I’ve been rereading the work of my internet friends Luke Burgis recently. His hugely influential book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life introduced popular culture to philosopher Rene Girard.
I’d first encountered Girard at university and through Peter Thiel’s influence pursued further understanding of the work thanks to Luke’s scholarship on the topic. A quick orientation on the thesis is as follows.
What Gravity Is To Physics, Mimetic Desire Is To Psychology”
I’ve found Luke’s thoughts on topics like existential safety and mimetic collapse to be regularly illuminating and would recommend reading his newsletter.
I am reconsidering some of the mimetics that are driving my life. We’ve had some amazing startup investments. I’ve been able to move policy issues into law. And I do it all with the added weight of chronic health issues.
It brings me joy to help the next generation of founders. It’s as close as I’ve come to a deep desire. I do it believe I love it.
I also have an idea of how it should look. The formality of funds and institutional investors has been the default way things are done in startups. I’ve never been too concerned with prestige but I have some attachments to what it should look like.
The irony being startups and the venture business are all about the big hit. There is no right way of achieving them as playbooks get rewritten every time we have a new technology.
So I wonder why I want things to look any way at all when the ultimate objective is to achieve a type of performance that is already emerging. Am I stuck wanting only because I want to mimic others? It seems possible.
That realization makes me want to let go of any preconceived notions of structure or aesthetic and to simply commit to my own process and how I find outliers.