Review of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life by Luke Burgis

I don't remember where I saw Burgis post first. I know I read an article of his from Aeon/Psyche, but I think I saw something else of his before that. In any case, I followed his newsletter. When he posted saying that his book was on sale for a decent price, I thought it would be a good, lighter alternative to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Fortunately, I was right.

The short version of Burgis's thoughts - that I will surely butcher the interpretation of - is that people's desires are governed by what they think others desire. While some desires are our own, most of what we want is just trying to match those in our peer group. I was able to identify some of these "mimetic desires" of my own as I was reading. A good example for me is learning to play an instrument: I really don't have much desire to create or play music when I really think about it, but I feel left out because it seems that every friend of mine can play at least one if not more.

He also goes into excellent examples of how mimetic desire can be destructive to a person as they try to match or one-up their mimetic rivals, and how breaking away from the resulting downward spirals can be a net positive.

Unfortunately, I can't say that the quality or value of the book remains consistent throughout. My gold and blue highlights (core ideas and supporting items of note) gradually got replaced in frequency by red (problems or disagreements) as I made it into the second half.

The primary example that comes to mind is a contrived story he creates to illustrate a scapegoat in which a group of teens fall into a pool while simultaneously knocking in a fridge, electrocuting each other, before turning their collective rage into anger against a friend who coincidentally returned at the perfectly wrong time.

Later on, he suggests that the best way to recognize your non-mimetic desires is to take a silent retreat. He suggests no social media or talking, which makes sense, but then oddly bans music as well while allowing books. Preventing music would make sense if the music had lyrics, but classical or most jazz music or even something in another language would make any issue of mimetics null. Yet with books, unless it's a book of wildlife photography or circut diagrams, you'll be constantly barraged by what the author thinks is important or valueable. It seems to defeat the purpose of isolating yourself from others' desires.

Overall, I am glad I was introduced to the ideas in the book, but I feel Burgis applies them way more often than they apply to.

Criticizing the book stylistically: Burgis uses far more examples than are necessary. For every paragraph of wisdom or solid advice, there's ten pages of examples and anecdotes. It reminded me more of Start with No (a book of great ideas weighed down by many long anecdotes) or Hacked Again (the worst computer security book I've ever seen) than something I'd likely pick up again. There's also the general air of "startup CEO" that I can't define as other than "someone who would make his introvert employees come to mandatory happy-hours after work".

P.S.: This is also the only time I've seen someone reference Elizabeth Holmes without referencing the major amounts of fraud that she was caught up in. It was published in July 2021, so the trial wasn't concluded, but I know there was at least awareness of allegations at that point.

I think this is the first book review I've posted to the blog. Unfortunately, it wasn't something I can gush about like The Scout Mindset, but it also wasn't something I dropped less than 10% of the way through for being terrible like XML Basics. There is some value in it being something I'm conflicted about, though, and I think it's made better because of that.