Mimetic Desire
Desire can be socially imported: other people’s concentrated attention makes an object feel valuable, until their appetite is experienced as your own.
Nothing about the object changes. What changes is that everyone around you begins wanting it—and soon you feel the lack too. A preference that arrives from the crowd can still feel completely private.
E1Attention becomes appetite
Other people act as models of what is worth noticing. When many of them converge on the same target, their attention supplies a powerful cue: this must matter. Repeated exposure to that cue turns observation into attraction, and attraction into a desire you experience as your own. Mimetic desire therefore runs through three moving parts: a model whose wanting you observe, a target made salient by that wanting, and your tendency to mistake socially transmitted value for an independently formed preference.
E1Influence is not proof
Social convergence does not prove that a desire is borrowed, nor does it make the desire unreal. Appetite can also arise from direct pleasure, need, or considered judgment. The model is most useful as a diagnostic when wanting intensifies alongside other people’s attention; used as a universal explanation, it becomes impossible to test.
Remove the audience
Choose one thing you strongly want and run a private counterfactual: if nobody you admired could see it, discuss it, or want it too, would you still pursue it? Then get firsthand exposure before committing—the move behind Exploration Before Commitment. If the desire survives both anonymity and direct experience, you have better evidence that it fits you rather than merely your social field.
Episodes that teach this
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How to Learn Anything Fast? Learning by Osmosis - FutureIQ
· explained at 4:27
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"all our desires are copied from other people" and "if everybody around us wants something then we want something"