You and I are Meme Personalities
The Increasing Similarities between us all ...
“O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes!” says Hermia in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Ever wondered about the source of dreams or desires that you are driven by? Did it ever occur to you that you might be chasing desires that drive others, and hence you chose them as important too? Would you say that your coveted ‘must haves’ were a result of your contemplative thought process, or was it impregnated in your mind by someone else?
These are questions that deserve a few minutes of your undisturbed thinking. No phones, no TV, no music, or any other distractions - just a pen and a paper needed while you think hard about these questions and write down what comes to your mind.
During my college days, there was a crazy fascination with Dr. Martin’s shoes amongst guys. It was the coolest thing that guys could wear, it was a source of envy towards those who already owned it, and it also took on a kind of status signal. I remember saving up money for these shoes for 6 months and finally buying myself a pair from Heera Panna Shopping Center in Breach Candy, Mumbai.
The funny thing about my fascination with these shoes was that I was willing to risk my life to protect these shoes from any harm. Just in case you think I am exaggerating, let me share with you the morning of 26th Jan 2001. We were in Ahmedabad for a cousin’s wedding and were staying in a tower on the 10th floor of a building. The mood was festive and we were enjoying our morning banter with cousins and family.
It was around 8:50 am that we could feel the tremors and it didn’t take much time to realize that it was an earthquake, and a dangerous one. We all started running towards the exit, trying to race towards the ground floor and find a safer area to park ourselves in. I had reached the 8th floor when I remembered my Dr. Martin’s shoes and the urge to protect them made me take a U-turn and head back to the apartment to retrieve those gorgeous pair of shoes. Yes, I did !!!
Finally, I made it to the ground floor with my shoes intact. Many buildings had collapsed in Ahmedabad during this earthquake, and ours had developed cracks too till the 5th floor but held on firm. A few more seconds of the tremor might have consumed this building too. In hindsight, it sounds stupid and naive, but there it was, the desire that had me in its grip, even in the most tumultuous 5 mins of my life.
It wasn’t the life-changing properties of this shoe that made it soo important for me, it was the importance that others in my college bestowed upon this shoe, which fueled the desire in me to protect it at any cost.
That’s what desire can make you do. I’d like to plugin Macklemore’s song on how an obsession with Nike shoes has occupied the psyche of youngsters, leading them to do the most insane things you can imagine. Do listen to the song, the whole song, to understand the context of desires and their impact on us all.
“Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.” ― Luke Burgis
Luke Burgis is referring to René Girard, who was a French polymath, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. Girard's main contribution to philosophy, and in turn to other disciplines, was in the field of epistemological and ethical systems of desire. Girard believed that human development occurs initially through a process of observational mimicry, where the infant develops desire through a process of learning to copy adult behavior, fundamentally linking acquisition of identity, knowledge, and material wealth to the development of a desire to have something others possess. - Wikipedia
Just in case you are certain that you are independent in your thinking and not influenced by other role models, then let’s do an exercise to unveil this romantic lie we hold so close to our hearts. Look at the picture below and pen down the colors you see -
I’m counting on you having done the exercise and I am sure that you are smart enough to distinguish the two colors. Now, cover the mid-portion with your finger and see if the picture reveals your overconfidence about the colors you noted down earlier.
It’s the same color, but the shaded area tricks your mind into reading the whole picture wrong. In a very similar fashion, you have been tricked into thinking you are independent, mature, and wise in your decision-making. But there is a possibility, with a high degree of probability, that you have been influenced in some way or another in almost all your desires that guide your decisions.
The importance you place on objects, may not be objective at all. It might be highly subjective, depending mainly on the importance placed on the same by others. The closer the distance between these people and you, the higher the “sameness” in choices made. This results in most of us trying to fight for the same trophy, eventually turning into a version of another.
Else, how would you define a 129 people line outside Al Baiq in Dubai Mall -
Al Baiq is the Arabic version of Mc Donalds. It basically serves dishes with fried chicken or fried fish, along with ice cream or soda. Nothing fancy, nothing out of the box, nothing exotic. But because it was Dubai’s first outlet, it became “THE” thing to do and share with others, over social media or one on one. I still see insane lines outside Al Baiq, Starbucks, or iPhone stores, and it makes me wonder about the power thin desires can have on us.
A 500 people line for COVID vaccines or Visa stamping is understandable. The former is needed for survival and the latter is a necessity. These are complied with without any external influence needed. Even our desire of providing for a better life for our family or surviving in our profession is internal. Our human instincts of survival, sustenance, sex, and warmth aren’t what I’m referring to. These are all thick desires which form a part of our core identity and for which we have biological mechanisms to help guide us.
I am solely referring to choices that don’t fit into your long-term goals. These are choices that come from the far left and distract you with their seductive powers, consuming a lot of your time and attention, eventually money too. These are thin desires and are highly mimetic and fleeting — the kind of wants that leave us unfulfilled in the end because they were adopted from other people.
Let’s look at how it plays out in various domains #
Venture Capital
Mark Suster from Upfront VC is playing out FOMO in his own words: “Nobody commits, nobody wants to set a price, nobody wants to stick their neck out then BOOM! Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn’s co-founder and an investor at Greylock Partners) is in? I’m in for $500k. Wait, make that $1 million. And please reserve another $1 million for me — I just need to call my LPs to see if they want to do it with us”. In Understanding the Herd Mentality of VCs, Suster thinks of FOMO as “brain outsourcing to the smartest person you know” and no founder can deny having heard from investors to call them back “once you got a lead investor to commit”.
Softbank launched a USD 100 billion Fund, eventually raising valuations for all companies seeking funding. Today, you have a unicorn being born across the globe every day. IPOs are getting listed in India at crazy valuations i.e. multi-billion dollar market values for 0 profits. Every Investor is chasing what other investors are chasing. It isn’t about the business anymore, it’s become about what the other guy is doing and I don’t want to be left out. This is FOMO on steroids.
Online Travel Bookings
The most important part of the picture below is the statement in RED - “Only 7 rooms left at this price”. Nothing else works on your psyche more than this line, and hence the emphasis with the usage of the color red. You are being practical by going online and scouting for options, but there are systems created to hijack your attention and make you purchase NOW while making you think that you made the right call. This works out best for the entity influencing your purchase; they get to delight you as a customer and feed your ego by making you think high about your own decision-making abilities. It’s a win-win for both :)
In case you are thinking about the genuineness of the claim, you may be right i.e. there may be only 7 rooms left. But for every 1 genuine entity claiming the fact, there are 10,000 entities that have made it their mission to overpromise/exaggerate/lie, and to hell with the consequences. It comes from the mantra that people have “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone, so let us play the game and why bother about who pays the price.”
Fintwit
We have seen a parabolic rise in asset prices since the US started money printing in trillions and the Fed having issued Stimulus checks. Investors have been touting their favorite stock picks, making assertions about multi-bagger returns, selling courses with promises of teaching exemplary analytical skills and many even flaunt their live portfolios with 1000% + returns.
After the carnage seen in the markets in the last few months, Fintwit has suddenly gone silent. No more Live Portfolio snapshots being shared, few tutors have disappeared leaving their students poorer by thousands of dollars, margin calls on leveraged positions have begun and you keep hearing horror stories of how much money has been lost out in the current meltdown.
If you think of all the investors that lost money, most of them were swayed away by claims/promises/guarantees made by the perpetrators of these schemes, that target people who want astronomical returns without paying any price. How do you blame the ingenuity of the schemers when there are so many low-hanging fruits in the Investing industry willing to dole out their money to the next salesmen with a compelling narrative to hook you onto.
The writer Antoine de Saint- Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, said it best: “If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
I recently met a friend and we started discussing stocks. He asked me about my portfolio and he was shocked when I used the “long term” while describing my holdings that have been accumulated with a very long term perspective a.k.a. coffee can portfolio. He went on to say “Bro, are you crazy, long term investing is dead.”
This friend of mine is a Senior Banker in a European Firm and manages millions of dollars of assets for his clients. Even he has been bitten by the euphoria of making tons of money in the short term. I don’t know about his personal portfolio performance in the current downturn, I can just hope that he isn’t leveraged and not selling everything in a panic.
Where did his thinking about “long-term investing being dead” come from? When did he start steering towards short-term trading opportunities? When did he get seduced into the lure of easy money? I don’t know the answers but I can tell you for sure, he wasn’t thinking this way 5 years back. He was rational in his thinking and practical in his execution. But bull runs have a knack for changing people’s behavior, making them live in a bubble, while they feel invincible.
It takes one shock to the system, where a lifetime of savings can crumble under the hubris of overconfidence and mimetic desires.
“Each person has a unique and unrepeatable vocation. If it is not discovered, embraced, and lived, it is lost to the world forever.” ― Luke Burgis, Unrepeatable: Cultivating the Unique Calling of Every Person
The only way out of being influenced by mimetic desires is going inwards. Our minds are constantly computing the optimal path forward to achieve A, B, or C. What is needed is to take a few steps back from the action and ask yourself very fundamental questions -
What provides me the most amount of satisfaction?
What gives my life a meaning/purpose?
What brings immense joy to me, even when I just think about it?
Why am I doing what I’m doing? Is this even important in the grand scheme of things?
What would I like to be doing if I had all the money and time in the world?
Answering these questions will require moving away from the optimization mode, and working on your inner scorecard, which provides the framework inside of which your choices contribute to maximizing your “Joy” factor. No more FOMO, no more attention to others’ desires, no more running around catching up with someone else - just being selfish about your joy, your values, your systems.
At the level of the individual, we set ourselves up for a life of strife and unhappiness if we cannot have desires and goals which are different from the people around us. The more differentiated our desires and goals are, the lower the chances of us spending our lives fighting empty battles for wealth, power & prestige. - Saurabh Mukherjea
And if your desires are the same as others, then there will be many desires to fulfill since there are so many others. Said differently, there will always be unfulfilled desires, which would be a sure-shot path to misery, just as Saurabh states above.
So take time out to go within, journal, meditate over priorities, contemplate over your Must-Dos instead of To-Dos, get clarity on what gives you energy, and start eliminating what takes your energy away. With enough silence, you will get answers to these questions. If not in the first seating, then surely in time. But seeking these answers allows you to stand out and refrain from getting sucked into the mimetic treadmill that I see many running on.
New Year’s is just around the corner. You will be seeing many planning out their new year’s eve, some out of pressure to do something cool, some to load pictures on their social media, some to signal their status, and some of us will enjoy a nice glass of red wine with family, enjoy the fireworks and call it a night. I got to head to the gym early morning on 1st, I couldn’t care less about where I was on 31st night, till the time I ended 2021 with people I love and started my New Year with the right habits, right systems, and right virtues.
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” - Girard.
Let’s stop monkeying around and apeing others. There is no need to be that creature. You could be a better one 🤝
Recommendations for the week #
Golden Age of Grift was a fantastic post about Mimetic Desires in full force in the Capital Markets today. It’s funny and profound at the same time. It’ll make you think hard about your own process related to Investments.
Charisma V/s Power by Paul Graham is a damn good read on Powerful Men and the consequences if they lack charisma. And it subtly covers charismatic men and the consequences if they lack power. You might find yourself in the broad range of possibilities discussed in this post.
Assured Misery from Morgan Housel just came out and I had to share his post. If you read my posts on substack, chances are high that you would find Morgan Housel’s post in my weekly recommendations. He is that good.
Why we want what other people have is a medium post by Luke Burgis. He is the author of the book ‘Wanting’ which I finished reading this weekend. It was the inspiration behind this post and I haven’t done justice to the book since I could cover only one lesson from the book, but there are many more e.g. scapegoats, deification, and more. I encourage you to get your copy and dive right in. The subject is a very important one to let go of for tomorrow.
Stay Safe & Take Care.
Manish
Informative and profound...