The Algorithm Did Not Steal Your Attention. It Taught You What To Want.
Mimetic desire, false near-rivals, and the quiet work of building a life that is actually yours.
The algorithm did not only steal your attention.
It taught you what to want.
That is the deeper problem. Not screen time. Not dopamine. Not the fact that you opened an app for five minutes and lost forty. Those are real issues, but they are not the root. The root is quieter: you can spend years building a life around desires you never consciously chose.
A city you suddenly need to move to.
A body you suddenly need to have.
A career ladder that becomes urgent only after you see someone your age climb it.
A lifestyle that looks like freedom online but feels like a script when you imagine living it every day.
A version of yourself that feels personal because it is inside your head, even though it was assembled from other people’s signals.
René Girard called the underlying mechanism mimetic desire. Mikey Posada framed it bluntly in a video I watched: we do not simply want what we want because of who we are; we often want what we want because the people we want to be have those things. The uncomfortable part is that this does not stop at products. It reaches our goals, careers, relationships, values, dreams, and lifestyles.
That is why “social media is bad” is too shallow.
The real issue is not that the feed shows you too much. The real issue is that the feed gives you models. Those models teach you what a desirable life looks like. Then your nervous system starts treating their scoreboard as your destiny.
For most of human life, comparison was local.
You had a village. Maybe a few dozen people. Maybe a few hundred. You compared yourself to people you actually knew: family, neighbors, classmates, coworkers, the people you would see repeatedly across the seasons of life. That had problems, but it had limits.
The old circle of influence might have been 100, 150, 200 people. Then the village changed. It became global. More importantly, the village became algorithmic. The feed now sorts through billions of people and serves you the people who are best at making you want what they have.
That sentence matters.
The feed does not merely show you people.
It selects for people who can produce desire.
The most dangerous account is not always the most famous one. A billionaire celebrity may still feel far away. The person who really gets inside your head is often the near-rival: someone close enough to feel comparable. The person your age. The person in your city. The small creator with momentum. The former classmate. The person with a similar background who seems to have converted the same raw materials into a more impressive life.
One useful distinction from Girard is between external and internal mediators. External mediators are distant enough to admire without feeling direct rivalry. Internal mediators feel close enough to compete with. Social media collapses distance and turns countless strangers into internal mediators.
That is why the feed can feel so personal even when the people are strangers.
It is not just content.
It is a room full of near-rivals.
Most of us imagine desire as a straight line:
I am here. The object is there. I want it.
Girard’s insight is that there is usually a third point. There is a model, a mediator, someone who teaches the object to glow. The object may be money, a title, a body, a relationship, a city, a niche, a watch, a startup, a certain kind of intelligence, a certain style of confidence.
But the object is rarely only the object.
You do not only want the thing.
You want the identity you think comes with the thing.
The uncomfortable part is that we do not just want what the model wants; we want to be that person. We see someone beautiful, successful, loved, respected, free, creative, calm, admired, or powerful. Then we assume the objects around them are the path into that inner state.
If I get that career, I will feel legitimate.
If I get that body, I will feel chosen.
If I get that audience, I will feel important.
If I build that business, I will feel safe.
If I move to that city, I will become more alive.
Sometimes these are true. Often they are partially true. But many times, the object is only a symbol. It borrows heat from the person carrying it.
This is why desire can survive even after the object stops making sense. You may not want the thing in any practical way. You want the permission it seems to grant. You want the relief. You want the version of yourself that appears in the fantasy.
Borrowed ambition has a specific texture.
It feels urgent, comparative, and slightly humiliating.
It does not feel like quiet commitment. It feels like being late to a party you never consciously agreed to attend.
You see someone win, and suddenly your existing path feels smaller. You see someone praised, and suddenly your own work feels insufficient. You see someone living a certain lifestyle, and suddenly your normal day looks like failure.
This is not always because you discovered a true desire. Sometimes you discovered a model.
The practical question is not only:
“Do I want this?”
The better question is:
“Who taught me to want this?”
That question does not invalidate the desire. It investigates it.
Maybe the desire is real. Maybe seeing the model awakened something that was already there. Good. Keep it. But maybe the desire is just social heat. Maybe it is envy wearing the costume of clarity. Maybe it is a scoreboard metric that entered your life because it is easy to count.
Money, status, looks, followers, titles, and achievements are dangerous because they are easy to count. And once something is easy to count, it quietly becomes easy to worship. They are not always wrong. They are just dangerous when they become the foundation of identity.
A metric is useful as feedback.
It is dangerous as a god.
A common mistake is thinking anti-mimetic means doing the opposite of everyone else.
Everyone wants money, so I will reject money.
Everyone wants status, so I will perform indifference.
Everyone wants the city, so I will romanticize leaving.
Everyone wants productivity, so I will make slowness my identity.
Everyone wants the corporate ladder, so I will make anti-career rebellion my brand.
This is the trap. If your life is organized around proving you are not like “them,” then “them” are still the center. The crowd still mediates your desire. You are just using a minus sign.
Contrarianism can be imitation in reverse.
This matters because many people confuse difference with freedom. But being different is easy if you let the crowd define the axis and then choose the opposite point. Freedom is harder. Freedom is choosing the axis.
An anti-mimetic life is not necessarily strange, minimalist, spiritual-looking, offline, rural, artistic, or countercultural. It can look ordinary from the outside. It can include ambition, money, technology, cities, companies, public work, and high standards.
The difference is not aesthetic.
The difference is governance.
Are you governed by envy, rivalry, and the need to be seen winning?
Or are you governed by values you would still respect if nobody applauded?
One answer is to choose better models.
This is practical and necessary. You cannot expose yourself to the same people every day and expect untouched desires. Input becomes appetite. Appetite becomes direction. Direction becomes life.
I think of this as conscious curation: choosing the ideas, symbols, information, and people that enter your consciousness. That is not aesthetic minimalism. It is psychological hygiene.
A model audit is simple but uncomfortable:
Who makes me feel behind?
Who makes my current life feel small?
Whose success secretly changes my goals?
What do I want only after seeing someone else praised for it?
Which accounts make me imitate a lifestyle I never consciously chose?
Which people make me more truthful, disciplined, loving, courageous, and alive?
Which people make me more performative, restless, envious, or ashamed?
Do not only unfollow obvious toxins. Audit aspirational content too. Some accounts look positive but train dissatisfaction. Some people inspire your craft. Others colonize your imagination.
The goal is not to live without models. That is impossible and probably undesirable. We learn by imitation. We borrow language, rituals, standards, techniques, and possibilities. The question is whether we are borrowing consciously.
But better models are not the final answer.
Human models are still human. They are flawed, contradictory, partial, and context-bound. If you make a person your north star, you inherit their shadows with their strengths.
That is where vertical values enter.
The deepest move is the distinction between horizontal comparison and vertical transcendence.
Horizontal comparison asks:
How am I doing compared to them?
Vertical values ask:
Is this aligned with what is higher than my ego today?
You can name the higher thing differently depending on your worldview: God, love, truth, learning, service, craft, gratitude, health, responsibility, presence. The point is not the label. The point is having a filter that does not depend on the feed.
If love is a value, the question becomes:
Does this decision make me more loving toward myself and the people around me?
If truth is a value:
Am I choosing this because it is true, or because it photographs well?
If learning is a value:
Does this path deepen my capacity, or merely upgrade my image?
If service is a value:
Who benefits if I win this game?
If faith is a value:
Am I acting from trust and responsibility, or from panic and comparison?
Vertical values do not remove ambition. They purify it.
They do not make you passive. They make you less available for fake races.
They do not guarantee certainty. They give you a place to return when the feed starts speaking in your voice.
Here is the practical move.
Write down the people you repeatedly compare yourself to. Not the people you admire in theory. The people who actually change your mood, urgency, self-image, spending, career anxiety, body image, or sense of enough.
Separate them into:
mentors: they make you better without shrinking you
mirrors: they reveal a real desire you need to honor
rivals: they trigger status panic
colonizers: they install goals you do not actually want
For one week, notice what you want after scrolling.
Do you suddenly want a different body? A new city? A new niche? A new identity? A more impressive job title? A different relationship? A more aesthetic home? A public life? A private life? A minimalist life? A founder life? A monk life?
Do not judge it yet. Just track the pattern.
Would I still want this if nobody could see it?
Would I still want it if it did not increase my status?
Would I still want it if the person who made it desirable disappeared from my feed?
Would I still choose the daily maintenance, not just the image?
Choose three to five values that can govern decisions. Do not choose decorative values. Choose values that can say no.
Example:
Truth: I will not build a life around a lie just because it wins.
Health: I will not sacrifice my body to look successful.
Craft: I will keep improving even when it is not visible.
Love: I will not make ambition an excuse to become cold.
Faith: I will act from responsibility, not panic.
The cleanest test is death. Remember that you die. This is not meant to be dark. It is clarifying.
A lot of comparison becomes absurd under the pressure of mortality.
Not meaningless. Absurd.
You are going to die. The people whose opinions dominate your decisions will die. The audience will move on. The algorithm will change. The scoreboard will reset. The trend will rot. The aesthetic will date itself. The rival will become tired too.
So what remains worth doing?
That question is not a quote for a wall. It is a knife.
It cuts false urgency.
The next time you feel behind, do not immediately accelerate.
Investigate.
Behind whom?
On what scoreboard?
Chosen by which model?
Rewarded by which tribe?
Paid for with what part of your life?
Aligned with which value?
This is the anti-mimetic lens. It does not make you immune to influence. It makes influence visible. And once influence becomes visible, you can negotiate with it.
Maybe you keep the desire.
Maybe you refine it.
Maybe you release it.
Maybe you realize you do want the business, but not the performative founder identity. You do want health, but not the body-image prison. You do want money, but not as proof of superiority. You do want public work, but not a life governed by applause. You do want excellence, but not rivalry as your fuel.
That is the point.
Not purity.
Agency.
The feed will keep offering models. The world will keep handing you objects and calling them dreams. Other people will keep turning their lives into proof that you are late.
You do not need to reject all of it.
But you do need to stop treating every desire as self-evident.
Some desires are yours.
Some were installed.
The work is learning the difference before you spend your life obeying the wrong ones.
Further context: Mikey Posada’s “Why Everyone Is Living The Same Life,” drawing on René Girard’s mimetic desire
.