Borrowed Wanting

You’ve seen this scenario or experienced a similar one in your life.

Two women meet at a party. One is carrying a bag. The other lights up.

“Oh my gosh, I love your bag.”

“Thank you. It’s new. I’ve always wanted one.”

“Me too. I’ve always loved these.”

They always loved a bag that did not exist in either of their imaginations eighteen months ago, before a woman they will never meet held it up to a camera in good light and spewed some talking points. The internet did the rest. This cycle happened before the internet on a person to person level first. Look no further than the characters Jay Gatsby and Tom Ripley for literary examples of this imitating behavior.

I’m not mocking them. I have been them. We all have. It is an uncomfortable admission. Change the product to a watch, car or vacation, but the cause and effect are the same. That product swap works because none of this is about the product. It’s about human behavior. That’s the real product - human desire and the act of fulfilling that desire by parting with your hard earned currency.

Last time I left you with my suspicion that most of us don’t actually want the things we think we want. Are our preferences pre-installed? Is what we call taste often just compliance wearing a better outfit. Maybe more now than ever. Allow me to explain.

Let me introduce you to René Girard. He spent his career exploring the idea that human desire is borrowed. According to him, we do not want things on our own. We learn what to want by watching other people want it. Desire is not a direct line from you to the object. It’s more of a triangle. You, the object, and a third point: the model, the person whose wanting you are quietly replicating.

Applying this theory to the earlier party scenario, the woman with the new bag believes she chose the bag. But the bag was chosen for her by someone she was watching, whether she recognizes it consciously or not. Recently in the shop, I have heard customers mention they were influenced by someone on social media to discover a particular brand or product.

Girard called our denial of this influence on our desires the romantic lie. But let’s call it by its real name self-deception. It’s really just the illusion of control. A comfortable narrative that is the story we tell ourselves that our desires are original, spontaneous, ours. The truth is they rarely are. Frightening but almost certainly true. This unconscious self deception underpins the whole thing, because it works best if we don’t notice it. This is mimetic desire.

There’s much more to Girard’s work, but I’m simplifying this single idea

The Stanley cup.

For over a century, Stanley made a sturdy, unglamorous insulated tumbler. A product built for utility with a promise of rugged durability. For most of that time, it was a steady but not standout product. By 2019 it was selling so poorly the company planned to quietly discontinue it. Then three women who ran a shopping website decided they loved it. They bought five thousand of them at wholesale and sold out in five days.

The cup did not undergo a redesign, nothing about the cup had changed. What changed was behavioral and an audience shift. One group, the target audience, saw another group, the models, wanting it. Stanley kept the product alive, the internet caught fire. By 2023 that unremarkable cup was a three quarters of a billion dollar business.