Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desires in Everyday Life

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this time of year. Just go to one you feed dot net slash Spiritual Habits to join the program. Enrollment is open now through October twelfth. That's when you feed dot net slash Spiritual Habits. I think there's a typical attitude that people want what they want, and whatever they want is fine. What's true, but not everything we want, not everything we desire, is going to be good for us. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great thinkers

have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,

and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Luke Burgess, an entrepreneur who has founded and led multiple companies. He's currently Director of Programs at the Center for Principled Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America. He's also the founder and director of Fourth Wall Ventures and incubator for people

and companies that contribute to the formation of healthy human ecology. Today, Luke and Eric discussed his book Wanting the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. Hi, Luke, welcome to the show. Hey Eric, thanks for having me on. I am really excited to talk with you about your book, which is called Want the Power of Mimetic Desire and Everyday Life. I think the concept of what we desire and why is so fascinated and so important. So we'll get into that in just a second. But let's start like we

always do with the parable. In the parable, there is a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And

the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means. To you in your life and in the work that you do. I've thought about this parable for many years, Eric, and I've come to understand it on three different levels. But all of those different levels have to do with desire. So for me, the parable is about which desires we

should starve and which desires we should feed. So the first layer of that, for me, I would call just a basic relational level, how I'm in relationship with other people. Sometimes I have the desire to right my perceived wrongs, to own somebody in some kind of an argument um I for an eye, kind of desires and those are unhealthy. And those are the kinds of desires that I want

to starve. And I want to feed empathy and compassion and understanding, the desire to listen, the desire to know understand somebody else's perspective that might be different from mine. And of course, you know, on that basic level, there's fleeting, ephemeral desires, the desire you know, to indulge myself with you know, alcohol or um, little fleeting instant gratifications that I know are not going to lead to long term fulfillment for me. So those are the kind I want

to starve. The second layer I would call a spiritual layer, maybe even a theological layer, you know, and I'm a Christian, so I would understand certain desires as being sinful um, which is really a source of alienation, and then other desires being the ones that lead to fulfillment or love UM. And those are the kind of desires that lead to to union into healthy relationships. And the third layer is a mission oriented layer. So I believe I have a

mission in life. I think that everybody does. And certain desires arise in me that are not aligned with my mission, their desires that, if pursued, will take me off track. And very relevant example of this is some desires that arose in me just during the pandemic. In the course of the pandemic, especially last year early I hadn't even finished reading my book yet, and I was dealing with, you know, trying to keep my elderly parents safe. I'm trying to plan a wedding um, which you know has

been moved and you know we're married now. But that was a whole story in itself, and focused on writing this book and communicating these ideas, and everywhere I looked, different desires are being modeled to me. You know, the desire to move to upstate New York, the desire to start trading in the markets hardcore, you know, from crypto to getting in on the on the Bowl market last year. And I have a background in finance and investing, so it's incredibly tempting for me to want to get in

on that. And you hear about, you know, the success that other people are having even earlier this year with some of the meme stocks, and there was an incredible desire to allocate a lot of my time enough for it into doing that. I'm also a very competitive person, so I was incredibly attracted to the idea of getting into that. And there's nothing wrong with that, but for me,

that was a desire that I had to starve. Why Because in this particular season of my life I had emission is very clear, um, you know, taking care of my family, um, finishing and writing a book as well as I possibly could. I had to pour into that particular task. And evaluating my desires based on that sort of vocation or mission throughout the various seasons of my life and throughout my life taken as a whole, is really important to me. And I noticed that that was

in aligned. Maybe someday it will be, but I had to start that. I had to feed and cultivate the desire to want to do other things more, you know, to to want to be with my family and you know, my my now wife, to want it so into my creative side and and to write and to get better at that. So fundamentally, that parable for me is about desires. You know, my own desires are like two wolves fighting

inside of me. And I know that some of my desires, you know, if I feed them, are are going to make me miserable or are certainly not going to lead to fulfillment, and then others are. And the key for me is just discern the difference between the two. And that's not always easy. There's so much in what you just said there that I could unpack, and I think we'll probably spend the rest of this conversation it's sort

of doing that. But I think you summarize so much of what I loved in your book in that answer, and instead of responding to it directly, I want to back up a second and make sure that we talk about this idea of memetic desire, because I think this is a really important idea obviously you do too, because you wrote an entire book about it. But what do we mean by memetic desire? What does that mean? The word memetic comes from a Greek word that simply means

to imitate. So memetic desire is imitative desire. It means that humans tend to imitate the desires of other people. That we want what other people want because they want it, so not coincidentally, we we happen to want the same thing that somebody else wants. When somebody else wants it, that thing becomes more desirable to us. That's the key to understanding memetic desire. So we're social creatures and we take our cues about what's valuable about what's desirable from

other people. And the source of this term memetic desire is a French thinker named Rune Jerard who taught at Stanford for many years and some other universities, and he noticed this key feature of human nature. Now scientists have known classic philosophers like Aristotle and Plato knew that imitation played a central role in human behavior. Aristotle said that humans are the most imitative creatures in the world. It's one of the things that separates us from from animals.

We have incredibly complex and powerful faculties of imitation um but imitation was always understood on a external level, so the imitation of art, of language, of facial expressions, of styles of dress, and Gerard realized that our powers of imitation go under the surface of all of the external things. Now we have this ability to read the intentions of other people, are to read their desires and to desire what other people want, and this is part of what

it means to be human. It's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, it's just the way that we are. We're incredibly mimetic when it comes to more abstract things like you know, the kinds of lifestyles we pursue, or careers or hobbies or things that were interested in. We may not lean on memetic desire as much with fulfilling our basic needs, like if I'm thirsty I want something to drink, I don't necessarily need anybody to model

the desire for water to me. But once we move into the world of what I would call desires, that are things that are less need based and more desire based. Humans are of creatures that require models for their desire. So according to Girard, we require models for for almost

everything in this so called universe of desire. And that's incredibly important to understand for me, because we typically think of desire as a rising just independently and autonomously, and we never think very seriously about how or why we've come to want something in the first place, and we typically don't acknowledge the other people or the other social forces that have caused us, you know, to desire something, and that could be like, you know, to be a

political revolutionary, or it could mean to pursue a career path. If we don't understand the forces that are acting on us and specifically on our desires, will just sort of be at the mercy of them. And worse yet, we can even be manipulated, whether that's by you know, comes or or people that want us to want something that is in their best interest but might not necessarily be

in ours right. What I think is so interesting about that is that, as you said, we tend to think that our desires they feel like they're part of us, They feel so intrinsic to who we are. An example I often use, I'm talking about it in a slightly different context, but I'm talking about it in the sense of sort of the Buddhist idea of everything is conditioned, right is, I'll say, you might say something like, and you could be a man or woman doing this, right.

This is not a one sex or the other thing that you might say, I prefer people who look like X, I prefer blonds. Let's just take that as an example. Right. That may feel so unquestionable. It just arises, and it's very obvious and it's very strong. But the reality is, there's something that occurred in my life that would have caused that to be the way it is. Maybe I saw Maryland in row movie at a particularly impressionable age. Maybe my mother was blonde or brunette, or as you said,

I learned this desire from somewhere else. And so I just think this is a really interesting idea that everything that we desire, again beyond the basic needs, is somehow again to use the Buddhist term, conditioned, in that it arose as a result of conditions, and the conditions that you're saying are imitative. It was modeled for us, right, And if we look hard enough and we'd become aware of this feature of human desire, we can usually always find a hidden model for something that that we desire.

And to your point, Eric, you know, when I look back in my life, I have been attracted to different partners for different reasons, and they've changed as I go throughout my life. So I mean, it would seem to indicate that there's no merely some kind of a physiological reason for that, Like why why would it change through different years? And not only in a physical level. Has my attraction changed, my preferences have changed, but also you know,

in the kind of person that I'm attracted to. You know, like there was a point where you know, some incredibly professional, you know, kind of investment banker career. Uh, you know, woman was was kind of like something that I was, you know, really attracted to and not so much anymore. Why is that so? Even that you know, it's probably conditioned by what the other people in my life desired or were attracted to. And I can't really be explained

through financial means or through through purely biological answers. It's a wide and sweeping topic that applies to so many different areas of life. My goal really is is just to get us thinking as individuals and also as a society. How this is affecting our behavior? You say, the desire is mimetic. We learn it in essence someone else wants it,

so we then think it's something that's worth wanting. The question that I don't really understand is what causes certain things, certain models, to be the thing that we click in on, right, Because there's a bunch of different desires. Right. If I just think about high school as an example, there were some people who were really into sports could have had that model, right, and other people were really in academics,

and I could have seen that modeled. You know, So what is it that causes us to choose a particular model? Do you have any insight into that? Well, the thinker that inspired my book certainly did, and you know, his answer is essentially that it's always because of a sense of lack that we feel we have, and we perceive that the model might have whatever it is we think that we lack. So he says that all desire is

a desire for being. It's a desire to be somebody else, or a desire to have maybe more freedom and control over our desires. So oftentimes an incredibly confident person that seems as if they know exactly what they want or what is wantable at all times is an incredibly attractive and powerful model to most people, because most of us secretly are not really sure what to want. So I

look back to my high school days. I grew up on the west side of Michigan in a town called Grand Rapids, and early days of the Internet, you know, I was hanging out in a O L chat rooms and stuff like that, and I got it in my head that the kids my age that lived in New York City had something that I didn't have, whatever that was, okay, maybe a level of coolness or street smarts or something like that. And I quickly adopted them as models. And and part of that came from a sense of you know, lack,

you know, or insecurity that that I had. And I, of course, this all happened without me knowing it. And you know, I had my heart set I'm going to college in New York City, and I did, and I got there, and it turns out that all the kids my age are exactly just like me. They're all they all have their own you know kind of they're all looking into their own models. This kind of dynamic is

extremely powerful and adolescence. You know, everybody's like trying to figure out who they are and kind of like latching on to the first thing or group or person that might give them, you know, a sense of identity. It's like, if I could just if I could just be a little bit more like them than you know, X, Y

and Z, would happen. You know. C. S. Lewis calls this the desire to always be in the inner ring, and he sort of describes it as a process of there's always a ring that's more inner that we're never in, and we always go through life thinking it might not even be true that there's an inner ring in inner circle that we're not part of, and we decide that certain people are, and you know, that fuels our desire.

And he says, you know, obviously that onion can be peeled to infinity basically, and you know that, I think is a large part of the reason why we adopt different models and very importantly, why people's models change as they go through life. So why is this important for us to try and understand that our desires are driven by imitation? Why is this important if we don't see

the things that are driving our desires at best. It can make us pretty miserable because there's always another model modeling a different desire for us, and we can just kind of float through life like a dilettante, you know, or feeling like we have whiplash, and pursuing new desires, perhaps getting new things, buying new things, entering into new relationships, changing careers, and you know, never understanding why we're so unsatisfied,

because we're just you know, we just simply have new models. Typically, though, it leads to conflict between people and resentment and and you know, jealousy or or envy, you know, without us really understanding why that happens. I mean, just to give you an example, most authors that have published a book have all kinds of desires modeled to them to want

certain things. So, you know, you want to be a New York Times bestseller, you want X, Y and Z award, you want to be recognized in certain ways, and I think few people ask themselves why that thing is wantable. I mean, sure, you might sell more books, but like the desire ends up taking over everything, and you know, you forget why you set out on a certain path

in the first place. Is it really so that you could you know, get a Michelin Star for your restaurant, or you know, get on to make a certain list for your book. And these desires are the medically given to us. And part of the process I think of maturing and understanding the way that this works is being able to see that and calling it, you know, for what it is, and being able to exercise a little more freedom in what we desire. So it's not to say like we can just do away with this altogether,

because we're social creatures. But what we can do is have the self possession and the agency and the freedom to make these things more or less our own, rather than just sort of unconsciously accepting these things as the things that I'm supposed to want. I grew up in a home with two doctors. I'm supposed to want to be a doctor or whatever. And you know, this is a really important thing. It's maybe I do it opt the desire to be recognized in a certain way for

my book. But if I do, at least I'm doing it with intentionality. At least I'm realizing what I'm doing rather than just following um. And we have a lot of followers in our culture. We have a lot you know that people I think uncritically accept both thinking and ideas and desires, and then fifteen years later, it might be that they're in a career that they're miserable in or the relationship that they're miserable in, and they don't realize how they got to be in that place in

the first place. And chances are, if we, if we dig deep enough, it may be that there was a desire or the desire for some object that they you know, they had pursued without really ever having made it their own and chosen to pursue that thing. You say that being anti mimetic is having the ability the freedom to counteract destructive forces of desire. So given that all this is modeled, how do we start to find what our

real desire is, or are deeper desire is? What are some of the ways we can start to unravel this unspoken, un understood forces that are driving us. Because desire is what drives us, It is what drives us, it's what moves us. I think of desire like an energy of movement that draws us towards certain people, are certain things, and we're always moving towards something or a way from something. We're never standing still. You know, it's the old saying,

if you're not going forwards, you're going backwards. And that's desire. So when I say being anti memetic, I certainly don't mean just be a contrarian and just sort of do the opposite of what everybody else is doing or what everybody else wants. That in fact is memetic behavior, because you're you're just modeling your behavior on what the other people want. Um they are positive and negative memetic desires.

A positive memetic desire the kind that I would want to feed, to go back to the fable, would be if I see some noble, good, virtuous trait in somebody that I admire, and I want to be infected with the desire. I want to feed the desire to be to be more like that person. And that's good as long as I don't end up seeing that person as a rival or a threat to me, as long as they remain that that relationship remains healthy. There are other cases where I want to be anti memetic when I see,

you know, sort of radical political polarization and rhetoric. I want to have the freedom, I want to have the ability to not engage the way that other people are engaging. It's possible. You know, when when somebody hates me, when somebody you know, wrongs me, the memetic response is to do the same thing back, right, is treat people the

way that they treat me. I think there's a there's a higher way, and I think that that's to step back and respond in freedom anti me medically and to treat them the way that I would have liked to have been treated. Um. I mean it is old ancient wisdom, but you know, this is just a new way to

kind of think about this. One of the ways I think to uncover and reveal the difference between what I would call thin desires and what I would call thick desires is to kind of you have to step back and kind of look look at life with a little more perspective. A thin desire is highly memetic. You know, here today, gone tomorrow. It's like my desire. It's sort of like go head first into crypto. That summer definitely a memetic desire. There was no kind of solid foundation

that that rested on. Um. You know, if the market had crashed, if all none of my friends cared about it the next week, then it would have been gone. For me too. You know, it was completely dependent on what everybody else was doing. You know, there was nothing intrinsic about it. There was nothing that I had made my own. It was just following fomo, you know, the fear of being left out. All my friends are getting rich, right,

and um, you know, I I noticed that. You know, I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to have learned, you know, when I'm feeling that and I pursue something, and how it can leave me empty because I've made a lot of money, and you know, it just didn't do for me what I thought it was going to do. And I sacrificed a lot to make that money. It doesn't bring me any fulfillment today. And that's one of the signs that it was kind of a fleeting sort

of memetic desires that it was. There was nothing enduring about the satisfaction that it brought me. What I would call a thick desire is the kind of desire that's cultivated, the kind of desire that you feed over a very

long period of time. So you could begin to put your finger on what some of those thicker desires are, you know, by looking back at your life and what you desired as a child, what you desired as as an adolescent or at an earlier time in your life, good and bad, but specifically trying to identify the kinds of wants that that we had that did bring us a tremendous sense of satisfaction and joy and sense of self, the kinds of experiences where we were in flow, where

we really just felt like our like most like ourselves. And you know, for me, I have that experience in sports a little bit. I have it experienced in certain subjects in school, and certain relationships that I was in, certain projects that I undertook after college. And I think it's possible to begin to see a pattern in those kinds of desires, and you begin to see the kinds of desires that you want to feed and with perspective, and I look back on my life and I I

see which ones ended up leaving me empty. And when I see those arising in me again today, I know that those are the kinds of desires that I want

to starve. So in a way, doing that, let's call it a history of our desires, sort of a narrative psychological narrative psychology gives us a hermoneutic an interpretive key to understand a little bit better what's going on inside of us, to be able to kind of spot it before it metastasizes and grows into this overwhelming desire, because there are some that we need to just pivot from and and realize, you know, what I do want this, but not everything I want is necessarily going to make

me happy. And this is just a fun amount of realization. I think there's a typical attitude that people want what they want, and whatever they want is fine, what's true, but not everything we want, not everything we desire, is going to be good for us. And you know, we have to have the self reflection to to to recognize that and to not convince ourselves in the rightness, you know, of our own desires, where we did we justify everything that we want that you know, we're really good at

justifying what we want and pursuing it right. Strength of desire does not equate to the value of that desire. As a former heroin addict, I obviously took that to a far extreme, but I mean, boy, did I want it. You know, I wanted it to the extent that I was willing to burn everything in my life down. Obviously, it's easy to see how destructive that was, but so

many things in life. I think strength of desire is really confused for the right thing to want, or that it's sort of as we said earlier, that it's who I am. You know, it's intrinsic to me. I feel it so strongly it must be who I am, and that's just not the case. A question for you is how does this idea of thick desire correlate to the idea of having values? Are they aligned? Are they similar?

Are they the same? You know, because one of the things that say something like acceptance and commitment therapy talks about, which is is a type of therapy I think is as a brilliant type is you find out what you value and then you commit your life to it. You know, So this sounds similar. Are those saying the same thing? There's a paradox here. And the fundamental question is do we desire what we value or do we value what

we desire? And I think that it's an iterative process because I think it's very important to step back and establish values, and not just values, but a hierarchy of values. And I talked about that in the book, and some of those values should be objective if you believe in objective values, right, things like beauty and truth that are not merely determined through you know, sort of cultural circumstances.

You know, step back because that's solid ground. But if I would have done that when I is eighteen, the values that I would have chosen would have been different than the values that I that I have today. There's an iterative process where if we just value what we desire,

then we get ourselves into big trouble. That's like the default mode, right, Like we we we desire things, therefore we value them if we're able to step back a little bit and establish like concrete values that are not merely the product of our mimetic desire of the culture of what other people are are showing us as valuable. Right, Like, a lot of my values are simply not aligned with what I see in the world, and it's taken me

a long time to arrive at those values. And that is a way of being a little bit more anti memetic. Like I I have these values, my understanding of them might change over the next decade A will, for sure, but at least I have like some solid ground I have a true north, and my desires begin to form around my values. Right, I've decided that your respective of how I feel right now, I know that one of my values is to love and serve my wife and my family and take care of my mother and father. Okay,

who are you who are older right now? And that's that's a responsibility and duty that I feel like I have. I might not wake up every morning and feel like I want to do that, but I know that that's a desire that I want to feed. So this is an example of my values that i've I feel pretty confident in and my desires then are formed around those values. And if there's a misalignment there that you know, we all have our days, but you know, if if I find myself with a real misalignment, that I need to

figure out what the heck is going on. And I think the corollary to that is to sometimes remember the desire. So as you talk about taking care of parents, right, I'm in that stage of life too. Um. My partner and I both have mothers who are not well. Father is not well, and so a lot of our time goes into that. And you know, when I find myself and listeners of the show. I've heard me talk about

this before. When I find myself in the mode of I have to do this, I kind of get, well, I don't like it when I stop and I go, oh wait a second, I have a value of doing this, and thus I want to do it because it's important to me. Then it reorients me towards the whole experience, you know, So sort of going back and reflecting on the fact that I do want to do this. It

is a want, it is a desire of mine. And I love what you said about sort of this hierarchy of values or desires, because I think that's another piece that is so challenging to work through, is what do I want when the number of things I can actually

have or devote time too is very limited? Right? Well, you know, the hierarchy is important because our values sometimes come into conflict with one another, and if there's no hierarchy, then how do you choose And the most me medic value at the time typically wins out, you know, So, like to give you an example, the thing that provokes the strongest desire is that what you mean by that exactly exactly the thing that provokes the strongest desire, and

that could be determined by like just what I saw on the news that morning, you know, and that desire could change tomorrow. So we have to have a bit more grounding than that. I mean, just to give you an example, you know this, this really happened to me. You know, my my father is Alzheimer's and you know, neither one of my parents are doing that well. And you know, something came up. One of my parents was

in the hospital. I'm an only child, and one of my good good friends at a bachelor party in Vegas. You know, so both values, right, take care of my parents, like love my friends, want to be there for my friends. But it is pretty clear which one went out for me in the hierarchy of values. Right, It wasn't that hard of a decision to make. But if I hadn't established that in my mind, that could have really been

a difficult situation. Right, how do I make it to Michigan and out to Vegas and back to Michigan and forty eight hours? And you know I I decided to go to Michigan and take care of my parents. But things like that happen all the time. That happen in companies where people have different ideas of which of the company values are more important than others, and everybody could have a different idea of which ones are more important, and then this is where problems happen. Ye I feel

you on the parents thing. My father has Alzheimer's and my partner's mother has Alzheimer's, and so we're deep in that world. I feel you. It's a brutal disease, you know.

And there are times, I mean speaking about desires, you know, there are times somebody who has Alzheimer's, you know, it's heartbreaking, and you know it's I don't necessarily always want to hang out with my dad for a couple of hours, you know, because he asked me the same question, you know, D and twenty times right, and uh, you know, it can get exasperating and exhausting, you know. And you know it's in a few years now and I've learned to want to spend time with him more than I did

in the beginning in a certain sense. I've learned new ways of loving him, new ways of spending time. It's been a process, you know. All I want to say is like it's tough. Thank god. It sounds like we both have help. I have this little will pivot I do with myself and with coaching clients, and for some

people it really makes a difference. In other people, it's just semantics, but it really is like what you were just saying, you know, about going to be with your dad, and we'll find ourselves saying like I don't want to. I don't want to, you know, And for me, I just sort of will do a quick connection back to what matters, and I'll go, oh, I do want to, I just don't feel like it. And for me, that pivot all of a sudden sort of separates for me my values, what I want most from my mood. Once

I make that separation, it's easier for me. I go oh, I don't feel like it in two hours, I might feel like it in two hours after that, I might not feel like it. Like that's constantly changing my moods. You know, I'm hungry, so I feel like it. I recognize the changing nous that I don't want to build my life on my mood. I've done that before. I

know it's a disaster. So that pivot from you know, sort of I don't want to to, I do want to, but I don't feel like it is often a powerful Yeah, I couldn't agree more so, sort of along this idea of hierarchy of wants or hierarchy of values. You have a section in the book where you talk about stalking your greatest desire. When you find it, let all of your lesser desires be transformed so they serve the greatest one. Say a little bit more about that. So this is

directly related to the hierarchy of values. And you know, I believe I have a purpose and and that everybody has a has a mission, something unique to them because of the circumstances that you know, you're you're born into and and your family and the unique situation that each one of us is in in life. We have a perspective that nobody else has, which gives us the ability to to do something you know, truly unique, or communicate something.

And I think that you know part one of the purpose of life, you know, part of it is trying to figure out what that unique thing is. And one of the ways to build a hierarchy of value, use and desires is to understand your mission or your purpose or your or your vocation. So knowing what it is and This goes back to that layer that I spoke

about in the very beginning with the fable. If I know what that is, I'm able to evaluate the various desires that I have and see whether they take me closer or further away from whatever that mission is, that thing that I feel that I'm supposed to do, that I'm called to do and without sort of an ultimate purpose, that is a value first of all, you know, and and and it's it's the most important one in my opinion, you know, what is it that I'm meant to be

doing here? What am I put here to do? And all of the other desires kind of are are scene in the light of that one, and and and sort of serve that one in some way. So thinking about you know, just a basic way to just evaluate them, you know, like, is this desire that I have to you know, travel around the world over the next year because I'm so anty I've been locked up in my house? Is that desire in any way like furthering sort of what I feel to be like my mission and my

vocation in life. And it makes it a lot easier to evaluate in that in that light, right, So I think that when you find your mission, your purpose. I call that in the book your single greatest desire. All of the other desires begin to take shape around it and hopefully sort of fit into an ecology of desire in some respect. One of the ways that you talk

about getting clearer on these thicker desires. You sort of reference this a little bit earlier, but I'm going to put a slightly finer point on it, which is what you call a fulfillment story. Say a little bit more about what a fulfillment story is and what are the

key pieces to have in one. A fulfillment story is simply you recounting a story, preferably to somebody else, because there's the element of this that's diological and are personal, and there's no substitute for communicating to another human being and having that person deeply listened to you and then be in dialogue with you. It's more powerful if if you do this exercise that I'm describing with another person

and then they can do it back to you. So it's you communicating a story about a time in your life when you feel like you took some action and you accomplished something. You did it well, you did it with excellence, and most importantly, it brought you a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that lasted. Okay, that that endured, and this, that final point is the most important point.

So it gave you some enduring satisfaction and joy to the point where if you think about whatever that thing is that you did today, even if it was twenty years ago, you rekindle that sense of satisfaction and enjoy just telling the story. Many of us have forgotten some of those times, and part of the beauty of the exercise is drumming them up right, like these forgotten memories,

these forgotten experiences, and sharing them with another person. You know, until I was thirty years old, nobody had ever asked me to share one of these kind of stories. So I had worked in a few different companies, nobody had ever asked me, Hey, Luke, tell me about a time in your life when you undertook some action and it was incredibly fulfilling to you. It seems to be something

that's very important for people to know. I mean, because it it expresses something that's like essential to understanding who I am. You can understand that I'm from Grand Rapids, Michigan. That my favorite pasta is what my favorite sports teams are. All of those things do not communicate to you anything essential about and unique to me. You know, a lot of people are you know, fans of the same football

team and like the same pasta. But the fulfillment story communicates something personal and something essential that none of those attributes can never communicate. And I think that's incredibly important for us to understand about ourselves, in terms of understanding our essence, our thick desires, and who we are. And it's important for other people to understand that about us too. You know, how beautiful would it be to like work in a company um where people knew this kind of

thing about the people that they work with. UM. So there's a level of intimacy involved in that which I've found incredibly powerful. And these fulfillment stories, what I call fulfillment stories, they don't have to be a story about you doing anything particularly impressive to anybody else but you. That's part of why this is such a personal exercise. You don't have to have, you know, knock some work

presentation out of the park. It could just be, you know, I learned how to make a fantastic homemade you know, pizza, The key is understand what it is about these fulfillment stories. And if you find five, six, seven of these kinds of stories from from our lives, a pattern tends to emerge and you begin to see, well, so what is it specifically about these kinds of things that are so

satisfying to me? Three different people could have the same experience from the outside looking in one a state championship in their high school sport or something like that. But those three people could find the satisfaction from that accomplishment could come from three totally separate things, right, so you know, for one of them it could be their individual performance, the other one it could be the camaraderie that was

formed in the locker room. And you know that the third one could have found so much satisfaction in the little sort of nudge that you know they gave a teammate at a critical moment in the game. So three different things. Now, so it's not the win that was important, it's why. And understanding the why is for me key to opening up a world of understanding ourselves and the people that we are with better. And it's a clue to what some of those stick desires might be. I

found two parts of that section really interesting. One was, as you said, doing this in dialogue with somebody else, how important that is, because most of the time when we take on activities of this sort, we're off doing it on our own, writing in a journal, filling out a form. You know, there's a lot of values and desire exercises, but they tend to be done by ourselves. So that was the first thing I thought was really interesting about this idea of a fulfillment story is as

you said, how important the dialogue element is. The second thing I found interesting was you said, once you started telling them, you started remembering a whole bunch of other ones. And my initial thought when I was reading that was like, I think I can think of like one, which I'm sure it's not true. And so I found it really interesting to think that if I embarked on this process, more would start to come up. You said, as you

did it, it was just like boom boom. They just kept showing up to you, you know, once you sort of understood the pattern, sure, and and it's true. And you know, that's why the challenge I kind of issue two readers is try because the sort of the nature of the memory is that you know, one thing can

kind of lead to another. And it's also why the partner is really important, why being able to communicate this to somebody who's truly listening is really important, and that's a key is just as much an exercise and listening as it is in telling the stories, because if you find somebody who's a good partner to be having this conversation with, they will hear and see things in the stories that you might not even realize. You know, they might notice that you continue to use certain kinds of

verbs as you're telling the story. You know, the verb might be I organized or I took control of this thing, ing um, and it's like, well, that's interesting. It seems like the kinds of action that you're describing that seems to be so satisfying to you is bringing order to chaos. Or you know, a good listener will this pick up on little things like that, you know, and then ask the right questions to draw out more. I find, as human beings, certain people can close us up and other

people can open us up. You know, when you're sort of in front of somebody that you don't trust or that doesn't make you feel like you want to speak to them, you just shut down and you don't reveal a lot about yourself. On the flip side, there are some people that you know that because they they seem to be you know, approaching us within love and compassion

and understanding makes us want to communicate even more. And the right interlocutor in this exercise is I think critical for bringing out the second and third and fourth and fifth stories. We have that effect on one another in the right context, So choose your conversation partner carefully. Having this sort of conversation with another person. Points to another thing you say late in the book, which is try and live as if you have a responsibility for what

other people want. Say more about that just speaks to the social nature of our desires and what it means

to be human. I think we live in a very individualistic age where you know, if somebody has chosen a path that you know we never would have chosen, or you know, has voted for a candidate that we wouldn't vote for, or has ideas or is hostile to something that's important to us, we often don't realize the very role that we ourselves had to play in them arriving at that point and especially people that are close to us in our lives, right, I don't I don't mean

to say that we're responsible for what everybody else wants. I mean to say that we're social. We are in some sense our brothers keeper and our sister's keeper, and we have a responsibility to other people rather than just seeing them as different or other or threats, as if they are walking their path on their own, because nobody is.

And you know, the idea is derivative from C. S. Lewis, who wrote about this in an essay of his called The Weight of Glory, and he just says, you know, think of everybody that you encounters, you know, as having this responsibility. There's no neutral encounter with another human being. There's no such thing as a neutral encounter, even the small ones like you know, the people that are in the self checkout section of the grocery store that I

go to practically every day. They've been there since the start of the pandemic. One particular guys always there, you know, seeing myself as having a responsibility to you know, affect

him in a positive way. You try to make him laugh when I go there, because I know, you know, a lot of people are not in the best mood when they're trying to get through the line at the self checkout place right, trying to just it's kind of a habit of mind, a habit of spirit of just realizing that I could make in that very encounter make him sort of completely effect his mood for sure, but

even his desire to serve other people in a way. So, I mean, this is incredibly important when it comes to our families and our friends, and I just think thinking of ourselves is not wholly cut off or independent from the way that other people are or think, and thinking of ourselves as having some degree of responsibility for that based on the way that we relate to them has been important for me in my life. And sort of stepping back and before I label anybody anything, thinking about, well,

what role do I have to play? How can I positively enter into this relationship so that both of us come away a little bit better than we started. I love that idea of no neutral interaction with another person. That's a really beautiful idea. You thank you well, Luke. You and I are at the end of our time here. We're going to continue in the post show conversation where we are going to talk about the difference between calculating

thought and meditative thought. And by meditative in this case, we don't mean what we normally think of as meditating. But I found this a really great part of the book, Calculating Thought meditative thought. We'll talk about that in the

post show conversation listeners. You can get access to that as well as ad free episodes, other post show conversations, a special episode I do every week called Teaching Song and a Poem and the joy of supporting something that matters to you by going to One you Feed dot net slash join Luke, Thanks again so much for coming on. I have really enjoyed this conversation and I really enjoyed the book. Thanks so much for having me on. Eric,

I feel the same. Thank you, yea. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One you Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support

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