What Happens When You Lack Self Awareness?
If you can't listen to your own inner voice, your own body, your own impulses - you end up listening to everyone else, and maybe, you even end up miserable.
I’ll never forget what it felt like to finish and finally put down Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire by Luke Burgis, who became an immediate “author crush” of mine back in 2021 when the book was released. By author crush, btw, I mean a MENTAL and INTELLECTUAL crush, someone who distills a theme, tension or topic so perfectly, it’s like they’ve opened your eyes to something you’ve always felt, but could never really explain. Luke did that with René Girard’s concept of mimetic desire: the phenomenon that explains why we want the same things as everyone else. It explains why tween girls started bowing down to the all-mighty Stanley Cup at the exact same time, why we all bought Beanie Babies and those dementor Furbies growing up, why every metropolitan boss-babe from LA to NY wanted to join The Wing, and why social proof works as a fail-proof marketing tool whether you’re hawking skincare or nicotine vapes or sneakers.
The Big Picture
‘Mimetic desire’ basically means you want something because everyone else wants it. We’re all stitched together in an endless human centipede of longing. Sheila wanting X assigns value to X, so suddenly, Katie wants X, too. Katie may not even KNOW Sheila, but here she is, adopting Sheila’s wants as her wants, foregoing her own self awareness or self knowledge to chase what someone else is chasing.
Katie may even burn herself out for X. Let’s say Sheila’s a college senior, and she’s just THAT bitch. She gets great grades, she has a great group of friends, she’s partnered with someone who loves and adores her, and she’s busting ass to get a job in finance post-grad. She’s an eager and invested Business Major and has a real, deep desire to make gobs of money for ten years, then retire to her hometown in the Midwest with some kids and a fat investment portfolio. But Katie, a Sociology Major with only half-baked post-grad plans that she’s quietly insecure about, doesn’t know all that. All she knows is that Sheila seems to have her life together, sits next to her sometimes in their mandatory World Sciences class, and is gunning for this fancy finance job that’s going to make her a lot of money and maybe bestow a little status.
So instead of looking inward, or journaling, or proactively meeting people in different fields she might be interested in, or talking to her parents, or a best friend, or doing research of any kind to interrogate what might light HER up or excite HER, Katie makes Sheila’s mission her own. She’s not consciously doing it, or at least, it doesn’t feel that way, but this route feels faster, and safer, and, honestly, kind of smart. It’s a built-in blueprint to a stable future. And it conveniently means Katie doesn’t have to do the harder, ickier, scarier work of cultivating self awareness, setting her own goals, and charting her own path. Katie buckles down and spends weekends and weeknights studying all the same stuff the finance kids are studying, racks up interviews with banks and asset management firms, gets herself a job, and she’s off to the races.
Cut to two years later, and Katie’s a mess. She’s working fourteen-hour-days for a boss she hates, in a job she hates. She’s making money but can rarely spend it on trips or dinners, because she’s at the office so much. She feels incredibly empty and unmotivated and detached from her own life. Disassociation has become the norm. She gets home late, pours herself nearly half a bottle of wine, watches Survivor and wakes up to do it all over again. She wants to make a life change, but has no idea how she even got into this life in the first place, and she has never used the muscles necessary to stop. pause. reflect. and dream. About a better life, about a bigger life, or more simply, a life she wants to actually inhabit, and feel, and own.
This is obviously a hyper-exaggerated version of the darker implications of mimetic desire. More minor examples include wanting to try that “hot new restaurant” in town because you see a line down the block every time you walk by (aka me and Sailor. I WILL claim my rightful seat at the bar one day!!), or buying Tik Tok viral lipgloss that gives you a lip rash and burns your boyfriend’s mouth (also me) because the ads had so much engagement and hype. The phenomenon has its claws in us in these very big and very small ways. And with either bucket, the trick to fending off these claws is establishing a strong, boundaried, real sense of self that has its own wants, its own goals, its own standards, even in a world where it’s becoming increasingly hard to do so.
My Story
Between January of 2023 and literally four weeks ago, I embarked on a journey of self- discovery to understand why I burnt out so hard, what I could’ve done differently, how I should spend my time to preserve enough gas in my metaphorical tank, what a productive but not destructive work-day should look like for me, and how I should structure my weeks so I strike the right balance between giving and taking in all of my relationships. Up until that inflection point, I was basically a flippety-flappety car dealership balloon, bending to the whims of my business, my team, and everything in-between. I had this VISION of becoming more like a tree trunk: more rooted, less flippety-flappety.
I’ll go into that journey in more detail in another post, but my goal was to build an internal compass, an internal set of ideals for how I would spend my time, schedule meetings, take vacations, unwind in the evenings, embrace the mornings... you know…basically DESIGNING my life for the first time, at least, the parts of my life I could fully control. I learned to ask myself questions like:
Does that work for me? Does that make sense for me?
Is that what I actually want to do this weekend? Is that how I want to be spending my time?
Is this something I’d actually feel good prioritizing, or do I want to prioritize something else?
How does my body feel when I wake up this early? How does it feel, and how do I feel, when I wake up this late?
What does my tummy want me to eat today? Do I want a burger? A salad? Some froyo?
Do I feel honest and comfortable committing to that?
Do I have enough energy for that today?
Do I need time in-between meetings, or am I actually okay charging through four hours of calls?
My answers surprised me. Delighted me. Shocked me! Tickled me. I journaled through what I learned, and now, I have a few rules I try my darnedest to live by:
No meetings on Fridays. I need at least one day for deep work.
No calls or meeting on travel days. If I’m going out of office on a Wednesday afternoon, my vacation starts in the morning, even if I’m just blobbing in bed.
No slack on my phone. If I’m working, I’m working. At my desk (jk I’m like, in bed 38% of the time. If you’ve Zoom’d with me, you know). If I’m going to pickup lunch, or take Shrimp for a walk, I’m immersed in that moment. And no one will die and nothing will fall apart if I’m unreachable for 20 minutes.
No work emails on Saturday.
At least one weekend day a week, as best I can, I make NO plans. I am my own guide. And I use the day to keep working these muscles of listening to my gut, and my instincts, and letting them roll me through from morning until night. I may end up seeing a friend, or grabbing a bite, or cooking, or doing something social. But it’s because I felt like it!
And more!
Just because everyone else is shooting up Slack like heroine while waiting in line for Sweetgreen or grabbing a little iced latte treat, doesn’t mean I have to! You normalizing it doesn’t mean it works for me. Just because someone else has glorified half-assing their vacation for the sake of faux productivity or company martyrdom doesn’t mean I have to. You and (Old Me) and the rest of our generation demonizing rest doesn’t mean I’m gonna! Just because my boyfriend works Saturdays doesn’t mean I have to. Maybe it gives him a sense of purpose and drive. Amazing. But I want to smoke a joint, get a coffee and fresh apple cider donut from the farmer’s market, plop down on a nearby bench and send memes to Paige. Just because everyone else is out and about on Friday night doesn’t mean I have to be, especially when I recently learned I can order spicy tuna on a ricecake to my BED. I don’t need to go to Sushi Nakazawa! They don’t even do crispy rice!
I was freelance for most of this aforementioned journey, and now I’m the co-founder of Scent Lab and have a new business partner to answer to, and a new Social Media Manager I lead and work collaboratively with, so I have had to become a bit less rigid and do what’s best for my team sometimes, and my company. BUT! I still find ways to look inward, and like to think of life now as one big, juicy time sandwich.
If I have crazy calls rolling on Wednesday, deep work Friday and a dinner with friends that night, you KNOW I’m vegging in bed that Thursday evening with my true crime queued up and some Amy’s Mac and cheese. It doesn’t MATTER if you invite me to the HOTTEST TICKET IN TOWN for Thursday night. I don’t CARE if half of New York is going. I don’t CARE if it’s a bar seat at Sailor (Okay I lie - I care a little!). I care that I know what I need, and I’m ready and able to give it to her. Mimetic desire still chirps away, but it can also f*ck right off. Because I’m a tree trunk now.
Recovery Resources
These reads, practices etc - shaped my journey of discerning mimetic desire from my truest desires ( or what my author crush Luke calls ‘thick and thin’ desires). I hope you lean on them, too. :-)
Wanting, by Luke Burgis - get it. love it. live it. then talk to me about it. One of my fave books of the last decade.
The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron (obvi) - a prescriptive, DIY program for getting unstuck, tapping into your truest wants and needs, and leading a life that fulfills you. This book is a viral, no-one-shuts-up-about-it hit for a reason. I developed a religious journaling practice because of this book. I started logging how my various tasks and roles and social interactions drained versus energized me, because of this book. And I tell everyone to get it! So go get it!
The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks - this book describes different “zones” of operating. There’s your zone of incompetence, zone of competence, zone of excellence, and zone of genius. I think Katie, my fictional character above, slipped into a job in her zone of competence instead of challenging herself to get messy and discover her zone of excellence or zone of genius. This happens to a lot of people. And this book can help.
The key to a life that doesn't burn you out is not removing struggle from your life, but knowing always, in your heart, that you are struggling for the right things. Stop struggling for what everyone else wants. Put in the work so you know what it looks like to “do you.”
Talk soon,
Ali 🧘🏼♀️
I listened to a podcast interview with Cal Newport about his new slow productivity book that I think you would enjoy (Modern Wisdom pod). (There’s one point where he talks about the slow productivity of novelists that made me want to blow my brains out but otherwise, it was insightful)
Not me… also coveting a seat at Sailor. 🫢 Great read, thank you Ali!