virtues, you know, things that me having it, you know, doesn't prevent you from having it in any way. This is an important distinction to make. but for scarce things, and by the way, many things are scarce only in our imagination. They're scarce because, you know, memetic desire has made them scarce. Something like status or prestige is often a scarce good in our minds because we've made it that way. You know, because we can only have it if somebody else has less of it. And, you know, we enter into this really toxic zero-sum game.

So yes, why does that? is memetic desire lead to rivalry? It's easy to see in, you know, very typical examples, you know, within companies or in our personal lives when we're, you know, especially in high school and college, right, where you have people competing for these coveted same things. And often the goals are socially derived in the first place. But my wanting something because you want it, like a job promotion, de facto, like causes you to appear as a threat to me. And we just, we often don't realize that that's the case, that that's happening. We enter into the zero-sum games.

And our desire is really reinforced by our rival's desire. So the more that a rival wants something, the more that we're going to want it to. And if the rival stops wanting something, then we often stop wanting it too. Because the thing that's driving our desire is not the thing itself. Remember going all the way back to the beginning of the conversation. We think that the desire is generated by the object, by the goal, when in fact it's actually coming from a model of desire. This is really important to understand.

We wonder why we can want something really badly. one minute and then not want it to next. And without understanding that, well, that's happening because there's models of desire that are that we care about more than we care about the goal, more than we care about the object, will always kind of be left sort of wondering why that's happening. And I tell the story in the book about how early in my startup days this was the case for me. I literally started entire company because I was driven by the model. that had been set by another entrepreneur. I didn't really care about the business that I was getting

myself into. And you know how much work it is to start a company. It's a lot of work. It takes years, lots of money, lots of effort. And I didn't know why fooled myself into thinking that this is, I had all kinds of objective reasons I could have given you for why I was pursuing that, that industry and that goal. And when this entrepreneur that I cared deeply about pivoted and ended up exiting and leaving the industry, all of a sudden I wanted to as well. It was one of the moments when I realized, like, wow, like what's really driving me is not the mission of the business itself, the business plan. It's actually, I care more about this other person than I do about about the business. and, you know, that's kind of a scary thing to realize. And that's an extreme example, I realize.

But, you know, this happens on a micro level in very subtle ways all of the time. And, you know, it is possible when we realize that this is happening in small ways, you know, to gain some distance from that, to realize that it's happening and to kind of extract ourselves from that a bit. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. It's week two of Canadian tires early Black Friday sale. These prices won't go lower this year. So you're lying on the floor? Save up the 50% November 13th to 20th.

Conditions apply, details online. There are two things that you said that I want to elaborate on. One was that at the time, you could have given all types of rational, logical reasons as to why this business made sense and why you wanted to do it. And it's only later, in hindsight, once you realized what you were. the root of your wanting to start this business was that you were then able to pivot. For the people who are listening, how do they develop the introspection, the insight to know earlier in the game?

Yeah, we do this all the time, right? That's why I'm not a big fan of the start with why mentality, because often the whys that we give ourselves are just, you know, post-talk rationalizations of things. And it's the desire that moves first. You know, we want before we ever understand why we're wanting usually. And that's just the way that it works. But we can certainly understand earlier or later. And it is a skill that one can develop, a skill of discernment.

You know, this is a word that we don't often use, but it is possible to discern the quality of desires and to discern the influences on our desires. You know, it's not something that we learn in school. but I wish it were. You know, it's something I'm just going to have to teach my kids someday as how to think about these things. It's hard in in the world that we live in when there's so much noise and we're going so fast all of the time. Around that time in my life that I'm describing to you, when I sort of had the realization of what I was caught up in, I had made a decision to take a vacation, basically.

I called it a sabbatical at the time. And I took like a five-day retreat and totally unplugged from everything. It was only in the silence of that moment where things bubbled up to the surface that I had never even had time to think about or I just like shove down and and refuse to look at. So I do think that a sense of detachment or unplugging, and it doesn't have to be five days, but for a certain amount of time, more important now than it was back in 2007, when I did that. I don't even think Twitter was out yet. That is, you know, this is kind of a very traditional thing I'm saying, but I just don't think there's any replacement for that silence, for that distance, for quieting down, or we never even hear our desires. So that was totally critical for me. And learning some basic skills, like how to question my, my desires and to not

sort of live with the illusion that I always know what's best for me. Because when I look back on my life, you know, I've just made a series of decisions where I was very confident at the time. You know, when I look back on some of the things that I wanted, and it's the case for all of us, right? We look at the things we wanted. We were in high school, right? Even last week sometimes. I see the folly of the level of confidence that I had, that I knew what I wanted. So now, there's kind of a process of questioning, like I call it an examination of conscience.

I try to do it at the end of every day. or I can kind of kick the tires and, you know, and ask myself, like, what's kind of driving this decision that I'm making? So that's just a habit that I think one can develop. I think just as important as, you know, health habits, because we're dealing with our desires. And they determine decisions that we're going to make and live with for years sometimes. So, you know, why, why not exercise that part of ourselves with the same level of seriousness as we do our bodies? So that's just something that I've tried to integrate into my life. And I talk about there's 15 kind of tactics that I list in the book, but that's that basic skill is one of them. Let's go through some of the

other tactics that you list in the book. Sure. You know, a very basic one is naming the models that we have in our lives, positive and negative. We know this is true with, with our emotions. Anytime you name something or you can put a language to something, you gain some amount of control over it. And it's the same thing with our desires. You know, we can name what it is that we really want, not the superficial answer, but like what we really want and who is influencing that desire, we gain some authority over it, you know, the ability to control it. A typical example of this is the difference between wealth and to money. It's something that Paul Graham talks about a lot.

You know, wealth is what we want. It's not money. You know, money is, money can be an indicator of wealth, but oftentimes we confuse the two things. And if we realize this is simple distinction, you know, what we really really are. one is wealth. So, you know, if you're, you know, in New York City and you, you had a magic machine that could make all of the things that you needed, you know, cookie dinner every night, and it would pop out a car if you needed one to, you know, get somewhere. Well, you'd have no need, why would you need money, you know? You just, you have the machine, right? And you're wealthy.

You don't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, unplugged from the internet and you had a billion dollars, well, you wouldn't be very wealthy. Like there's, you'd have You couldn't buy anything. You couldn't do anything, right? You could have all the money in the world. So, you know, what is it that you desire? What wealth do you desire? You know, it could be living in a certain place and having a certain kind of family

and being able to pursue a certain thing. It could be writing. It could be like what that's that you will be wealthy if you do those things. If you pursue those things. In the book, I call this kind of your single greatest desire. And that becomes kind of a hermeneutic or a way to interpret or make decisions. about the things that you, you know, you buy and need. Like, is it helping me get wealthier in the deep sense of the word? Or is it just, or is it just spending money? Is the money that

I'm spending contributing to my real wealth, things that are really going to make me happy? So in this context, you're using wealth as synonymous with lifestyle. My definition of wealth is the things that we truly want in an enduring way, you know, wealthy, you know, which ultimately leads to happiness. So yes, lifestyle is a huge, huge part of that. I draw that out because I want to make the distinction between that versus net worth. What struck me when you were giving the Antarctica example is if you were a billionaire in Antarctica, you wouldn't have. Wealth in the form of lifestyle, meaning there was nothing you can buy, you would have a certain type of life and certain limitations. But if part of your mission or perhaps part of your ego identity is associated with the net worth that you've built throughout your life, that would be something distinct from wealth, distinct from lifestyle, that you would still have even as an Antarctica billionaire.

Yeah, that is true. That is definitely true. kind of a core part of your identity and has been a core goal for most of your life, that could, you could be satisfied, I suppose, right, being in Antarctica. And don't get me wrong, you know, there may be some people that would be happy living a hermetic life in Antarctica, right? It could be, they could, they could feel wealthy there, right? I mean, so the vast majority of people would probably not want to live that particular lifestyle, even if they had a billion dollars because they would be detached from networks of meaningful relationships like from

markets remember this is just a theoretical game I'm playing to make a point and you have to assume you'd be totally unplugged from the internet and from all communication right but I do think that you one in that situation who did care deeply about net worth may start to reevaluate or or take a different perspective in terms of, you know, what is worth if they weren't able to do anything with it. Because I think one of the reasons that people, you know, have goals for a certain level of net worth, it has to do with security, there's identity, there's ego always involved with these things.

We have it in order to live a certain lifestyle or to do certain things. And if that's taken away, like, this is why our health is so important, right? You don't have that. Then so many other things don't matter as much. more. So, you know, as I've went through life, like my perspective on certain, you know, numbers that I've pegged where I'll feel a certain way, it changes. It changes with time. It changes with circumstance. It sounds to me like the distinction is intrinsic versus extrinsic. So having a high net worth can give you certain extrinsic benefits in terms of your lifestyle. But there's also

the element of intrinsic sense of accomplishment? That's right. And the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic is not always as stark as I think we make it. I think the two are always connected in some way, you know, because we're people that live intrinsic and extrinsic lives at all times. In other words, we're social, and the extrinsic things always affect the intrinsic things. And I don't know if we can totally kind of like detach the two because that's a form of dualism. Like I don't know if we can completely separate.

But there are certainly some goals that are more intrinsic than others and some that are more extrinsic than others. One of the keys, I think, is kind of like integrating the two or understanding how they relate and how they come together. I mean, here's one example of this would be a VC. You know, this is somebody I happen to know who is intrinsically motivated by investing in young companies that are creating value and doing really important things in the world. And she would do that even if she didn't have VC returns that her investors expect. Okay. She's intrinsically motivated to do that. I've known it for a very long time.

But she is also extrinsically motivated to do well, right, and to have these companies be profitable and to create and generate impressive returns for her shareholders. And so it's both for her. And the two things are not, they're not in competition. You know, they kind of go together beautifully. And she's found a place where her intrinsic and extrinsic motivations work well together and, in fact, reinforce one another. Because the better that she does with the extrinsic goals, the more it serves her intrinsic goals. So that's what I mean when I say. I think it can be sometimes not wise to think of them as separate things, but to think of them, like the goal being they're both important.

And intrinsic is not necessarily more important than extrinsic. Looping this back to the original conversation then about desire, would one of the ways in which a person can evaluate what they really want, would one of those, ways be to to reflect on whether you have that synthesis of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation? Yes. I think it's a critical part. And there's a later in the book, there's a whole exercise that I talk about that is exactly about that. It's this distinction between, you know, thick desires and thin desires and mining our lives, looking at our lives to try to understand, you know, what is more intrinsic, what is kind of more of a core desire, the kind that will help me be wealthy in the personal sense of the word, which may or may not involve having a certain, a lot of money.

Because not everybody does, and they can consider themselves very wealthy. So that is an important part of this. And I think the synthesis between the two is important. And there are ways to do that. And, you know, one of them is looking back at our lives about those times when we did accomplish something or fulfill a desire. And it didn't leave us wanting more. It didn't leave us empty or disappointed or having anxiety.

It did leave us with a sense of fulfillment that was enduring. You know, I have some things I remember from fifth grade that I accomplished that I still remember to this day because they were so satisfying and left me with some. so much joy, and there are still things that I do to this day. And there are little keys to the kinds of desires for me that tend to never disappoint me. It's really important to figure out what those are. Well, we're coming to the end of our time. Are there any final ideas that you would like to leave this community with? Final ideas, you know, the most important realization for me in the process of writing this book, in the process of spending the last 10 years, understanding

the way that memetic desire has worked in my life and has worked in the world, is having an appreciation for the people in our lives that affect our desires and the way in which we affect theirs. And living as if I have a responsibility for what other people want at some level. and that they also affect what I want. That's a beautiful thing. It means that we live lives of responsibility to others. And we can do powerful things with that. And what I would leave everybody with is how can you generate positive memetic desire in your life,

both to achieve your goals and to help others achieve theirs? Because for me, I found this real pain. paradox. And it's that my desires are often fulfilled by helping others fulfill their desires. And I sort of accidentally fulfill mine in the process. So it's almost, you know, the less I think about my own and the more I think about others, there's this kind of beautiful process that unfolds. And that's been one of the most important things that I've learned. So I would encourage, I would encourage people to think a little bit about that. And that goes back to what you said at the beginning about how we're not individuals, but interdiv individuals. Exactly.

Well, thank you so much. Where can people find you if they would like to know more about you and your work? You can find me at Luke Burgess.com. I publish a substack every week where I unpack all these ideas, all the stuff that didn't make it into the book. And you can always find me on social media. Thank you so much, Luke. What are the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Here are five. Number one, the conversation that we have just had about memetic desire, about wanting things because other people want them. that's the underpinning of keeping up with the Joneses. The famous phenomenon in which we're on the hedonic treadmill, were caught in lifestyle inflation, there's never enough. Our wants rise to match the standard of living that our neighbors have,

and as our means escalate, we trade up neighbors to an infinite degree. And as Luke points out, this is not only unhealthy, it's the root of a lot of conflict. Mimetic desire is the really the philosophical explanation for the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. You know, it seems innocent at first. You know, who cares if I adopt a desire from somebody else? But what we end up doing is seeing those other people as threats to our own desires. And if we don't realize that, that takes us down a path that eventually leads to conflict and a lot of tension.

And so that is the first key takeaway. When we become more intentional about wanting what we ourselves want, not what others want, we can step away from lifestyle inflation, we can step away from the keeping up with the Jones's effect, and we reduce conflict with our friends and neighbors, which is another way of saying that being more intentional isn't just something that we do for ourselves, it's something that benefits the people around us. And so that is key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two, be careful who.

who your role models are. We encourage kids to have role models, and we fret and worry if we think that kids are looking up to the wrong people. But as adults, we don't often apply the same level of rigor or the same level of concern to ourselves when we think about who we might consciously or unconsciously look up to. Mimetic desire is what you want. When you're growing up, you want positive models of desire that urge you on to become great at a sport, to mature. These are what we call them positive role models. But as we grow up and we become adults, we often don't like to think that we have models at all for anything.

As adults, sometimes we don't even like to admit that we are influenced by role models, that we are influenced by others. And yet we can see it so clearly when it happens with kids. It's like we have this hubris of thinking that we're better. than kids, we're not. Even in our 30s and 40s and 50s, we're basically just really tall kids with tax liabilities. So if you're concerned about the role models that your kids are keeping,

apply that same level of thought to who you hang around with, who you text the most frequently with, whose social media posts you comment on the most, because those messages that you receive, those are going to influence what you think matters. And so that is key takeaway number two. Key takeaway number three, if you want something that goes against the grain,

it's probably something that you genuinely want, something that's maybe even more of a calling than a copy and paste goal. He gives the example of his wife quitting her job at a law firm to become a barista at a coffee shop. It was a decision that went against the grain and she struggled to find examples of other people who were doing that thing, or she had to deliberately search out those examples. And so it was a sign that this was not a memetic desire. This was a desire that's formation may have been inspired decades ago. And now it's a thick desire rather than a thin one, meaning it's durable. But I would say that, you know, what she was experiencing there is a deep desire that was probably

not that memetic because, you know, she couldn't really find any, any models for that. And she was drawing on some inspiration that came from much earlier in her life. You could think of those as being thick desires, okay, as opposed to thin desires that are super memetic and can change, you know, by the week or even by the day. There are some clues, right? Like, does doing this thing, you know, bring me a certain amount of, like, peace or does it just caused me more anxiety. And so that is the third key takeaway.

Key takeaway number four. So remember how we mentioned that if everyone wants the same thing, it causes conflict, it causes tension. If you're keeping up with the Joneses and you and the Joneses all want the same thing, assuming that that thing is scarce, assuming that that thing is a limited supply of housing or land or luxury cars, when we're all competing for the same wants, we generate conflict. But that only happens assuming that we're all competing for scarce resources. When we shift our attention to things that are not scarce, then that conflict goes away.

Assuming some degree of scarcity is really a key phrase, because there are many things that we can both desire, that are in abundance. You know, I'm thinking particularly of, you know, like certain human qualities, things like virtues, you know, things that me having it, you know, doesn't prevent you from having it in any way. This is an important distinction to make. And so there are three distinctions to make. There are needs like food, water, sleep, being at a temperature that's relatively comfortable within

within the human comfortable range, those are needs. Those are physical needs. And no one needs to teach us to want it. If you're thirsty, if you're sleep deprived, if you're freezing, your body instinctually wants to remedy that. And then, of course, there's a distinction between that versus wants, like a particular type of career or a particular zip code or neighborhood, or a particular brand of handbag or car.

But then there's a third distinction to make, and those are non-scarce concepts, such as virtues, patience, humility, humor, resilience. Resources are scarce, but virtues are not. And so when Luke talks about how if we all want the same things, that creates conflict assuming some degree of scarcity, what we're reminded of is that if we all want the same values or the same virtues, If we all want to develop more patience, more humility, more humor, more resilience, maybe we learn that we want to develop those characteristics by imitating role models, even though we are learning those examples from models, we are learning to want that by imitating others.

We're wanting something that's not scarce. And so there's no conflict. And so that is the fourth key takeaway. There's a distinction between needs, wants, and non-scarce concepts such as virtues. Finally, key takeaway number five. Oftentimes we pursue goals without ever knowing why we're pursuing them. We give ourselves reasons.

We give ourselves rationalizations. Oh, this is why I want that career. This is why I want to live in that city. We can construct a case for why we think we want it, and we might believe it. But oftentimes what we think is the why is often, the rationalization. Yeah, we do this all the time, right? That's why I'm not a big fan of the start with why mentality, because often the whys that we give ourselves are just, you know,

post hoc rationalizations of things. And it's the desire that moves first. You know, we want before we ever understand why we're wanting, usually. But there are ways to find the truth of what you really want, not just what you think you want. And one of these ways is to find examples from your past in which when you got what you wanted or when you achieve the thing, you were actually happy and you weren't left with a sense of wanting more. There are ways to do that. And, you know, one of them is looking back at our lives about those times when we did accomplish something or fulfill a desire.

And it didn't leave us wanting more. It didn't leave us empty or disappointed or having anxiety. it did leave us with a sense of fulfillment that was enduring. Because the opposite of keeping up with the Joneses, the opposite of that hedonic treadmill, the lifestyle inflation, is when you pursue something that truly is something that comes from inside you, a thick desire, a durable aspiration. And as you go down that path, as you switch careers,

or you start to travel, or you live in the new stuff, city, or you start that hobby, or you leave that trophy relationship and get into one that's more meaningful. As that happens, you start to feel fulfilled. And when you feel that unfolding, you know that you're getting a little closer to the truth of what matters most and how to make the decisions around that which matters most. Not just what society says you should want, but what you yourself actually want. And so that is the fifth and final key takeaway from this conversation with Luke Burgess. Thank you for tuning in. We are hosting a series of live online webinars that are completely free. We're going to host four of them. They're going to start in the third week of

September 2021. So the first one most likely will be Tuesday, September 21st. and then the rest of them will be every following Wednesday from that point forward. They're live, they're online, they're virtual. And in this mini-series, you'll have the opportunity to learn about investing in real estate if that's something that interests you. So if you have wondered, hey, is real estate right for me? What if I live in a high cost of living area? And what about the housing market in 2021?

Isn't it really totally nuts right now? If those are the questions that you have in your head, congratulations, you're human, and you'll probably learn a lot from the information that we share in this live online mini series. Again, it's starting September 21st, and it continues every week for the next four weeks, totally free. To sign up for it, go to afford anything.com slash real estate. That's afford anything.com slash real estate. By the way, on that page, it says that it's starting September 22nd, but we have to move it a day early. So anyway, we'll send you all the updates once you sign up there. We'll also send you a lot of freebies and goodies and information about how to be a real estate investor, particularly in the 2021 market.

So afford anything.com slash real estate's the place to go, totally free, live online four week series. It's going to be a ton of fun. We've got some great guest speakers lined up. So I'll see you there, afford anything. com slash real estate. We also have a brand new newsletter that we just launched. We released the first issue the other week. The newsletter is called First Principles, and it's all about how to think from first principles,

how to be a better decision maker. And we talk about F-I-R-E, F for financial psychology, I for investing, R for real estate, and E for entrepreneurship. So we redefine fire, and we talk about each of those four concepts. in this newsletter, and it's totally free. You can sign up at affordanything.com slash newsletter. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant.

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