You’re Chasing Someone Else’s Desire

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much.

It comes from doing the wrong things well.

• You hit your goals.

• You ship good work.

• You stay visible, relevant, and responsive.

And yet, somewhere underneath the motion, motivation feels thin and borrowed, like you’re running on a fuel source that doesn’t belong to you.

Most people interpret this as a problem of discipline or focus. They assume they need better habits, sharper goals, or more willpower. They assume that because almost everything in our culture is selling us hustle.

But something else … something deeper … is going on.

We measure achievement by metrics we never consciously chose. Over time, those metrics begin to shape not just our behavior, but our desire.

This fatigue is easy to miss because it usually shows up alongside external success. Friends ask us how you’re doing and you reflexively say, “Okay.”

Your calendar is full. Your output looks solid. The numbers move in the right direction. From the outside, it looks like progress. From the inside, it feels hollow.

The work doesn’t restore you. Wins don’t land the way they used to. Curiosity fades. You stay busy, but less alive. You soldier on, partly because stopping would raise uncomfortable questions.

What if the problem isn’t effort, but authorship?

What if the reason motivation feels borrowed is because, in a very real sense, it is?

We live in a culture that is remarkably efficient at telling us what matters.

· Revenue.

· Growth.

· Followers.

· Engagement.

· Velocity.

· Visibility.

None of these are inherently bad. Many of them are useful. But they arrive preloaded with meaning. They quietly tell us not just how to measure success, but what to desire.

You don’t have to consciously agree. The message is ambient. It comes through platforms, organizations, peer groups, and professional norms. Over time, comparison becomes calibration. We look sideways to figure out what “good” looks like.

And eventually, we stop asking whether the things we’re chasing actually align with who we are.

We assume they must. Everyone else seems to want them.

This is where the work of René Girard becomes surprisingly helpful.

Girard was a French thinker who spent much of his life studying violence, rivalry, and culture. One of his core insights was deceptively simple: human desire is not autonomous. We don’t usually want things on our own. We want things because we see other people wanting them.

Girard called this mimetic desire. Mimetic comes from the Greek word for imitation. According to Girard, desire is learned, not generated. We look to models, consciously or unconsciously, to figure out what is worth wanting.

This explains why desire spreads so quickly. Why certain careers, lifestyles, or achievements suddenly become magnetic. Why entire industries form around the same aspirations.

It also explains why rivalry emerges so easily. When many people chase the same markers of success, comparison intensifies. Anxiety increases. The stakes feel higher than they objectively are.

In Girard’s framework, the problem isn’t desire itself. The problem is unexamined desire.

Borrowed desire has a particular psychological signature.

It keeps you moving, but rarely settles you.
It drives effort, but doesn’t sustain meaning.
It produces achievement, but not coherence.

When your motivation is externally mediated, you become dependent on feedback loops you don’t control. Validation replaces alignment. Metrics become mirrors.

This is especially dangerous in leadership contexts.

Leaders are constantly exposed to models. Other leaders. Other companies. Other “successful” people. The pressure to keep up, to stay relevant, to perform certainty is intense.

In uncertain times, mimetic pressure accelerates. When no one knows what’s coming, we look even harder at what others are doing. We copy strategies, language, postures. We adopt goals because they seem safer than choosing our own.

Over time, leadership becomes reactive. Not because leaders lack integrity, but because they lack space to discern what actually matters to them.

There’s also a physiological dimension to all of this.

Borrowed desire keeps your nervous system externally regulated. You’re constantly scanning for signals. Likes. Numbers. Approval. Threats. Comparison.

That state is not neutral. It’s activating.

When your sense of worth is tied to external metrics, your body never quite settles. You stay vigilant. Alert. Slightly braced. Even success can feel tense, because it raises the question of whether you can maintain it.

This is one reason burnout often shows up not after failure, but after sustained performance.

You’re not exhausted because you’re weak. You’re exhausted because you’re living inside a motivational system that never lets you come home to yourself.

This is where stillness enters the picture.

Not as an escape. Not as a rejection of ambition. And not as a spiritual aesthetic.

Stillness is the interruption of imitation.

It’s the pause that allows you to notice what you’ve been chasing without ever choosing. It creates just enough distance from external signals for discernment to emerge.

In stillness, you begin to ask different questions.

Why does this matter to me?
What happens in my body when I pursue this?
Who did I learn to want this from?
What would I choose if no one were watching?

These are not questions you can answer while scrolling, comparing, or optimizing. They require space. Silence. Presence.

Stillness doesn’t tell you what to want. It reveals what’s already there beneath the noise.

One of the most consequential shifts a leader can make is to consciously choose their metrics.

Not to abandon external measures entirely, but to contextualize them. To stop treating them as proxies for worth or identity.

This requires courage.

When you choose your own measures, you step out of constant comparison. You accept that your path may not look impressive from the outside. You risk being misunderstood.

But you gain something else in return.

You gain coherence.

Instead of asking, “How am I doing compared to others?” you begin asking, “Am I acting in alignment with what matters most to me?”

That shift is subtle, but profound.

It changes how you make decisions.
It changes how you respond to pressure.
It changes how you experience your own effort.

Motivation stops feeling borrowed because it no longer depends on imitation.

It’s worth naming the fear here.

When you step out of mimetic patterns, there’s often a moment of disorientation. If you’re not measuring yourself by the usual metrics, it can feel like free fall.

You may wonder if you’re falling behind. If you’re missing something. If you’re opting out of relevance.

Stillness doesn’t remove that uncertainty. It helps you stay present inside it.

It teaches you how to tolerate not knowing how you compare. How to live without constant reassurance. How to trust internal signals again.

That’s not comfortable work. But it’s clarifying.

If your motivation feels thin right now, it may not be because you’ve lost your drive.

It may be because you’ve been living inside someone else’s desire.

Stillness is how you reclaim authorship. It’s how you begin to hear your own values again. Not loudly. Not all at once. But gradually, through attention.

You don’t need to reject the world’s metrics. You need to stop letting them decide who you are.

Motivation returns when desire becomes your own again.

And that begins, quietly, by choosing to pause long enough to notice what you’ve been chasing—and why.