you've inherited your desires. they're borrowed. not yours to own.
guide to the desires worth keeping.
i need four minutes of your undivided attention before the internet overstimulates you for today.
every morning i make coffee before i open my phone.
it’s a small rule i gave myself. the kettle does its thing, the mug warms my palms, and for four or five minutes the world still feels like mine. nobody has told me what to want yet. nobody has shown me their offer letter or their engagement ring or their six-figure exit. it’s just me, the steam, and whatever’s actually true before the negotiating starts.
because the second i unlock my phone, the negotiating starts.
someone got into consulting. someone joined a vc fund. someone’s building an ai startup they’ve “always been passionate about.” someone’s engaged to a man who looks suspiciously like every other man currently trending. someone moved to a city i’ve never wanted to live in until this exact second, and now, inexplicably, i do.
none of them are trying to do anything to me.
they’re just living. loudly. and i am, apparently, extremely suggestible.
by the time i’ve had my first sip of coffee, my future has been quietly renegotiated by eleven strangers who will never know they did it.
that used to scare me. now it just makes me curious. because there’s a french guy named René Girard who spent his whole career on one unbearable idea, and once you understand it, you cannot watch your own life the same way again.
he said desire is never really a straight line.
we like to imagine it works like this - me, and then a thing i want. simple. clean. mine.
it’s not like that. it’s a triangle. you. someone you admire. and the thing they want. the middle point is the model - the person quietly teaching you what deserves to be wanted
think about a bookstore. hundreds of books. you walk past most of them without a flicker of interest. then someone whose taste you trust picks one up, turns it over, gets that specific look on her face. suddenly that exact book is the only one in the room.
the cover didn’t change. the title didn’t get better in the last four seconds.
you did. or your wanting did, which apparently is not always the same thing.
i think about an incident from my first year of engineering more than i’d like to admit.
one of my closest friends, she wanted into our uni’s robotics society with a hunger i had genuinely never seen in a person before. talked about it at every instance. worked like it owed her something. and watching her, i felt something ignite in me too. not for robotics. i didn’t care about robotics. i cared about wanting something the way she wanted it.
you shouldn’t have to want to want something.
i wrote that down at nineteen and didn’t understand it until much later. because sometimes inspiration and infection feel exactly the same from the inside. someone hands you a fever and your body just runs with it, and you call it passion because passion sounds so much better than contagion.
i caught her desire the way you catch an accent from a person you spend too much time around, just to take an another entire year to realise it’s not what i really wanted (surprise surprise) after i got it and did it anyways.
only a few years ago the smart ambitious ones all wanted investment banking. then it was consulting. then FAANG. then everyone was building a startup. now it’s AI, and half your feed has apparently been “obsessed with it since childhood,” and next year it’ll be something, and everyone doing it will swear, hand on heart, that this one is real, this one is theirs, this one they thought of first.
the object keeps changing costumes. the mechanism underneath never does.
and before you decide this is just a you problem, or a your-generation problem, understand that entire industries are built on exploiting exactly this. marketing doesn’t actually sell you information about a product. it sells you somebody else’s desire and lets you wear it like it’s yours. that’s the whole business model. nike doesn’t need michael jordan because he understands rubber soles better than anyone alive. companies don’t pay actresses millions to stand next to a cream because the cream is chemically superior when she’s nearby. they’re paying for transfer. they’re paying you to want what she appears to already have.
there’s a reason a recommendation from your best friend moves you more than a billboard ever could. the billboard says “this product is good.” your friend says something much more dangerous. she says “someone like me already wanted this, and it was worth it.” that’s not information anymore, that’s borrowed conviction, and borrowed conviction is the most persuasive thing on earth.
your instincts are ancient here. for most of human history, copying the person who seemed to know something was how you survived. if the best hunter in the village avoided a certain path, you avoided it too. copying prestige used to be intelligence. the software never got updated. now instead of following someone who knows where the clean water is, you’re following a twenty year old announcing she just dropped out and joined a startup, and some old, dumb, loyal part of your brain still whispers “if she wants it, it must be good.”
for most of history you were only ever comparing yourself to maybe thirty people. your inner circle. your school. your street. now you scroll past thirty thousand curated lives before you’ve finished your coffee, and every single one of them is quietly asking, what if you wanted this instead? no wonder your wanting feels loud and confused and slightly not your own. it’s not thirty voices in the room anymore. it’s a stadium.
here’s what’s really stuck w me, more than the theory itself.
you don’t actually want the rolex. you want whatever you’ve decided the rolex will make people believe about you. you don’t want the startup. you want the specific kind of confidence you saw settle into someone’s shoulders after they built one. you don’t want the relationship, not really, not the actual logistics of it, the shared calendar and the compromise on which show to watch. you want the softness you heard enter someone’s voice the one time they talked about coming home to a person.
objects are never really the destination. they’re translators. every desire is quietly trying to translate itself into a feeling underneath. a rolex is really just respect wearing a metal strap. money is safety that learned to talk. followers is just being seen, counted obsessively because being seen is hard to count any other way.
which is exactly why getting the object so often feels strangely hollow. you optimized for the visible layer because it’s the one you can screenshot. and then you’re standing there holding the thing, waiting for the feeling to arrive with it, and it doesn’t, because it was never inside the object to begin with. it was in the model. it was borrowed from someone else’s face, not the object’s chemistry.
so try asking a slightly better question than “what do i want.” ask, what feeling am i actually hoping this will hand me? because objects compete. only one of you gets the internship, the house, the boy. feelings don’t compete the same way. everyone can have safety. everyone can have being seen. the object turns life into a fight. the feeling underneath it usually doesn’t have to.
i want to be clear that i’m not telling you to become a hermit about this. don’t delete every app. don’t distrust every person who ever inspired you. don’t decide imitation is a disease you need to fix.
you learned language by imitation. you learned to laugh by imitation, your specific laugh is probably forty percent your mother’s. you learned kindness the same way, by watching someone be kind to you long before you understood why it mattered. love, too. every apology you know how to give, someone modeled it for you first. why would ambition be the one exception in a person built almost entirely out of other people?
the problem was never imitation. the problem is unconscious imitation. a desire that operates on you without ever differentiating itself.
it’s easier to write about rivalry than repair. if desire spreads like this, then it doesn’t only spread envy and burnout and the specific ache of loneliness watching someone else’s one year relationship anniversary post at 1am. it spreads generosity too. spend real time around someone who treats curiosity like it’s sacred and you’ll get more curious without trying. spend time around someone who is gentle about strangers and you’ll notice your own sharp edges start to soften.
people aren’t just influences passing through your life. people are entire environments you’re quietly absorbing.
so the real question was never “is this desire borrowed.” almost everything is. the real question is whose desires you’re letting live rent-free inside you, and whether you’d choose them again if you actually looked them in the face.
letters from nush runs on caffeine and the life left in me after being a full time woman in tech, support my work and keep the coffee coming <3
this brings me to the only fair way i know to test any desire. imagine the applause disappears completely. the promotion still happens, but nobody claps and nobody posts about it. the watch still arrives, but nobody ever notices you’re wearing it. the company still gets built, but forbes never calls and nobody ever tells you you’re inspiring.
would you still want it.
if the wanting goes quiet the moment nobody’s watching, it was probably borrowed. borrowed desires starve without an audience. owned ones keep breathing in silence, in the dark, on a random tuesday when literally nobody is checking.
and while we’re being honest, here’s a second question that might matter even more. every glamorous identity you’re chasing eventually dissolves into an ordinary tuesday. the founder doesn’t wake up feeling like a founder every morning, she wakes up to payroll and difficult emails. the writer doesn’t spend her mornings signing books, she spends most of them deleting paragraphs she was proud of yesterday.
you’re not actually choosing a career when you choose ambition. you’re choosing which specific, unglamorous, repetitive problems you’re willing to keep showing up for over the next ten years. so don’t ask what you want to become. ask what kind of tuesday you could survive loving.
and now the part i owe you an honest answer to because i thought about it a lot before an evening travelling alone in the train gave me an answer.
is the ache to be touched mimetic too? is the hunger to be held by someone, to be known without having to explain yourself, is that borrowed as well?
i don’t think the hunger itself is. i think the shape of who satisfies it is, but not the hunger.
nobody had to model attachment for you before you felt it. a newborn doesn’t need to see it on instagram to reach for warmth. that need is older than language, older than status, older than every culture that ever decided what love should look like. it was here before there was anyone to imitate.
what girard gets you is the costume, not the hunger underneath it. one generation decides love looks like marrying a doctor. another decides it looks like a founder in a hoodie. someone wants flowers every friday, someone wants a quiet cottage, someone wants a wedding registry from a store they can’t afford. the longing stays exactly the same size across every one of those people. only the outfit changes.
i’ve said before that i don’t really fantasize about my future husband. i fantasize about my future home, the lamps, the linen curtains moving in the evening air, lilies on a wooden table nobody’s rushing me away from. i used to wonder if pinterest taught me to want that. it probably shaped the tiles. it did not invent the peace underneath them. the tiles are replaceable. the peace isn’t.
here’s the actual tell, if you want one. mimetic desire needs a witness to survive. it gets loud in company and quiet the second you’re alone, because the whole point of it was always being seen wanting it. the ache to be held does the opposite. it gets loudest in the dark, at 2am, when there is nobody left to perform for and no algorithm awake to notice you’re feeling it.
if a wanting gets quieter the more alone you are, return it, it was never fully yours. if it gets louder in the silence, keep it. that one’s real.
so where does that leave you. not with a clean answer, because i don’t have one and i’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. it leaves you with a slightly better set of questions than the ones you walked in here with.
who first made this desirable to me? would i still want it if every person who ever admired it vanished overnight? am i chasing the actual tuesday of this life, or the biography i’ll get to tell about it later? what feeling am i hoping this object will finally hand me, and is there a cheaper, faster way to just have the feeling? would the wanting survive total silence?
authenticity was never about finding some untouched, factory-original desire buried underneath all the noise. i don’t think she’s down there. i think authenticity is much less romantic than that and much more like maintenance. it’s a borrowed desire you interrogated properly and it stayed anyway. it’s the one that made it through every ugly question you could throw at it and came out the other side a little dented but still standing there, still yours, still wanting the same thing on a random unglamorous tuesday when nobody was ever going to know.
keep that one. it earned it.
give the rest back gently to whoever it actually belonged to. it was only ever borrowed, and it’s not a betrayal to return something that was never yours to carry in the first place.
tomorrow, make your coffee before you open your phone. just once. give yourself the four minutes. notice what you actually want in that small, quiet, unwitnessed window, before eleven strangers get the chance to redecorate your future for the day.
whatever survives those four minutes is the closest thing to yours you’re ever going to get.
start there.
yours imperfectly,
Nush <3
all roads leads to the question of free will
sleeping now
my phone shall see me after the coffee tomorrow morning:D