I highly suggest consuming the full piece here (35 min. read time)
“Human beings are creatures of mimicry. We are evolutionarily supercharged to do one thing better than anyone else: learn by watching and copying others. And the most important thing we learn is how to want.” — Alex Danco
“…at a deep neurological level, when we watch other people and pattern our desires off theirs, we are not so much acquiring a desire for that object so much as learning to mimic somebody, and striving to become them or become like them. Girard calls this phenomenon mimetic desire. We don’t want; we want to be.” — Alex Danco
“Marcel Proust’s masterpiece A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is all about this phenomenon: how our memory of objects and experiences is powerfully and retroactively shaped by the opinions of people who we aspire to imitate.” — Alex Danco
“One of the tragic elements of mimetic desire is that it induces a lot of self-deception: lying to yourself in order to reshape your perceptions, your experience and your identity to be consistent with who you feel you ought to be” — Alex Danco
“Be like me, because that is what you desire; but also don’t be like me, because to try would expose you as an imitator and embarrass you in front of everybody. Narcissists, whose role model is themselves, feel a cruel twist: ‘the harder you try, the more you’re embarrassing to yourself.’” — Alex Danco
“One particularly human feeling along these lines is a certain kind of anxiety: the need to make sure your peers recognize that you have obtained something, or have accomplished something, or in some other way have become a particular type of person; while simultaneously needing to make sure they don’t catch you trying to make sure they see it. To get exposed as a striver is the worst thing that can happen to you, because it basically confirms to everyone else that you’re not that particular person you’re trying to project.” — Alex Danco
“…the internet makes it easier to gaze longingly at the people we admire and envy, and creates an overpowering amount of pressure for you to become, and be seen as, a particular type of person.” — Alex Danco
“The good news…is that we are slowly and steadily developing a kind of antibodies to the internet: as social networking becomes more saturated and more ubiquitous, the inevitable pullback to more one-on-one conversations and more closed circles of friends is bringing our peer set of internal mediators down to more manageable levels once more. “I’m sick and tired of being so online” translates pretty cleanly into “I’m sick and tired of having so many peers that I need to care about.” And the good news is that who you see as your peer set is entirely within your control. No one gets to be your peer without your active consent. And I think people are beginning to learn this lesson.” — Alex Danco