What René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire can tell us about LinkedIn, ambition, and the strange performance of modern success.

You open LinkedIn on a Monday morning. Someone has joined Google. Someone else has raised a Series A. A 27-year-old founder has just crossed $10 million in revenue. Someone has made Forbes 30 Under 30, and someone you vaguely remember from college is “thrilled to announce the beginning of an exciting new chapter.”

You opened LinkedIn perfectly happy. Twenty minutes later, you’re wondering if you’ve wasted your life. Should I be building a company? Should I have a personal brand? Why haven’t I raised money? Should I be posting more? Am I falling behind?

This is where René Girard gets interesting.

Girard was a French thinker who developed a theory called mimetic desire. The basic idea is surprisingly simple: we don’t just want things; we learn what to want by watching what other people want.

We like to imagine desire as something that originates deep inside us. We tell ourselves that we want to be successful, travel the world, start a company, get an impressive job or become wealthy because these things naturally appeal to us. Girard would ask us to look one level deeper. How did we decide that these particular things were desirable in the first place?

For Girard, desire often involves three people or objects: you, another person, and the thing being desired. You see someone you admire possessing, pursuing or being rewarded for something, and that thing becomes more attractive to you.

Imagine walking past two restaurants. One is completely empty and the other has a queue stretching outside. Even if you know absolutely nothing about either restaurant, you’re probably more curious about the second one. The crowd hasn’t merely given you information about the restaurant. Their desire for it has actually influenced your own desire.

Once you understand this, LinkedIn starts looking very strange.

LinkedIn doesn’t merely show us what other people are doing. It constantly shows us what other people are being rewarded for doing. Someone announces a promotion and hundreds of people congratulate them. Someone raises funding and thousands of people like the post. Someone becomes a founder, their title changes, their following grows, and suddenly they start appearing on podcasts.

None of these things explicitly tell you what you should want. LinkedIn never displays a message saying, “You should raise venture capital because this will make people respect you.” It doesn’t need to. You watch thousands of people reward someone for doing it, and the lesson becomes obvious.

Consider venture capital. A founder raises $5 million and receives enormous attention. Other founders see the attention and fundraising becomes more desirable. Venture capitalists gain status because they control access to something everyone appears to want. Talented young people see successful VCs and decide they want to become investors. People start writing about venture capital, those people gain followers, and others begin imitating them.

Eventually thousands of people independently announce that they have always been “passionate about entrepreneurship.” Maybe they have. But Girard would ask a much more uncomfortable question: Would you have wanted this particular life if nobody around you seemed to want it?

This is where LinkedIn becomes almost comical. The platform appears to show millions of independent people pursuing their individual ambitions. Girard gives us another interpretation: millions of people watching one another to figure out what ambition is supposed to look like.

Over time, certain symbols become universally understood as signs of success: funding, promotions, prestigious companies, revenue milestones, followers, speaking engagements, Forbes lists, exits and impressive job titles. These things aren’t necessarily meaningless. The important thing is that they are extremely visible, and mimetic desire needs visible things to imitate.

Now imagine someone posts: “I run a boring little company. It makes me enough money. I work 25 hours a week. Nobody knows who I am. I’m going fishing tomorrow.” That person might have constructed an extraordinary life. They might have money, freedom, close friendships and very little stress.

But LinkedIn has difficulty assigning status to that life because there is no obvious scoreboard. There’s no funding announcement, impressive title, heroic struggle or “five lessons I learned along the way.” So fewer people imitate it.

Slowly, almost invisibly, visibility becomes confused with value. Someone living a quiet and deeply satisfying life can look unsuccessful next to someone having a miserable year but announcing that they’re “delighted to share…”

Girard’s theory doesn’t stop at imitation. He believed imitation eventually creates rivalry. You begin by admiring someone. Then you want what they have. Eventually you want to become what they are. At some point, admiration can turn into the uncomfortable question: Why are they getting it instead of me?

This explains something strange about social media. A founder with 500 followers sees another founder with 50,000. He starts posting. Then other founders start posting. Soon founders aren’t merely competing to build good companies; they’re competing to be perceived as the kind of person who builds important companies.

Once everyone understands the signals, people begin optimizing for them. Everyone is “building in public.” Everyone is talking about “founder mode,” going from “0 → 1,” being “obsessed with customers” and sharing the ten lessons they learned from reaching some revenue milestone. The language starts converging, the photographs start converging and eventually even the ambitions start converging.

The funniest part is that even authenticity becomes something people imitate. One person writes a vulnerable post beginning with “I almost didn’t post this…” and it performs well. Soon everyone is almost not posting something. People write about failure, burnout, insecurity and the side of entrepreneurship that “nobody talks about,” while thousands of other people simultaneously talk about exactly the same thing.

There is something wonderfully Girardian about that. We begin copying each other’s way of appearing unique.

The Real Problem Isn’t That LinkedIn Is Fake

Calling LinkedIn fake is too easy. Most of those promotions actually happened. The companies really raised the money. The person probably is excited about their new job. The interesting problem isn’t that the achievements are fake; it’s that the platform gradually creates a shared definition of what is worth wanting.

Because humans imitate one another, that definition can slowly become our own. Eventually it becomes difficult to tell where the platform ends and our ambition begins. Did I always want to become a founder? Did I actually want to raise venture capital? Would I care about having 100,000 followers if follower counts were invisible? Would I want the promotion if nobody could ever know I received it?

These are much harder questions than “How do I become more successful?” because they force us to question the definition of success itself.

Before You Want Something, Ask Who Taught You to Want It

None of this means ambition is bad. Girard’s theory doesn’t require us to delete LinkedIn, quit our jobs and disappear into the mountains. It simply gives us a useful way to inspect where our desires come from.

The next time someone’s LinkedIn announcement makes you feel strangely inadequate, don’t immediately ask, “Why haven’t I achieved that?” Instead, ask yourself: Before I saw this person wanting this, did I even want it?

And perhaps there is an even better test: If nobody could ever see me achieve it, would I still want it?

Somewhere between what everyone else wants and what everyone else wants you to want, you might discover something much rarer: a desire that actually feels like your own.