Why your friend's success bothers you

Hi there,

Last Tuesday, OpenAI launched Dots, a new AI agent with a bubbly little blob for an avatar. It was supposed to be their big moment.

But it didn't last long.

People quickly noticed that dot.com, the domain one letter away, didn't lead to OpenAI at all. It sent you straight to Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk's company, xAI.

The internet was a buzz about how Musk had trolled Sam Altman, again. Within a day, OpenAI's big launch had a headline that wasn't about OpenAI.

And nobody seemed surprised. If you've followed these two at all, you know this was just the latest round.

Two of the richest, most powerful men alive, building nearly the same product. And still, on some level, fighting like two kids over the same toy.

The hidden force behind our desires

At first, it's easy to write this off as billionaire ego. But the French thinker René Girard, who was interested in the causes of conflict and violence and the role of imitation in human behavior tried to warn us about the pathologies of our modern culture. He taught for years at Stanford and built his life's work around one compelling idea.

He called it mimetic desire. He said our desires are not our own and that we are most driven to want what others want. These duplicated goals and desires lead to rivalry and violence.

The myth we all operate on is that we like to think we have free will and our desire run in a straight line, from me to the object, the thing, or the goal. Girard said it's actually a triangle. There's you, there's the thing, and there's the person you watched who had it first, which he called the model. The model is what makes the thing shiny and creates a pull for you to get it.

In other words, we don't decide what to want on our own. We borrow our goals and wants from other people, usually without noticing.

The romantic lie

Girard’s favorite illustration was a playroom. Put a child in a room full of toys and they'll wander around, a little bored. Then another child picks up one toy, and suddenly that one is the only toy in the room.

Adults aren't much different, and the neuroscience backs that up. In a 2012 study in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers in Paris found people rated everyday objects as more desirable after watching someone else reach for them. And the brain's mirror system, which activates when we watch others act, was shaping activity in the network that assigns value.

Girard had a name for the belief that our wants, our goals, and our desires are purely our own. He called it the romantic lie.

Be careful of who you mimic

Girard split our models into two kinds. With external mediation, the model is far away, the billionaire, the movie star, the historical figure. We can admire them freely because we'll never be in the same league or social circles to be able to compete with them.

But with internal mediation, the model is close by, the colleague, the sibling, the friend from school or a neighbor. The internal mediators are within our reach and close enough to become a rival.

It’s why the models who stir us up most aren't usually the famous ones. They're the ones close by in our circles.

For example, a former classmate's promotion can sting in a way a tech CEO's bonus never will. When economists Sara Solnick and David Hemenway asked people at Harvard to choose between earning $50,000 while others earned $25,000, or $100,000 while others earned $200,000, about half chose the first. Think about what that says about humanity: people chose to get half the money, as long as they came out ahead.

To the rest of us, Musk and Altman are as external as models get. But to each other, they're two men racing to build the same thing, in the same industry, for the same customers. That's about as internal as it gets.

So what do you actually want?

So what does all this mean for you? Well first, the point isn't to stop imitating. Girard didn't think we could, and I'm not sure we'd want to. Imitation is how we learn to speak, to cook, to have a common culture and values. But the deeper question to ponder is whether you know who your models are.

A few questions that have helped me:

• Who did I first see wanting this? Pick something you're working toward right now and trace it back. More often than not, there's a person who modeled that desire.

• Would I still want it if no one could ever see that I had it? This one tends to separate the wants that hold steady through the seasons of your life from the ones that come and go with whoever you've been scrolling past.

• Is there a rival hiding in this? Is there something you're chasing mostly because someone close to you is chasing it, or because you'd rather they didn't get there first?

Just noticing the triangle is usually where its grip starts to loosen.

Final Thought

So this past week when I read about the Musk/Altman dispute, I kept thinking about Girard philosophies who will likely become known as the most prolific thinker of our time forewarned us of this in our modern world. And with that said, a part of me still admired the cleverness of Musk’s move.

But it's also a little sad. Even with all that money and all that power, you can still end up spending your best energy on whatever the other guy has.

Most of us aren't buying domains to make a point. But we all have our own version of it. So it might be worth asking, of the things you're reaching for: is this mine, or did I just watch someone else reach for it first that makes me want it too?

Until next week,

Shakila