September 8, 2023
Finished reading: Wanting by Luke Burgis 📚, which I wish had existed for me to read back in my early 20s, but maybe I would have thought it trite back then? Probably not: ever since The Dude’s parroting of pop culture was mistaken for profundity I knew how powerful mimesis was and how blind people were to it. The contents of Wanting would have brought into sharp focus that we are not only copying other people’s words and actions, but also — most of all, perhaps — desires.
Like The Dao of Capital it is overflowing with new-to-me mental models, One day, I should write a list of all these models and how I use them. Alas, not today. or at least with words to describe what may have tickled me already: calculating versus meditative thought, thin desire versus thick, and — in a nod to Taleb — Celebristan versus Freshmenistan. At the very least it clarified too me why Taleb himself was a model worth emulating.
And if you think it too of-the-time, with its SEO subtitle and quoting of some questionable philosophers and contemporaneous books, well, there is a René Girard reading list provided in the appendix and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning is now on the pile.
The wild blue yonder, as seen from a submarine off the coast of Lahaina (2019). So it goes…
