📮 The Perils of Comparison
Letters from a Seeker (Vol. 60)
📮 Letters from a Seeker
“Letters from a Seeker” is a weekly series of short contemplations that explore the mystery, meaning, and art of living. The word ‘Seeker’ in the title is inspired by the Delphic maxim: “Be a seeker of wisdom.” *** This series is exclusive to members.
Dear Fellow Traveler,
Have you ever left a reunion wanting things you didn’t want before you arrived?
Not dramatically.
Just the low hum of a recalibrated appetite—a neighborhood that suddenly seems more desirable, a career move that hadn’t occurred to you that morning, a quiet dissatisfaction with something that was perfectly adequate on the way there. The gathering didn’t give you these wants.
It borrowed them from someone else and handed them to you so smoothly you mistook them for your own.
This is what reunions actually do, underneath the warmth. Jobs, salaries obliquely referenced, neighborhoods, schools for the children, recent travel, home renovations. The automatic process of locating everyone in relation to everyone else.
We leave knowing roughly where we rank.
And having updated, without deciding to, what we should want next.
René Girard (1923–2015) spent his career trying to explain why this happens—and why it happens so automatically that we almost never notice it. His central insight was simple and quietly devastating: we rarely want things for their own sake. We want them because someone else wants them. He called it “mimetic desire”—from the Greek mimesis, imitation.
The wanting is borrowed before we know we’re borrowing it.
This is not a cynical claim. Girard wasn’t suggesting that human desire is hollow. He was making a more precise observation: that desire needs a model. Before we want something, we need to see someone else wanting it, or having it, or being seen to have it. The object itself is almost secondary.
What we’re really tracking is the person who seems, through their wanting, to possess something we lack. Some fullness. Some arrival. Some quality of being that the desired object appears to confer.
And here is where Girard becomes most unsettling. The model who makes the object desirable eventually becomes the rival who makes it threatening. As you close the distance between yourself and what someone else has, inspiration quietly curdles into competition. The friend whose success once motivated you begins to feel like a rebuke. The colleague you admired becomes the one you measure yourself against with increasing unease.
Mimetic desire doesn’t just borrow—it escalates. The wanting intensifies precisely as it approaches what it wants.
This is why the reunion inventory feels so charged underneath its warmth. We are not comparing possessions. We are tracking proximity to models—and feeling, in the gaps between conversations, the pressure of desires we absorbed so long ago, which we’ve mistaken for our own.
The tragedy Girard identified is that mimetic desire is self-defeating by design.
Acquiring the desired object doesn’t resolve the wanting—it simply relocates it. The arrival never quite arrives. And the person who has spent years pursuing borrowed appetites may find, on reaching them, that they were never really theirs to begin with.
The American essayist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) didn’t have Girard’s vocabulary. But he had the same diagnosis—and he did something Girard never managed: he ran the experiment.
In the summer of 1845, Thoreau built a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, and lived there for two years, two months, and two days. The cultural mythology around his life tends toward the romantic—a man alone in the woods, communing with nature, living nobly and simply.
The reality was more interesting and considerably less pure. Thoreau walked into town regularly. He had dinner with his mother. He was not a hermit, and he knew it. What he was, more precisely, was a man attempting to find out what he actually wanted when stripped of what his neighbors wanted.
That is the real experiment of Walden—harder than the romantic version suggests. Thoreau understood that mimetic desire is less like a choice and more like a climate. Ambient. Airborne. It doesn’t announce itself—it simply becomes the atmosphere you breathe, shaping appetite and ambition so gradually that you eventually lose the ability to distinguish what you genuinely want from what the climate has been depositing in you all along.
He went to the woods to change the air.
Not permanently—Thoreau was too honest for that kind of romanticism.
