Sixian

It’s always badly defined. There is a vague desire to be a certain kind of person. Yet entrepreneurship begins when someone attempts to solve a specific problem in the world—and when starting a business just happens to be the best way to do it.

There are two major types of models with whom we have different kinds of relationships. Mimetic desire works differently in each of the two situations. If the model stands at a great distance—not physically, but socially and existentially—then the model is an external mediator of desire. The model is external to the subject’s world. This means that... See more

But at the grand narrative level, everybody is getting off the big turnpike, and there is not going to be a grand narrative slipstream for a while. But smaller scale narrative slipstreams — from family to city-scale — may still be viable.

Collapsing under the pressure of time-flows between completed and noncompleted time, a person’s ability to imagine the future falls away. While wrestling with the past and dealing with the present, concern for the future – any future – pales in comparison to making it through another day.

The value of objects is not objective—it’s subjective. And that subjective value is determined mimetically, based on our relationships with others. We could say that value is intersubjective: we assign value to things (and therefore desire them) according to what other people want.

The non-stop comparison game that Maximizers play usually makes them miserable. We could say that maximizers are more driven by mimetic desire than the “Satisificers”—those who are satisfied with finding “the right fit” rather than needing to maximize every outcome.We not only want the things that we can’t have; we don’t want things unless other... See more