A lot of people don’t actually know what they like. They know what others like and what they think they’re supposed to like.
Some respected friends raved about a great new book. I bought it, started it, and was immediately bored. It didn’t resonate with me at all. I pushed through most of it because all my friends thought there was real value in it. Eventually, I asked: “Am I doing this because someone else wanted me to, or because I’m finding value in it? “
Unfortunately, we often don’t know what we really like. As Austin Kleon wrote in his recent book Don’t Call It Art,
“By the time we grow up, we’ve been told what we’re supposed to like for so long that it’s easy to lose track of what it is we really like. We mostly like what other people like. Otherwise, we don’t really know.”
Borrowed wanting costs us years, money, and time chasing someone else’s definition of success.
The work is to notice it, have the courage to admit it, and then rebuild your own desires from where you actually are.
Mimicking What Others Want
How much of what we chase is borrowed wanting?
The phrase “mimetic desire” was coined by the philosopher René Girard. He taught that often we don’t desire things for their own sake so much as because we see others desiring them.
Girard argued that with freedom comes uncertainty. We don’t know in advance what to choose, so we look to others for cues about what’s worth wanting.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff wrote about this in her book Tiny Experiments:
“Our goals are often not even our own; we borrow them from peers, celebrities, and what we imagine society expects from us … we desire something because we see others desiring it. In other words, our goals mimic the goals of others.”
It’s easy to look to others for our desires when we don’t really know what they are. Buddhist monk Haemin Sunim wrote about this in When Things Don’t Go Your Way:
“If you do not know what you like, you will desire what others desire.”
4 Forces Deciding What You Want
First, social comparison is making these choices for us. Consumer research supports the idea that social comparison shapes aspirations and lifestyles and, therefore, determines what people want to buy, with digital platforms intensifying this effect. We know this process more commonly by the phrase, “keeping up with the Joneses.”
Second, culture shapes our desires. In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argued that we are all born into a pre-existing imagined culture, and that “desires are shaped from birth by its dominant myths.”
Third, advertising exists to guide our desires. Advertisers use a sophisticated scientific understanding of what motivates us to create a desire in us for what they’re selling. How many times after being exposed to clever advertising have you bought something that, until you heard the advertisement, you didn’t even know that you wanted?
Fourth, in modern life, metrics and rankings quietly instill their wants in us. As C. Thi Nguyen wrote in The Score,
“In value capture, you are outsourcing your values. You’re letting an external metric or ranking set what’s important for you. You’re outsourcing the process of figuring out your own sense of meaning.”
In many professions, practitioners are increasingly channeled toward seeking results that are easily measurable from the outside, rather than what they consider the most important goals.
The Quiet Tragedy of Succeeding at the Wrong Thing
The quiet tragedy isn’t failure. It’s succeeding at the wrong things. Derek Sivers in Anything You Want describes this dilemma:
“Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own. They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won’t make them happy.”
The high-stakes version of this involves things like careers and retirement. It’s the same mechanism, but at a much higher price.
It’s the corporate driver who chases money, status, and position and arrives empty, or the student who endures years of education and training to become a doctor, then, unhappy, realizes he was doing what his parents wanted him to do, not what he wanted.
It’s the retiree who assumes that golf and cruises are mandatory in retirement and thinks something is wrong with her when she’s not interested in those things.
How to Tell Your Wants From Everyone Else’s
Because of all the cultural noise and advertising, sometimes it’s difficult to know what you really like. What can we do to discover what we want?
In Don’t Call it Art, Austin Kleon suggests that, instead of just being passively fed material, you need to actively search for what you like. You have to “pull things towards you” that you like.
Kleon suggests that if you don’t know what you like anymore, then try going back to what you liked when you were younger and see if you still like it:
“Reread, rewatch, and relisten to your old favorites. Sometimes getting back in touch with what you used to like can tell you what you really like now.”
Don’t be afraid to be independent and unique. Just because other people find value in something doesn’t mean that you have to find value in it. Be willing to like what you like.
Start With One Honest Question
You don’t have to overhaul your whole life to break the habit of wanting what you borrow. You just have to catch it in the act.
The next time you find yourself pushing through a book you don’t enjoy, chasing a goal that feels heavy, or assuming you’re supposed to want something, stop and ask Kleon’s question: “Am I doing this because I find value in it, or because someone else wanted me to?”
Pick one thing you’re chasing right now and put it to that test. The answer won’t always be comfortable, but it’s yours.
You may find that what you’re chasing is genuinely yours. You may find it belongs to someone else entirely. Either way, you’ll have started doing the one thing that borrowed wanting depends on you not doing: paying attention.
Note: I wrote this blog post myself using my own words and thoughts for the initial draft. I used AI only to suggest headlines, section headings, images and text improvements.
Links to product pages on Amazon include a referral code which pays me a small percentage of the sale when products are purchased. This helps to defray some of the costs of running this site. I strive to only include links to products I believe are worth purchasing.