A Retro on Mimesis

Explore

A bridge, a castle, a tower, a penguin. Small pine planks, Kapla, helped me translate my inspiration and creativity into reality. Adding one plank at the time, I could marvel at my own construction a few days later. My childhood was comprised of play. Outside of the constraints of school, I was fully immersed into the present moment, exploring, creating and reading for hours. I was doing what I found interesting. I was experiencing fulfillment.

Back and forth, my desires seesawed from learning to creating. When I wasn’t traveling and exploring somewhere new, I studied the maps decorating my walls and read atlases from cover to cover.

Imitate

As long as I can remember, reading has been an inherently fulfilling experience to me. Books provided a safe space, an immersion into a different reality. Books revealed the stories of humans. Humans that were distant in space and time. Books told the stories of human desire and conflict.

I was reading Peter Thiel's Zero to One. Recently, I had discovered a fascination for entrepreneurship, devouring any book relating to the topic I could get my hands on. I was thirteen. Maybe, fourteen.

Humans are inherently imitative (mimetic.) We are models and mediators of desire. Yet, we are prone to acquire our models' desires as our own. Mimesis is the process of mediating wants. Engaging with his book, Thiel mediated a desire.

He mediated a desire to be an entrepreneur. A metaphysical desire or a desire to be. To me, Thiel possessed a fullness of being I was lacking. My wanting to be an entrepreneur was a mimetic attempt to acquire his fullness.

Over time, my desire to be an entrepreneur became deeply ingrained in the way I see myself. I idolized entrepreneurs; Yet I didn't take action, devouring books instead. When reading about the work of others, I was transported into my desired state of being.

The more time passed after putting down a book, the more distant I felt from my metaphysical desire. So, I picked up the next book, experienced a high, and plunged into the void. A high and a low. One after the other.

Testing whether my desire for entrepreneurship was fulfilling for the experience itself scared me. A physical desire brings fulfillment for the experience itself while a metaphysical desire—or the desire to be—deceivingly promises fulfillment, but doesn't deliver.

The changing ratio between the physical and metaphysical components of my wants permeates my life story. A diverging ratio translated into feeling burned out; A converging ratio felt exciting.

Acquiring ever-changing metaphysical desires from models, suffering to attain their perceived fullness of being, and ultimately experiencing their deceptive nature left me overwhelmed and confused.

Escape

School was dull, I was trapped in an environment I didn't enjoy. Anticipation of my frequent weekend getaways and travels kept me going. During a foreign exchange stay in England, I discovered my passion for photography. Coming back in eleventh grade, I combined that passion for capturing moments and my curiosity for exploring. As part of my school's yearlong project, I created a portfolio website showcasing my travel photography. Not only did I share them on my website, but also on Instagram, engaging with fellow travel photographers on a daily basis.

Soon my travel destinations converged with those of my social media peers. I desired to visit the beautiful places that populated my feed. And I did go places, obsessing about taking the perfect image. I escaped my slothfulness, got up hours before sunrise to reach the spots of desire and spent my nights editing and sharing my recent captures.

My longing for the experience of photography transformed into a desire to be. A desire to be a travel photographer. A desire to be socially recognized for my work. A desire to live the life of a paid travel photographer.

The more I absorbed this metaphysical desire, the less fulfilled I felt from my travels and photography. My curiosity for exploring and framing new places was softly stifled, leaving me questioning its meaning and feeling burned out.

After pausing for a handful of months, I burned the ships. I drowned my portfolio website and crushed my Instagram, selling my newly acquired camera gear at a hefty loss. I destroyed every single digital copy of my photographs, leaving a printed single edition coffee table book of my favorite fifty as the sole trace behind. I was relieved.

The resurfaced space uncovered my inner conflict with the societal pressure to conform to the laid out path. To conform to school. Bottling it up, I passively slipped down the spiral of society. I was lacking a model to provide me with the confidence of dropping out and carving a path of my own.

The tension between following along and breaking free kept increasing. During my holidays before my final year in school I was faced with the decision between escaping or embracing. Fearing to regret not having tried and closing doors in the future, I reasoned my way into conforming to social expectations.

Struggling to consistently translate reason into action for half a year, I slowly constructed a metaphysical desire of acing my final exams, exiting old mimetic systems and selecting my models intentionally. Choosing those that are distant in space and time over those that are close, helped me to avoid the dangers of mimetic rivalry.

The results from maxxing out my study-to-time-awake-ratio by following an anti-social Kantian routine, surpassed even my most ambitious objectives. Graduating with a perfect GPA left me more than unfulfilled. For acquiring an object that I thought of as deficient, I felt shame. I was dishonest with myself and fell for an illusion.

I desperately filled the void with wants that were the desirable next step. To trick my urge to break away from the group, I settled for prestigious US colleges. Engaging with their mimetic system far away, my desire to exist in great measure became coupled to these shiny institutions. I got caught up in chasing recognition and prestige.

I tormented myself through the application process. I was miserable, but it didn't click. By acquiring objects, I unknowingly hoped to get closer to my ideal being. A pen, a backpack, a travel bag, clothes... Objects that reflected how I saw myself in my mimetically desired state of being. Each of them began with suffering, an obsession for a fullness of being after acquisition, ending in deception and the desire for the next object. Cycles of mirages.

Then, when one rejection letter after the other flew electronically across the pond, I felt hurt, for my identity was threatened. After a few months, my fling with this prestigious path was over. I defensively rationalized my way out of it, healing the hit my identity had suffered.

How I spent my time the following months I honestly can't remember—except cooking for my family and neurotically obsessing about cleanliness and order in the house. Exiting the dark ages, I had my own renaissance of entrepreneurial desire. I filled my lack of being with a familiar desire. Remigrating to what I thought I truly wanted.

Not knowing how to get there, I searched for laid out paths. I applied for two internships. One being at a startup and the other at a talent accelerator while ideating on a decentralized cohousing network from cafés in Ukraine. Leaving a scrapped business idea behind when coming back, I moved away from my place of birth, breaking free from the mimetic systems I grew up in.

For two months, I was lost in the urban jungle of Berlin. All of a sudden an internship opportunity arose. It drove me into a mimetic crisis. Wanting to be self-sufficient and starting on my own vs. learning from within an organization. While rationalizing my way into commitment, I feared getting trapped in this mimetic system. Fearing being left behind, I chose to commit.

Throughout my internship, my inner conflict tore me apart. Three months in, I decided to end my internship after completing the six-month stint. I could no longer justify living in conflict with myself. I felt relieved.

Shattering all societal chains, I emigrated from the socially agreed upon narrative I grew up in. A subconscious hope to escape mimesis.

Entering the new mimetic system of Tbilisi, I felt the tension between embracing and breaking free. Figuring out what to do by choosing where to live first soon turned out to be a deception. Ironically, I was ideating on an application that matches people to their ideal place of living at that time.

I figured that if Europe did not make me obtain my fullness of being, surrounding myself with the brightest individuals in the world surely would. My new project was finally dealing with my own plight: How to enable ambitious individuals to follow their curiosity and create lasting value?

Before going to the technology mecca, I wanted to spend two months in a calm environment to get my new project off the ground. My intermediate destination was going to be Madeira. A booked flight from Funchal to New York connected my present being to my desired state.

Embrace

Getting trapped in mimetic systems feels intuitively threatening to me. Often times I find myself mirroring mimesis and breaking away from the group. This mirroring is based on my believe of a deficiency in being of my models.

In school, I felt as if there was a huge gap between what I hoped it would do—inspire students to follow their natural curiosity (physical desires) and instill them with a confidence in their own abilities to master their own unique challenges in life—and what it actually did— instill obedience to conform to a singular carved out path of socially acceptable illusions.

Since my first encounter with Peter Thiel's ideas through his book years ago, I stumbled across a handful of articles depicting his intellectual influences: René Girard's theory of mimesis. I read and listened to the occasional introduction to Girard, not grasping the fuller picture. Nevertheless, I became curious. Thiel mediated a desire to understand Girard's mimesis. Finally, I added Luke Burgis's Wanting and Jonathan Bi's lectures on my reading list.

A month ago, I finally devoured Burgis's Wanting in two or three days. I, then, digested Bi's first three lectures over multiple weeks. After what felt like years of blindness, I could finally see again. Mimesis popped up here and there. Not much later, I recognized it everywhere. Interpreting my life through the lens of mimesis, I finally found the key to my inner conflicts, to desire-hopping and to suffering. Terrified with the greater picture at first, a feeling of equanimity grew on me, reconciling with the violence inside and around me.

My metaphysical desires rescinded with this newly gained awareness. They lost part of their magic spell, but didn't disappear. I'm letting go of my desire to be somewhere, to be someone. I won't board my flight into a new mimetic system. Not yet. I'm back to discovering, following what's interesting.

I'm prone to mimesis. Intuitively, I feel the metaphysical mimetic pressure so clearly that I tend to resist and try to break free. Escaping to converge onto my physical desires, the experiences that bring me fulfillment itself.

My breaking free is socially determined. I reject the group, for seeing their wants as deficient. Wondering why I felt more spirited when I broke free from the group, it's dawning upon me that my physical desires get masked by mediated metaphysical wants of my models—wants that tend to be deceptive and leave me lacking.

Escaping from mimesis, however, is not possible. Humans are naturally mimetic. Our sociality heavily determines our desires. Awareness and intentionality drives change. It allows us to embrace mimesis that propels us forward to an existence in great measure, full of physical desires instead of metaphysical illusions.

I’ve been so obsessed with entrepreneurship because I physically enjoy creating my own things. I enjoy the experience. It’s the root of my inner conflict of being an entrepreneur and building things.

Exploring, learning, creating. Experiences that are inherently motivating and fulfilling to me. Deviating from my natural curiosity leads to inner conflict and deceptive cycles. So often my desires fall back on entrepreneurship because I enjoy building and ownership. I look for models and fall back on entrepreneurs. I sense the deception of being an entrepreneur—a mediated metaphysical desire—while feeling torn apart when I drift away from my physical wants of creating. That my metaphysical wants are unfulfilling I’ve grasped intuitively, but am only realizing now as I’m discovering the toolset to put it into concepts.

I’m building a ship. Mimesis can be the wind driving a boat across the ocean. “Where do I want to go?” I ask myself. Yet, I’m choosing to not know.
A journey of exploration.
A journey of learning.
A journey of creating.
The journey I’m embracing.

Thanks to Amanda, Emilia, Helmut, and Patricia for reading drafts of this essay and providing helpful feedback and support.

I recommend Luke Burgis's book and Jonathan Bi’s lectures for an introduction to René Girard’s Mimetic Theory. My understanding of Girard’s theory is based on their interpretations.

I encourage you to email me your thoughts and feedback at jesse@gabel.is.