Principle 4: Choose your desires, don’t let them choose you.
Have you ever heard of Mimetic Desire by Rene Girard?
If you have, great. If you haven’t well…buckle up. Because it’s important.
Here’s how it goes:
You are born. Welcome to the universe, young padawan.
You begin to grow up. And you notice, people have and want things.
Milestone time: You get a toy. Hooray!
But one of your friends has a bigger, better and more awesome toy. All the other kids want that toy and you think it’s better than yours. So, naturally, you want it. You quickly forget about your toy.
Uh oh. You can’t have it because it’s not yours, dummy.
But, but but, I wannnttttttt it. Why? Because it’s cool, everyone wants that toy and it makes that kid awesome.
Sorry, it doesn't matter. It’s not yours. If you want it, then you’ll have to go get it somewhere else.
*Fast Forward 40 years*
You see the person with a flashy car, a good-looking spouse, seemingly great kids and nice house. All the boxes are ticked.
I want those things too, everyone else does and after all, that’s what makes this person happy and so well liked, right?
So, let’s get those things. Then I’ll be happy, people will like me, I’ll be revered. Positive this, positive that. There is no downside, right?
This is known as mimetic desire. It’s a theory - sure - but it seems to accurately describe situations we find ourselves in when we compare what we don’t have with what other people have.
We have wants. We see other people have things. A lot of other people want those same things. Because we have wants, naturally we want those things.
But there’s a supply and demand issue here. The wants (demands) are endless, but the supply (the things) are not. Because it’s a finite pool of things, ultimately, some people miss out.
And so the question is, do you actually want that thing? Or do you want that thing because someone else has it? Or because the people around you want it?
This is the Trojan horse that is desire. The problem with desire is that it is very, very effective at seducing you, without you realising you’ve been seduced.
This links with entropy. There are so many ways that our desires can’t be satisfied, compared to how they can be satisfied. So even if I have one desire, there are so many ways in which that desire can’t be met, but only a small number of ways it can be met. Now amplify this. Imagine if you have 5 desires. Make it 10. Make it 15 or 20. See the problem?
When you don’t get what you want, you suffer largely in your own head. The Buddhists seem to have a pretty good grasp of it.
I’m simplifying a way of life that is 2000+ years old, but in short they say:
Life is suffering (booooooo life’s not all bad, is it?);
Suffering comes from desire (booooooo desire is awesome, go desire);
Desire nothing and you’ll cease to suffer.
Now, my TLDR lacks nuance. Desire normally makes friends with passion. And passion in the right doses, at the right time, in the right situation - can be useful. And you could also argue that a life without desire would be boring. Removing all forms of pleasure might be a path to enlightenment, but with an 80 year existence, some forms of pleasure in moderation, I believe, is perfectly fine.
However, far too often we let desires choose us. And because humans are incredibly plastic and impressionable, the desire pushes us to exist in environments where it becomes near impossible to escape. A prison of our own making, and we’ve thrown away the key.
It’s a state of being that can partially explain why people repeat the same mistakes. The environment incubates the same actions, behaviours and consequences that arise like groundhog day. A lifetime passes and you regret the things that you did do, more than you didn’t do.
So this principle in my life is not to remove desire altogether. That just wouldn’t be fun. But it’s more to… as consciously and deliberately as we can, choose them.
Deliberate Practice 1
Firstly, I label my desires, as best as I understand them. It’s in my User Manual, which is a detailed document of who I am: my quirks, strengths, weaknesses, communication preferences…you name it, it’s in there. This structured reflection helps me get to the root of the desire, the ways they tend to manifest and the environmental conditions that make it harder for me to keep them in check. I want to be clear - I am not proclaiming to be Buddha reincarnate. I can be a slave to my desires and struggle to resist temptation. But this practice, in short, it increases my awareness of those desires. And awareness and regulation are two peas in a pod. You need them both.
Deliberate Practice 2
Secondly, when I find myself comparing who I am and what I’ve got to another person, I do a thought experiment called, aptly, the Pokémon Trade.
When you trade Pokémon, you have to give it all up. You give up what you’ve got (all of it) and you get what they have (all of it). It’s the same with comparing your life with others. If you truly want another life, you have to receive all of it. You can’t just take the good stuff that you see - the highlights - and throw out the bad stuff you don’t see.
It’s like saying I wish I was Michael Jordan. Like, sure, it’d be pretty bloody cool to be that awesome at basketball. Being rich and famous has its perks. But what about the downside? Like his failed marriages? Like the loss of his father? Like the constant media scrutiny?
There is always a cost that we don’t see (hello physics - for every action there is an opposite and somewhat equal reaction). And so whenever I find myself fantasising about someone else’s life, how cool it would be to be them, I remind myself: the trade is not the top 10%, it’s the whole 100%. Whatever I want from what they’ve got, I have to take all the baggage that comes with that.
This doesn’t mean I’ll stop desiring what they have, but it causes me to pause and really consider: is all they have really worth it?
Deliberate Practice 3
Thirdly, I always come back to my life filter: my vision, mission and operating principles. Does this oh-so-tempting desire align with all of these? Is there congruency? Not just with one aspect. It has to align with all of them. If it doesn’t, if it pushes me further away from my North Star, then it’s worth doing the hard work to accept it, and keep that desire in check.
You can have anything you want. But you can’t have everything. And trying to get everything - particularly what other people have and you don’t - is a path to maximise, not minimise, regret.
