My thoughts post reading: I realize I divide my weeks into maker's and manager's. Mondays and Tuesdays are generally manager's with many meetings. Thursdays and Fridays are makers, with usually none to one meeting. Wed is in-between, and I'm trying to make it more of a maker's. However, I'm curious how Paul operates on a maker's schedule: when does he takes breaks? when does he sits down to set goals for the day? That's what I'm thinking about now. Now that my focus is singular and to work on [[Unshackled]], how do I set goals for the week, for the days? I could categorize the work into "things that require deep thought", "important but simple things", and "do it only if you're done with others."

Maker vs Manager's Schedule

One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.

There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule.

The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour. When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command. But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

Problem for Makers

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case.

Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

Each type of schedule works fine by itself. Problems arise when they meet. Since most powerful people operate on the manager's schedule, they're in a position to make everyone resonate at their frequency if they want to. But the smarter ones restrain themselves, if they know that some of the people working for them need long chunks of time to work in.

YC on Maker's Schedule

Our case is an unusual one. Nearly all investors, including all VCs I know, operate on the manager's schedule. But Y Combinator runs on the maker's schedule. Rtm and Trevor and I do because we always have, and Jessica does too, mostly, because she's gotten into sync with us.

I wouldn't be surprised if there start to be more companies like us. I suspect founders may increasingly be able to resist, or at least postpone, turning into managers, just as a few decades ago they started to be able to resist switching from jeans to suits.

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours.

Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded. These chunks of time are at the end of my working day, and I wrote a signup program that ensures all the appointments within a given set of office hours are clustered at the end. Because they come at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. (Unless their working day ends at the same time as mine, the meeting presumably interrupts theirs, but since they made the appointment it must be worth it to them.) During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but they never interrupt it.

When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I'd sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called "business stuff."

I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager's schedule and one on the maker's.

Speculative Meetings

When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative meetings. You can meet someone just to get to know one another. If you have an empty slot in your schedule, why not? Maybe it will turn out you can help one another in some way.

Business people in Silicon Valley (and the whole world, for that matter) have speculative meetings all the time. They're effectively free if you're on the manager's schedule. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to "grab coffee," for example.

Speculative meetings are terribly costly if you're on the maker's schedule, though. Which puts us in something of a bind. Everyone assumes that, like other investors, we run on the manager's schedule. So they introduce us to someone they think we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. At this point we have two options, neither of them good: we can meet with them, and lose half a day's work; or we can try to avoid meeting them, and probably offend them.

Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the source of the problem. We just took it for granted that we had to either blow our schedules or offend people. But now that I've realized what's going on, perhaps there's a third option: to write something explaining the two types of schedule. Maybe eventually, if the conflict between the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule starts to be more widely understood, it will become less of a problem.

Those of us on the maker's schedule are willing to compromise. We know we have to have some number of meetings. All we ask from those on the manager's schedule is that they understand the cost.

This is a short note from my Roam Research second brain. Here's a free guide where I introduce you to Roam & Building A Second Brain. 

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Metadata of Note

Type: 🍃 Leaf [Nomenclature present here.] Source: The Science of Setting & Achieving Goals | Huberman Lab Podcast #55 Tags: #goals #productivity #Balance Q3: How Can We Set & Achieve Balanced Goals Date: July 27th, 2022

Science of Setting & Achieving Goals

We're not the only animals to do this. Honey bees need to set a goal of collecting honey back to the hive. Predators set goals to hunt and kill their prey.

But we humans are unique when it comes to two characteristics:

We can set goals that are immediate, short-term, mid-term, long-term, and lifetime goals. We can modulate our time scales.

We can juggle multiple goals at once: at home, at work, in our relationships, etc.

There are 4 neural circuits involved in setting and achieving goals:

• Amygdala: associated with anxiety and fear. This is involved in our desire for avoiding punishment/loss.

• Ventral striatum (basal ganglia): associated with action and inaction. This contains the "go" and "no-go" circuits that direct us towards practicing healthy habits and initiating actions. "I'm going to wake up early to run tomorrow." OR "I'm NOT going to eat that cookie."

• Cortex (lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC)): The LPFC helps us with executive and long-term planning. The OFC helps with meshing emotions into our current state of progress and measuring where we are to where we'd like to be.

It doesn't matter what the goal is: the same circuits are involved whether the goal is to build a company or plan a birthday party.

The 4 neural circuits above all work together to perform two functions:

• Placing value on a particular goal (which is done via the neurotransmitter dopamine ) at a particular period in time.

• Deciding whether or not to act at a particular moment in time based on the perceived value of a goa

Peripersonal space and extra-personal space:

• Peripersonal space is defined as the space surrounding the body where we can not only reach and manipulate objects by movement but can also be reached by external elements, including other individuals. For e.g. this includes interoception (how we perceive the internal state of our own body) and also the materials around us that we can easily access. This is associated with the neurotransmitter serotonin.

• Extrapersonal space is everything beyond the confines of our reach. E.g. something in the next room, next block, etc. This is associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine

"If we are to be good at goal seeking, at setting and achieving our goals, we have to be able to toggle between a clear understanding of our peripersonal space - what we have and how we feel in the immediate present - and the extrapersonal space - our ability to understand what's in the extra personal space and move into that extra personal space."  

Literature is littered with acronyms in the domain of goal setting and pursuit. Some of the common ones, dating from 1930s, include:

• ABC method: Achievable, believable, and committed.

• SMART: Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

• SMARTER: SMART + ethical, rewarding.

In terms of the sequence, it's about first (a) goal setting, then (b) assessing whether or not you're making progress towards the goals, and (c) goal execution.

Science-backed Tools for Achieving Goals

1. The 85% Rule for Optimal Learning: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12552-4

Set your goals such that you fail/make an error about 15% of the time. If it's way too high, such as 50%, it means what you've set out to accomplish is too hard for yourself.

This is controlled for external factors such as how well you've slept, your mindset coming into working on the goal, etc.

2. Focus visual attention to initiate goal pursuit and improve performance: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167219861438

Before you begin a task, find an object that is outside of your peripersonal space and focus on it for 30-60 seconds. This has also proven useful for people with ADHD.

3. Using Aged Self-Image to Self-Motivate Yourself: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3949005/

By seeing pictures of ourselves 30-40 years in the future, we're more motivated to think long-term with our goals.

4. Visualizing Success is a good starting point goal, but visualizing failure is better for ongoing motivation:

Since the amygdala is part of our goal-setting & pursuit neural circuit, we have a strong aversion to loss.

So [[Emily Balcetis]] lab has found that beyond the beginning, visualizing failure in a goal -- what would happen if you don't wake up and run, or what would happen if you don't sit to write every day -- is more effective, sometimes even 50% more, than visualizing success. The brain and body are more effective at moving away from fearful things than towards the things we want.

5. Set goals that are realistic but challenging: As described in The Flow clearly. Rex Wright's lab found that when people were given goals that were just immediately out of their reach, their systolic blood pressure increased 50% more than when they set goals that were too easy or too inspirational and out of reach.

This reminds me of a chapter from [[Where Good Ideas Come From]] where the author talks about something called "the adjacent possible."

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. Yet is it not an infinite space, or a totally open playing field. The number of potential first-order reactions is vast, but it is a finite number, and it excludes most of the forms that now populate the biosphere. What the adjacent possible tells us is that at any moment the world is capable of extraordinary change, but only certain changes can happen.

6. Don't set more than 3 major goals per year: [[Andrew Huberman]] does not say why or cite papers, but mentions to not litter our mental space with more than 3 big, lofty goals per year.

Supermarkets use this against us by stocking the shelves with so many items that we always end up buying more things than we actually need.

7. Have SPECIFIC and concrete action steps for a goal: It's not enough to set a big, lofty goal (such as a New Year resolution), without setting clear action steps. It was found in an experiment to improve recycling that when businesses set clear action steps on how to improve recycling, that gave a 100% better output than when businesses just asked people to be better at recycling.

8. A good frequency to assess progress for goals is weekly: This reminds me of [[Tim Urban]]'s famous talk on procrastination, and how he ends that by showing the 90,000-week chart.

9. Engaging in Time-space bridging to train our brain for goal setting and achieving: [[Andrew Huberman]] talks about a practice he conducts everyday wherein he moves his focus from a peripersonal space to an extrapersonal space, and back to the peripersonal space: (a) close your eyes and take a 3 breaths while focusing on the internal state of your body, (b) open your eyes and take 3 breaths while focusing on something in your body (e.g. your palm), (c) focus on something a little away from you and take 3 breaths, and finally (d) focus on the broader horizon of whatever is in front of you and not any particular object for 3 breaths.

He mentions that by doing this practice, he is training his brain to cut up time differently. In the above, (a) leads to thinking of time in seconds and minutes, while (d) leads to thinking of time on a longer time scale.

This helps when we think about goal setting for various time scales, measuring progress, and getting rewards.

Some Findings on Achieving Goas from Peer-Reviewed Research

The following are key conclusions based on peer-reviewed research (that are generally misunderstood):

Multitasking is not always bad

We generally hear any sort of multitasking is bad. This is not always true. Studies at CMU have found that we can hold our attention for 3 minutes on average on a task. And, when we tend to multi-task, we increase the amount of the neurotransmitter/neuromodulator epinephrine in our system (aka adrenaline). So it's actually beneficial to engage in some multi-tasking before jumping into a task that requires our full focus. E.g. checking your email and messages before jumping into a task such as writing a proposal (although while writing, it's not recommended to multi-task).

Focusing visual attention improves performance

Tons of research has also found that narrowing your visual focus while thinking about goals helps with performance. [[Emily Balcetis]]' lab at NYU work with visual perception. In one experiment, people were divided into groups. Group A was asked to focus on a goal line while running towards it with weights, and group B was asked to look elsewhere. Group A expended 17% less effort and got there 23% faster on average.

This phenomenon is rooted in our autonomous nervous system: When we take in the world through our visual system -- our eyes -- the information can travels via 2 pathways: (A) Vergence eye movement: when we tend to intensely focus on a given point and observe all the minute details of it, OR (B) Magnocellular pathway: which takes into account a global set of everything happening around us. (B) is associated more with relaxation than A, which makes intuitive sense. And as a result, there's a slight increase in arousal with (A) over (B), and an increase in your systolic blood pressure, which in turn leads to more oxygen availability, more epinephrine, and more dopamine, and more readiness.

This reminds me of the instance from [[A Climb To The Top]] when [[Kenny]] began running towards the top of Algonquin Peak the moment we ascended to the last mile of the stretch. Later, he described the experience as, "I saw the peak finally through the clearing, and a force overcame me that I had to get there fast. I don't know what overcame me myself." -> perhaps something to include in the [[Balance]] book.

Dopamine is the key hormone behind motivation and pleasure-seeking

Experiments have been conducted on rats wherein researched depleted the dopamine neurons in some of the rats, and later observed that although the rats still enjoy pleasure, their motivation to achieve pleasure is vastly reduced. Depletion of dopamine inhibits our ability to pursue the action steps that will lead to pleasure.

Utilizing dopamine prediction error to our advantage

We experience the highest increase in dopamine when something unexpected and positive happens. We experience a decent increase in dopamine when we anticipate something positive will happen, and in fact, it does end up happening (wherein we once again experience a slight increase). When we anticipate something positive will happen, and it doesn't, our dopamine level goes below our initial baseline. For E.g. expect 10 friends to show up to a house dinner but nobody does. There are 2 conclusions to be drawn from this.

First, it's important that we have a consistent, regular cadence (e.g. weekly) at which we measure progress. Pick a milestone that you can maintain consistently.

Second, it's important that we think of ourselves as succeeding to continue producing dopamine towards a goal and reward ourselves cognitively by affirming that we're on the right track. (while visualizing failure is a good motivator to lean into the right habits, we need to believe that we're moving forward on a consistent basis)

This is a short note from my Roam Research second brain. Here's a free guide where I introduce you to Roam & Building A Second Brain. 

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Metadata of Note

Type: 🌰 Seed [Nomenclature present here.] Source: Process-Centered Love by Lee Shevek Tags: #Balance Q2: Why Do We Live Lives of Imbalance #love #Relationships #capitalism Date: July 27th, 2022

The Logic of Capitalism

The anti-capitalists of today look back at the most important works of anti-capitalists of yesterday (or the last century) and find a similar flaw threaded through many of the otherwise clear and continuously relevant writings: many of them believed that capitalism’s end was nigh and inevitable. They thought its strength was in its oppressive power, and that eventually, that rigid, oppressive power would be unable to hold its form and collapse. What they did not account for— and what we recognize now— is that capitalism has an uncanny ability to adapt. Its incredible staying power lies not within its oppressive power alone, but in its ability to make so many of us foot soldiers in the very system that undermines our interests, poisons our communities, and makes our relationships untenable. Capitalism maintains, not just because there are rich and powerful who enforce it, but also because the rest of us have internalized its logic and march to its beat in our everyday lives. That capitalist logic is this: to live always on the promise of the future satisfaction of desire. We not only enact this logic in the arenas typically understood as the realm of capitalist logic (workplaces, electoral politics, etc.) but also in our most intimate relationships, and that is the arena I will be delving into here.

To be human is to live with an intrinsic sense of loss. The loss we must grapple with is not only the reality that our lives, and the lives of the ones we love, are finite but also the loss that comes with living in a universe we do not— and cannot— fully understand. In that sense of loss, there is a great potential for creation— art, games, community, faith, philosophy— but to connect with that potential means also accepting and coming to terms with the loss. There is likely very little that is more difficult and more painful than a reckoning with loss (and arguably very little that is more rewarding or fulfilling than doing so.)

The reality of this intrinsic human sense of loss comes to bear in many ways, but few are quite so clear as our ability to signify (create language, name things.) When we name an object we create something bigger than the object itself and can never be truly satisfied by it, and our desire for an object hinges on our very inability to be satisfied by it. Our signifiers are endless, abstract, and unlocalized, and the objects they signify have finitude, and in the bridgeless space between is both our sense of loss and our desire.

The logic of capitalism sees that loss— the gap between true reality and our signified reality— that we feel and offer to fill that void, to avoid that pain of loss, by consuming. There is always another product on the horizon that promises the ultimate satisfaction and end to loss. We will find that the newest iPhone doesn’t satisfy us the way we expected or hoped, it is not the perfect object we seek, but don’t worry, the next iPhone might just see to all your heart’s desires after all. We all know, whether consciously or unconsciously, the paradox built into this logic. Even were it possible to truly provide that ultimate, complete satisfaction, capitalism could not deliver it because doing so would spell the end of capitalism and consumption itself. Its promise capitalism cannot ever deliver on.

However, it still plants the seeds of its logic in our minds: the possibility of the end of the loss, pain, or want. But it’s always just over the horizon. Our satisfaction— our freedom from desire— is always somewhere just beyond us, but feels tantalizingly close. The promise of a better future. It is this logic that anticapitalists often still find ourselves trapped within, despite our knowledge of capitalism’s larger workings, and it shows up in our philosophy, too. When we promise a better future (ultimate satisfaction) under our ideal anticapitalist blueprints, we make that promise the mode of our resistance and we step into capitalism’s own playing field. Liberation becomes not something that we can actionably take here and now, power isn’t something we can take accountability for in our lives today, but is just over the horizon.

Outcome-Centered Relationships

While we can find instances of this logic in all arenas of struggle, here we are going to speak of how it expresses itself in our close and intimate relationships. Many of us are raised to understand relationships as possibilities for fantasy fulfillment (“I will be so happy when I find a person I love and then marry them and then buy a house and then have kids and then raise those kids and then and then and then...) We can often get so caught up in the fantasies of our future lives, and the obsession with trying to make others fit into that prefabricated mold, that we miss the reality of one another entirely. What becomes especially sticky about internalizing this capitalistic logic is that we become dependent on it for our sense of happiness. Even in the near impossible circumstance that you do get exactly the life that you’ve always fantasized about, it cannot bring you satisfaction for the simple reason that you’ve only ever known how to place your happiness in a place just over the horizon, not where you’re standing.

Moreover, this logic brings us to place others in the role of our personal wish fulfillers, rather than the autonomous people that they are. We engage in this mode of thinking when we get wrapped up in working towards whatever future steps we think we want to have in our relationships for them to be meaningful, and in doing so we inevitably miss the most meaningful thing relationships have to offer: the real, unique, full human beings that want to stand beside us. When we keep our eyes on future (and truly unknowable) outcomes, we miss the richness of the process in the present. We miss getting to watch people we care about to grow into themselves. We get caught up in the fear-based response of trying to control that growth that we miss the joys of supporting it instead.

Viewing and treating the people we’re in a relationship with as conduits for our fantasy fulfillment denies them respect for the fullness of their humanity, and objectifies them. We place part of their value not in the present, but in their ability to promise us future— always future— satisfaction. Conforming to the paradoxical logic of capitalism, it is also a promise that no one can keep. As an example: if what we value in a relationship is that it lasts for a lifetime (avoiding the pain of loss), then satisfaction can only truly be attained at the moment of someone’s death, the full delivery of that promise. Yet, who among us, standing at the grave of a beloved one, would say that the most meaningful aspect of that relationship was the completion of a contract rather than the special and unique spirit that person in themselves brought into our lives? Further, even that contract can protect us from loss for only a finite time: as anyone who has experienced the profound loss that is the death of a loved one can attest.

Section end-note: Think back to the fantasy for your future life that you had three, five, or ten years ago. Did it happen exactly the way you wanted or expected it to? More importantly: how glad are you that it didn’t?

Process-centered Relationships

How immersed as we are in the logic of capitalism, can we create present, non-transactional, and fulfilling relationships? How do we cultivate relationships with one another that offers the possibility of sustainability without falling into expecting promises or guarantees for future outcomes? Despite the high promises of capitalist logic, there is no formula for the perfect relationship. In rejecting that logic, we can even rejoice: there is no formula for the perfect relationship! Finally, we can set about exploring what kind of relationships are good for us, that encourage mutual respect and accountability, that is valuable to us in the here and now, and that allow us to flourish.

The largest task before us is to find where capitalist, outcome-centered logic clouds our value judgments in relationships, and I personally have been best served in asking these questions of myself, though this is not by any means a comprehensive list:

If this relationship ended tomorrow, would it still be valuable to me today?

Am I with this person because of who they are, or because of what I think they can give me?

If this person decided they want a different kind of relationship with me, would I still value them? Even if I found I could not give them the different kind of relationship they want and had to go separate ways?

Do I feel threatened by the other kinds of relationships this person has because I feel at risk of loss?

What can I do to reorient my relationship values to feel grounded in my own self-worth and happy that my loved one has other people who care for them?

How can I confront my fear of loss without requiring outcome promises from the people I’m in a relationship with?

What things do I love about this person that are entirely independent of what they do for me?

Are the things that I want from my relationships fair, just, and kind?

Do the things I ask for from the people I’m in a relationship with respect their full humanity and autonomy? Or do I ask for things that require aspects of control?

When we ask ourselves questions like these, we can begin to understand the roots of why we want relationships in the first place, what our expectations are, and whether or not there are values that we hold that we need to address and challenge ourselves on.

The topic of relationships is a deeply intimate one, and it’s easy— even for anticapitalists who are used to questioning deeply ingrained assumptions— for us to write off the ways we show up in relationships as inscrutable personal preference, or “just the way it is.” But those of us who study the realm of power and seek to subvert it know that its scope does not live only in congressional halls, nor does it stop at the boundaries of the workplace, but stretches into all aspects of our lives: including and often, especially our relationships. Something that is custom, that is expected, that is uncomfortable to question, is not inherently good for us, and often warrants the most intense scrutiny of all.

Doing the work of reorienting the values we hold in a relationship from outcome-centered values to process-centered values, away from capitalist logic, is hard and intensive work. Most importantly: it is deeply personal work. Many of us have been taught that our lives and relationships are only meaningful if they produce certain outcomes. Capitalist hetero-patriarchy tells us that having a spouse, a mortgage, children, and grandchildren are all hallmarks of success and additionally provides violent structural barriers to those who want to live by different values. It is not enough to restyle a new “free love” movement when many people’s only choice for economic stability seems to require an outcomes-centered model of relationship. Rejecting capitalist logic in our relationships requires a dual approach of doing the often painful and always difficult work of learning to be grounded in ourselves (rather than externalizing our sense of worth to what others think of or are willing to do for us) and working to build communal networks of support that allow for the personal stability needed to cultivate process-centered relationships.

Some may argue that we cannot expect people to do the hard interpersonal work when there are currently so many structural obstacles to creating truly process-centered relationships: that we must abolish those structures first and then address the interpersonal. But this falls again into the same capitalist logic we find ourselves mired in. If we wait for the perfect conditions to do vital interpersonal work, we will find ourselves eternally waiting and recreating the same maladaptive relationship values in future generations as we wait.

While it would be a mistake to pretend that rethinking, revaluing, and recreating the way we see and practice relationships aren’t difficult to work— it is— it would be an even greater mistake to ignore the reason we set to that work, to begin with. We do this to open up joyful possibilities. A process-centered approach to relationships is ultimately about reveling. When we find ourselves connected to and in community with people we love and we refuse to let ourselves get tangled up in expecting and enforcing outcomes, we can truly revel in the best part of relationships: witnessing each other. We get to experience the joy of growing into ourselves the way that is true and healthy for us, and we get to bear witness to and support those we love dearly getting to do the same. We have the potential to find both autonomy and security without having to sacrifice one for the other. We get to revel in creating with one another, and love becomes a precious gift rather than a heavy obligation.

Have you ever watched a person you love flourish and bloom? Personally, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever witnessed.

This is a short note from my Roam Research second brain. Here's a free guide where I introduce you to Roam & Building A Second Brain. 

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Metadata of Note

Type: 🍃 Leaf [Nomenclature present here.] Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Tags: #Rene Girard #mimeticdesires #AAA: Mimetic Theory Date: June 7th, 2022

Girard calls ‘mediation’ the process in which a person influences the desires and preferences of another person.

Thus, whenever a person’s desire is imitated by someone else, she becomes a ‘mediator’ or ‘model’.

Girard points out that this is very evident in publicity and marketing techniques: whenever a product is promoted, some celebrity is used to ‘mediate’ consumers’ desires: in a sense, the celebrity is inviting people to imitate him in his desire of the product.

The product is not promoted on the basis of its inherent qualities, but simply because of the fact that some celebrity desires it.

External Mediation

In his studies on literature, Girard highlights this type of relationship in his literary studies, for example in his study of Don Quixote. Don Quixote is mediated by Amadis de Gaula. Don Quixote becomes an errant knight, not really because he autonomously desires to, but in order to imitate Amadis. Nevertheless, Amadis and Don Quixote are characters on different planes. They will never meet, and in such a manner, they never become rivals. The same can be said of the relation between Sancho and Don Quixote. Sancho desires to be governor of an island, mostly because Don Quixote has suggested to Sancho that that is what he should desire. Again, although they interact continuously, Sancho and Don Quixote belong to two different worlds: Don Quixote is a very complex man, and Sancho is simple in extreme.

Girard calls ‘external mediation’ the situation when the mediator and the person mediated are on different planes. Don Quixote is an ‘external mediator’ to Sancho, inasmuch as he mediates his desires ‘from the outside; that is, Don Quixote never becomes an obstacle in Sancho’s attempts to satisfy his desires.

External mediation does not carry the risk of rivalry between subjects, because they belong to different worlds.

Although the source of Sancho’s desire to be governor of an island is in fact Don Quixote, they never desire the same object.

Don Quixote desires things Sancho does not desire, and vice versa. Hence, they never become rivals.

Girard believes ‘external mediation’ is a frequent feature of the psychology of desire: from our earliest phase as infants, we look up in imitation to our elders, and eventually, most of what we desire is mediated by them.

Internal Mediation

In ‘internal mediation’, the ‘mediator’ and the person mediated are no longer abysmally separated and hence, do not belong to different worlds. In fact, they come to resemble each other to the point that they end up desiring the same things. But, precisely because they are no longer in different worlds and now reach for the same objects of desire, they become rivals.

We are fully aware that competition is fiercer when competitors resemble each other.

Thus, in internal mediation, the subject imitates the model’s desires, but ultimately, unlike in external mediation, the subject falls into rivalry with the model/mediator.

Consider this example: a toddler imitates his father in his occupations, and he desires to pursue his father’s career when he grows up. This will hardly cause any rivalry (although it may account for Freud’s Oedipus Complex; see section 2.d). This is, as we have seen, a case of external mediation.

But, now consider a Ph.D. candidate that learns a great deal from his supervisor, and seeks to imitate every aspect of his work, and even his life. Eventually, they may become rivals, especially if both are looking for scholarly recognition.

Or, consider further the case of a toddler that is playing with a toy, and another toddler that, out of imitation, desires that very same toy: they will eventually become rivals for the control of the toy.

This is ‘internal mediation’; that is the person is mediated from the ‘inside’ of his world, and therefore, may easily become his mediator’s rival. This rivalry often has tragic consequences, and Girard considers this a major theme in modern novels.

In Girard’s view, this literary theme is in fact a portrait of human nature: very often, people will desire something as a result of imitating other people, but eventually, this imitation will lead to rivalries with the very person imitated in the first place.

Metaphysical Desires

In Girard’s view, the mimetic desire may grow to such a degree, that a person may eventually desire to be her mediator. Again, publicity is illustrative: sometimes, consumers do not just desire a product for its inherent qualities, but rather, desire to be the celebrity that promotes such a product.

Girard considers that a person may desire an object only as part of a larger desire; that is, to be her mediator. Girard calls the desire to be other people, ‘metaphysical desire. Furthermore, acquisitive desire leads to metaphysical desire, and the original object of desire becomes a token representing the “larger” desire of having the being of the model/rival.

Whereas external mediation does not lead to rivalries, internal mediation does lead to rivalries. But, metaphysical desire leads a person not just to rivalry with her mediator; actually, it leads to a total obsession with and resentment of the mediator.

For, the mediator becomes the main obstacle to the satisfaction of the person’s metaphysical desire. Inasmuch as the person desires to be his mediator, such desire will never be satisfied. For nobody can be someone else. Eventually, the person developing a metaphysical desire comes to appreciate that the main obstacle to being the mediator is the mediator himself.