Something Borrowed. Something Blue
THE IMITATION GAME
The French have a lot of explaining to do, given their philosophical contributions of recent times.
Postmodernism and its denial of reality— where facts are optional, everything is open to interpretation, and logic is ‘just an opinion’— that has come to define the modern world in all its weirdness was largely a French affair.
One, thankfully, offset by a contribution that, franc-ly speaking, goes a long way towards balancing the ledger, which, given that other drivel, makes it a heavy-duty insight indeed.
And they could hardly be more different. The chin-stroking and fanciful theories— none of which survived contact with the outside world— versus René Girard’s uncovering of mimetic desire: a behavioural dark matter.
A hidden hand shaping human behaviour, relationships, and social structures, this unconscious imitation drives competition, conflict, and even self-destruction all rarely explicitly acknowledged.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
David Foster Wallace
Like in Foster Wallace’s famous ‘This is Water’ speech, because we know nothing else, we never see it. We analyse, argue, and angst over the more superficial —because everything is more superficial— but it’s this, behind the scenes, pulling our strings and presiding over everything from personal ambitions to societal trends.
Indeed, much of its power is simply in that it is so rarely acknowledged. And not because we can’t see it, necessarily, but because we won’t. This greatest abstraction of them all hits a little too close to home when you learn that your deepest desires aren’t even yours. And that carefully curated and crafted story of self, your Magnum Opus, is not a work of originality but plagiarism— less masterpiece than forgery.
Once you see it in everyday life, it’s hard to unsee, but the tendency is still to look away. To not see. But then we’re back through the Postmodern looking glass again, and by aiming to preserve our notion of self, only denying it.
So, you are at a crossroads. A place where identity and desires can either be reclaimed or further distorted. By understanding the external forces that shape your desires, you can better navigate the uncomfortable liminal space between who you are and who you think you want to be.
And the further warning: If awareness of mimetic desire doesn’t fundamentally change how you look at the world and you in it—it’s pure ostrich defence.
As Luke Burgis writes:
There’s no avoiding it. If we don’t go there, mimetic desire will only be understood at a surface level. There’s no life hack or tool or technology that solves the “problem” of mimetic desire. In fact, it’s not a problem at all. It’s a reality. It’s part of human nature.
And so we shift from a great flattening to flattery at its most sincere.
THE IMITATION GAME
You might well be wondering exactly what the discovery is here because we see kids play this pattern out all the time:
I don’t want that.
Until I see that you want it.
And then I want it because you want it.
We have been those kids—both of them. But adulthood is, of course, in many ways less the realising of truths than the veiling of them, and Girard realised that transference of desire, far from a pettiness left to childhood, remains below the surface governing our everyday lives.
The idea we are the authors of our desire is what Girard called “The Romantic Lie”, and what we believe to be a straight line— between us and our desire— is, in fact, always curved and going through, or around, a third party: a model or mediator.
To get trickier still, it’s not even that we want the object, but that we believe the object will imbue us with some quality of being we see in the model—an idea we know well from advertising, where a lifestyle, mood, aura, or some other abstract essence is suggested to sell pet food, toilet paper, or whatever—such that desire is less about the object and more a search for being itself.
We rely on mediators or models to help us understand who and what to desire such that without them, we are adrift, searching for cues and clues about what to value.
We have familial, societal and cultural portals — a long list of ‘should’ wants— that fill in any gaps, making it more than possible we’ll ride an escalator of desire from birth to grave with no examination of our real wants.
But mimetic desire isn’t inherently bad—it’s how we learn. We are built for it, with mirror neurons helping us imitate speech patterns, social norms, and even physical skills. Every craft, discipline, or profession is built on a foundation of apprenticeship, where we model those who’ve mastered what we want to learn. This is how knowledge is passed down, how skill acquisition works, and how we accelerate our progress.
But it doesn’t stop at skill-building, and people rarely question the origins of their desires. With heads full of what others want, left unchecked, it’s not merely possible but likely we will act as Manchurian candidates betraying our best interests.
And that grim note is where we’ll leave our look at mimetic desire more generally. The all-encompassing nature of this topic and its far-reaching implications require a book or more to get the job done, and, Girard’s work aside, Luke Burgis does a fantastic job here with Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.
And there is a fantastic recent documentary on Girard here: Things Hidden
As a teaser for those so inclined, I’ll add that, as Solzhenitsyn observed, “the line between good and evil goes straight through the human heart”, and as a descriptor of human nature, mimetic desire doesn’t just have its dark side but arguably the darkest, but our cursory knowledge has us sufficiently armed to investigate how mimetic desire might guide, or, as you will have guessed, far more likely derail us when it comes to all things fitness.
And as is so often the case, we get things wrong here right from the very start, even by viewing fitness through this rubric.
In contrast to mimetically-derived wants, we are intrinsically, biologically motivated to fulfil our most basic needs like shelter, food, water and human connection— think the lower layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Not that fitness belongs there, either. On any cursory tour of the animal kingdom, you sure as hell wouldn’t find it there, but only as an assumed precursor to needs like food, shelter, social connection, etc and in fact, the means to ensuring them.
And far beyond the animal kingdom, good luck finding another organism that doesn’t make fitness priority number one and more like a basement to the pyramid above, but— just as mimetic desire is peculiar to humans— so is the folly that fitness might be deemed optional.
So before we go down the rabbit hole, note that nearly all of this can be easily sidestepped by adopting a mindset I’ve been promoting for 14 years: Fitness is a need, not an optional extra.
It won’t make you immune to mimesis in fitness or anywhere else, but you’ll get fit regardless. Because—if you’ll allow me the tautology—it’s not optional.
So do yourself a favour.
If you insist on doing this the hard way, the first thing to appreciate is just how rare basic fitness is. How many people do you know who enjoy any sort of relationship with their body, much less a positive one? If you’re still counting on two hands, add in a stress-free relationship to food, and you’ll quickly be down to one. If any.
And just how strange that is. The physiological principles behind fitness — the mechanisms of effect — are well established: no conjecture, no (credible) dissent. We needn’t be casting about in the dark hoping to strike it lucky because the knowledge eludes us.
But if our mis-categoristion of fitness isn’t already weird enough, even random chance would be an improvement on a copy-paste fitness culture that reliably replicates failure. A reality as bizarre as it is self-evident.
This contagion, were it positive— perhaps useful is a better term— would hold fitness and dietary success as the rule, not the exception.
Of course, we see the opposite. And, even in light of which, we still don’t cast doubt on the mistakes that lead to that end. We don’t point to the emperor having no clothes, we cast off our own, and in this domain of great import and consequence, one fundamental to health and quality of life, we’re either making the wrong moves or—because we haven’t come to value it enough it in the first place— making no moves at all.
In either case, there can only be one explanation for this near-universal struggle: we’re copying the wrong models. And despite a crystal-clear pirate map marking out the path to treasure, we aren’t standing on the shoulders of giants but peering over the shoulders of dunces.
Following those who don’t shepherd but prey on us.
Some are outright frauds—photoshopped influencers, steroid-fueled physiques, or tech gimmicks promising effortless results. Others mislead in more subtle ways: the grind-porn of fitness hustle culture, the obsession with arbitrary metrics, or the attachment to aesthetics over ability. Even the most relevant metrics, like increasing reps or adding load, can lead us astray when they don’t translate into real-world function and a deeper connection to our body.
In every case, what we’re following under the guise of fitness is not fitness at all.
Cannot. Possibly. Be.
So what to do?
Awareness is (always) the start. Expose these ecosystems of desire, and you start to understand the game you’re playing—whether you like it or not— and you can then begin to behave in an anti-mimetic fashion by bringing agency and intent to the equation.
But not all desires are equal. Burgis, in Wanting, builds on Girard’s mimetic theory to make a further distinction between the thick and thin:
Thin desires are surface-level, socially contagious, and often externally imposed. These desires are fleeting, easily manipulated, and often lead to frustration (e.g., chasing status, trends, or material success).
Thick desires are deeply rooted, intrinsic, and personally meaningful. They align with our core values, persist over time, and provide fulfillment (e.g., mastering a skill, pursuing a meaningful vocation, or strengthening relationships).
The key is to recognise mimetic influences and choose appropriate models—if fitness is not to be (our deepest) need, it stands to reason it must be the thickest of desires.
Helpfully, this distinction is less a what than a where. It’s taken me long enough to get here, but you’ll make this virtually guaranteed by first —and I hope to God, obviously— limiting your exposure to the greatest mimesis machine you could conjure up in your wildest copycat dreams.
Social media takes all the negatives of mimetic desire and multiplies them by many orders of magnitude. You could find a useful model on social media, but not without exposure to many more unuseful ones, most of which are artificial or curated for engagement rather than truth. In every case, you chase a fantasy— a heavily edited representation, at best, and one that rarely translates into reality.
That laptop nomad fantasy in practice is not you sipping Mojito’s and answering emails on a remote beach but connecting to dodgy dial-up and waiting 20 minutes for your inbox to load in one of the few cafes in the world yet to get the Danish design memo.
Many a #vanlife that made a sharp U-turn for home at the first rainy day confined-space squabble.
But the easy off-ramp here is to humbly admit what you already know —you will not be satisfied. The very moment you ‘get’, your desire will immediately flit to the next, as Burgis writes:
The act of winning, of gaining possession of the thing that the model made us want, convinces us that we chose the wrong model in the first place. And so we go in search of another one. Mimetic desire is a paradoxical game. Winning is how you lose. Every victory is Pyrrhic.
So we’re forever in a state of flux. Utterly convinced our present target is, finally, the answer, only to arrive at a mirage, the same as all the rest.
But wait! There on the horizon, that must be it!
And, again, we put our heads down. Mimesis can have us keeping up with Joneses, chasing abstractions like stars or likes—even reps, steps and weight— or only looking the part such that fitness becomes secondary, a mere sideshow to the whole affair.
And, again, that can be the only reason you’re not achieving it. Fitness is not elusive. If you are trying to get it, you will. Without fail. Everytime.
But not if you’re trying to get something else, an endless want and never have, and the forever fitness restart is simply the sating of one mimetic desire after the next.
A fitness practice is the antithesis of all these things. That should be obvious. But long before I understood mimetic desire, Leftfield Training was built—named—to counter the mimetic contagions that define fitness, diet, and lifestyle. A cast of beliefs, biases, and behaviors we take for granted. None of which are real.
Do what you love. Losing weight. Just rest
Barely a fraction of the nonsense we take for granted. Any one of which will have you have dead in the water.
But, it’s important to note that anti-mimetic doesn’t deny mimesis. It’s the acknowledgement of its eternal gravitational pull that drives us to make certain our desires are the thick ones. And, although it would improve much in this domain— like Seinfeld’s George Costanza neutralising his self-sabotaging tendencies by doing the opposite of everything he usually does— Leftfield is not contrarian.
As Girard observed, “Everyone leaves the beaten path only to fall into the same ditch.” Leftfield is a framework that keeps the physiological reality front and centre. It’s the recognition that fitness ‘culture’ is only our coalescing around the same collection of falsities— marketing pain points ‘solved’ by an appeal to baser instincts— and then differentiated with abstractions.
A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy far removed from any physiological or psychological reality. Like a game of Telephone with mistaken messages passing through and from media, celebrity, and business models (not physiological ones) and now so woven into society that much of it now is simply received ‘wisdom’ and just as likely to be parroted by the well-meaning.
A culture such that your entire concept of fitness and nutrition— from PE class to governmental dietary guidelines, the fitness industry to SM influencers has been pure fantasy.
It’s what you’re neighbour or friend is doing. It’s what you’re doctor is telling you. It’s what you did last time. And the time before that.
And the reason it didn’t stick for your neighbour or friend. And why your doctor keeps telling you— and every other patient. And the reason you keep coming back to the same place is that the conventional approach to fitness and diet is a series of the same/similar steps that we act out as if they are obvious. Sensible. Logical.
And they are none of them.
We’re so good at copying wrong that we don’t even know what right looks like. What you are doing, how you are doing it, and, most importantly, how you think about it is under the influence of anything and everything except that which makes a difference. And at odds with best practices, both fitness and psychological— like behaviour change— you seek to impose your will on your body and mind.
You go to war.
And you lose.
Because your body and mind don’t work like that.
The good news, and I’m searching desperately for a silver lining here, is that—as mimesis tells us— you got all of this from somewhere else, so none of it can be attributed to you.
The better news is that your next move can be. A move that, by contrast to what everybody else is doing, makes no sense at all. But nor would you want it to, right?
You want something from left field. You need something from Leftfield.
A move that will lead to your ongoing success as surely as anything else won’t.
Next time: Your move.
____
Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI