I think about a version of this conversation a lot, because I keep half-hearing it in different forms. Someone gets the title they’d been working toward for years. Their name is on the door, they received the salary bump that finally makes their family stop asking when they’ll settle into something real. Then, somewhere in the celebration, almost as an aside, comes some version of: I don’t actually know why I wanted this so badly. I just know everyone else wanted it too.

Nobody’s crying when they say it. Nobody’s in crisis. There’s no dramatic collapse to point at, no burnout you could put a clean label on. Just a small, honest admission dropped into the middle of an otherwise happy moment, and then the conversation moves on to something else. I don’t think that admission is rare. I’d guess that if you asked most people who’ve accomplished some version of “made it” to explain, in real detail, why they wanted the specific thing they got, not the general shape of success, but the specific title, the specific company, the specific rung, a lot of them would stall out the same way. They can walk you through exactly how they got there. Every step, every sacrifice. The why is the part that goes quiet.

There are two philosophers, as it happens, who spent a lot of time on exactly this phenomenon. They never met, weren’t working on the same project, weren’t even asking the same question on paper but read them side by side and they seem to be circling the same trap from two different doors.

Wanting by contagion

René Girard spent much of his career arguing against something most of us take for granted: that desire is a straight line between a person and an object. I want money. I want status. I want the corner office. Girard’s claim, laid out across books like Deceit, Desire, and the Novel and Violence and the Sacred, is that desire is almost never that direct. It’s triangular. There’s you, there’s the object, and there’s a model – someone else whose wanting teaches you what to want. We don’t discover our desires by introspection. We catch them, the way you catch a yawn, from people we admire or envy or fear falling behind.

Applied to a career, this means the promotion you’re chasing might not be something you independently value at all, it might be valuable to you mainly because someone you respect, or someone in your peer group, is chasing it too. The object becomes desirable through the model’s attention to it, not through any quality intrinsic to the object itself.

Girard called the result “mimetic desire”, desire that imitates another’s desire, often without either party noticing the imitation is happening. Sat with for a minute, this is a slightly disorienting idea, because it suggests a lot of what feels like personal ambition is really social pattern-matching. Everyone around a given prestige gradient tends to be drawing from the same small set of visible models, the executives who get profiled, the founders who get funded, the colleagues who get promoted. That might be why so many people in the same industry end up wanting near-identical things, in a near-identical order, on a near-identical timeline.

That’s likely part of why the unhappiness of successful people so often looks identical from person to person, industry to industry. If the wanting was borrowed from the same handful of cultural models, the disappointment that follows achieving it might be borrowed too.

The man who takes his values as given

Simone de Beauvoir has a term for a related phenomenon, though she was working on ethics rather than desire. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she describes what she calls “the serious man”, someone who treats values as objective facts sitting out in the world, waiting to be discovered and pursued, rather than as things a free person has to actually choose and keep choosing. The serious man doesn’t ask what’s worth valuing. He asks what’s already valued, and then devotes himself to it with total sincerity. He can be genuinely admirable to watch, he’s disciplined, committed, hardworking, and that’s precisely what makes the trap so effective. Seriousness looks like virtue from the outside.

Beauvoir’s point, as I read her, has nothing to do with laziness. The serious man works enormously hard, just at following a value system rather than at the harder, scarier task of authoring one. Choosing your own values means standing without a script, with no external authority to blame if it goes wrong. Adhering to the cognitive schema that instructs you to climb this ladder, hit this title, buy this house in this neighborhood by this age, lets you stay industrious and anxious and exhausted while never once facing the blank page of what you actually think matters. What the serious man is evading, in other words, isn’t effort, it’s authorship.

Where self-esteem comes in

This is where I think the two ideas stop being just an interesting parallel and start explaining something. Choosing your own values requires a kind of interior confidence, a willingness to trust your own read on what’s worth pursuing, even when nobody else is applying pressure in that direction. When someone’s sense of self is shaky, that trust is exactly what’s hardest to access. Defining your own goals means risking being wrong alone, in public, with no crowd to hide inside, while following the prestige gradient means you’re never wrong alone, if the goal turns out hollow, at least everyone else was chasing it too.

Social proof, in that light, functions less like information about what’s good and more like cover. Following a well-worn script lets a person be visibly, measurably competent via promotions, raises, praise, without ever having to answer the much more exposed question of whether the destination was theirs to begin with. Girard’s mimetic contagion supplies the what, the specific object everyone’s fighting over. Beauvoir’s seriousness supplies the how, the posture of total, unquestioning devotion to that object, which conveniently forecloses the need to ask if it’s worth wanting.

Taken together these provide a fairly complete account of why success can feel so empty from the inside while looking so solid from the outside. The person did everything the model demonstrated and did it with total seriousness. Nobody, including them, ever checked whether it was chosen.

What this doesn’t mean

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into another self-improvement thesis: find your true authentic desire, unplug from the matrix, live your best life. I think that misses the point. Girard was skeptical that a desire untouched by any model was even possible. We are, in his account, fundamentally imitative creatures. That’s not a design flaw to be corrected, it’s closer to what a self is. The question isn’t whether to imitate, but which models you’re imitating, how consciously, and whether you’d still choose them if you noticed you were choosing.

Beauvoir, similarly, wasn’t arguing that seriousness is always bad or that spontaneous, unscripted values are automatically better. Her point was narrower and harder: that treating values as given rather than chosen is a way of fleeing the anxiety of freedom, and that flight has a cost, whether or not the person paying it can name it.

So, the useful move isn’t to reject every borrowed want on principle. Plenty of borrowed wants are worth keeping even after you notice where they came from. The effective move is smaller and less dramatic than a reinvention. It’s just the pause. Before the next application, the next title, the next thing everyone around you seems to be circling, take a moment to ask yourself who taught you to want this, and whether, now that you can see the teaching, you’d still choose it.

That’s a much less satisfying answer than “follow your passion” but it has the advantage of being true, and of not requiring you to already know what your passion is before you’re allowed to start.