A (0:00)

In today's Lessons episode, I want to expose a relatively painful truth that is destroying millions of lives. The dreams that you're chasing aren't even yours if you're working towards goals that look impressive but they leave you feeling empty inside. If you've been copying other people's success that asking what actually makes you happy when you secretly worry you're living someone else's version of a good life, you have to listen. I'll show you why most people spend decades pursuing these borrowed dreams that they absorb from social media and society, and how to stop copying everyone else's desires and start choosing your own before you waste your entire life living the wrong life and building towards the wrong thing. Today, I'm going to show you why the dreams that you're living aren't yours. But first, the story. Grace was dying after 67 years of marriage, three children, and a life that looked perfect from the outside. She lay in the hospital bed with tears streaming down her face. I wanted to travel the world, she whispered to her palliative care nurse. I wanted to write stories. I wanted to live alone in a small apartment in Paris and eat croissants every morning. She paused, struggling to breathe. But everyone expected me to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother. I lived the life they wanted me to live, not the one I dreamed about. And sadly, grand Grace died three days later. And her nurse, Ronnie Ware, would later write that this was the most common deathbed regret she heard. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. But here's what Ware didn't realize and what you need to understand. Grace's story isn't about lacking courage. It's about something far more disturbing that I really want you to understand as soon as possible. Grace never had her own dreams to begin with. She was living a lie. A lot of us are living a lie. French philosopher Rene Girard. He spent his life studying something that he called mimetic desire, the idea that human beings don't actually know what they want. Instead, we copy the desire of others. We see someone driving a Tesla, and suddenly we want a Tesla. Not because we've analyzed our transportation needs, but because someone we admire or envy made that choice seem desirable. We could watch someone building a startup, getting married, moving to New York, buying a house, having kids. And we start wanting those things, too. And Girard called this the romantic lie, the belief that our desires spring from some deep, authentic place inside us. But the truth is more unsettling. We are constantly Borrowing other people's dreams and mistaking them for our own. Think about it. Why do you want the relationship that you want? The career you're building? The lifestyle that you're currently pursuing? Is it because you sat quietly with yourself and carefully considered what would bring you joy and meaning? Or is it because you've seen others live that way and you decided that it looked appealing? Now, most people, if they're honest, will realize that their desires are borrowed and copied and mimicked, and they are living someone else's vision of a good life. Now, social media has turned mimetic desire into this precision weapon. Every single day, you're exposed to thousands of curated versions of other people's successful lives. The entrepreneur with the beachside laptop. The couple with the perfect wedding. The friend with the dream job. Each image plants a seed. Maybe I should want this, too. So you start following people whose lives you want to copy. You bookmark their posts. You screenshot their quotes. You study their life and their strategies for living that life. And without realizing it, you start to replace your own inner compass with someone else's gps. And then what's the result? Well, you end up spending years and maybe decades chasing goals that were never really yours to begin with. You build the business you saw someone else build. You move to the city everyone else thinks is cool. You optimize for the metrics that make others impressed. And then one day, you wake up feeling empty. And it's because you've achieved someone else's dream, not your own. And that is a tragedy of an unlived life. There is a special kind of suffering reserved for people who reach the end of their lives and realize they never actually lived. And palliative care workers report the same story over and over. People on their deathbeds don't regret the chances they took or the mistakes that they made. They regret the chances they didn't take because they were too busy living up to other people's expectations. They regret working jobs they hated to buy, things they didn't need to impress people they didn't like. They regret staying in relationships. It felt saf but empty. They regret playing too small because big dreams seem too selfish, too risky, too different from what everyone else was doing. And most heartbreakingly, many of them regret never figuring out what they actually wanted in the first place. Carl Jung wrote about this phenomenon. The tragedy of the unlived life. The parts of ourselves that we never explore because we're too busy being who others expect us to be. The dreams we never pursue because they don't fit the template of success that we've absorbed from our parents, our friends, our culture. It could be the path that we never walked because they seem too weird or too risky or too far from what others would understand or approve of them. And this is the deepest source of human suffering. Not living your own life. Now, this brings us to the word authenticity. As everybody says, just be authentic, right? But what if you don't know who you authentically are? What if you spent so long copying others that you've lost touch with your own desires, your own values, your own vision of what a meaningful life looks like? And this is the trap that most people fall into. They hear advice about following their passion or being true to themselves, and then they panic because they realize they don't actually know what that means. So their passion feels borrowed and their values feel inherited. And their dreams feel like hand me downs from people that they've admired. So the solution isn't to live authentically. The solution isn't to dig deeper, to find some buried authentic self, because that self might not exist, at least not in the way that we imagine. The solution is to consciously choose what to want. Now, here's what Gerard understood but not many people teach. Since all desire is learned. You can learn to desire consciously instead of unconsciously. You can choose your models instead of letting random influences on social media choose them for you. You can ask better questions. Instead of what do I want? You can ask, who am I copying? And do I want to become like them? Instead of what should I do? You should start to ask yourself, what would I regret not trying? And instead of what will make me successful? You should start to ask yourself, what would make feel alive? This is the difference between mimetic desire and conscious desire. Mimetic desire, it copies what other people have already chosen. Conscious desire chooses based on who you want to become. And if you want to know if your dreams are really yours, you just start to ask yourself some really tough questions. And ask yourself, if no one else would ever know about your accomplishments, would you still want them? Because most people want recognition more than they want the actual thing they're working towards. And if you strip away the audience, you're going to start to discover what actually matters to you. And you can ask yourself, if you could live five completely different lives, what would they be? And this question bypasses the either or thinking that keeps people trapped. Right? You don't have to choose just one path, but you do need to know what paths actually appeal to you. You should ask yourself, what did you love Doing before you cared about what people thought. So childhood interests before they got filtered through social expectations. That could also point to authentic desire. You should ask yourself, what would you do if you knew you'd die in exactly 10 years? And this remove pressure to build something that lasts forever and focuses attention on what feels meaningful right now, today. And then the last question you should ask yourself is, what are you afraid people will think if you pursue what you actually want? And more often than not, the thing that you're most afraid of and what you're most afraid to want is the thing you most authentically want. Now this brings us back to authentic living. When you go through this exercise, you are getting closer to being in line with who you actually are, having dreams that are actually yours, to living authentically. But what no one tells you about living authentically is it can be very lonely. Because when you stop copying other people's dreams and you start pursuing your own, especially at the beginning, you start to leave the crowd behind. You stop getting likes for the content that resonates with everyone else. You stop fitting into neat categories that people can understand and approve of. You stop being able to explain your choices in ways that make immediate sense to others. And this is the price of true dreams, the price of authenticity. You have to be willing to be misunderstood. But what you gain is that you get to live your own life. You get to die knowing you at least tried to figure out what you actually wanted and gave it your best shot. You get to experience the rare satisfaction of pursuing goals that feel genuinely yours, even if they don't make sense to anyone else. Remember, your life is not a dress rehearsal. Grace died with tears on her face because she realized too late that she had lived someone else's version of a good life. You don't have to. You can start right now asking yourself the hard questions. What am I doing because I think I should? What am I avoiding? Because it doesn't fit a template? What would I try if I knew I couldn't fail? What would I try if I knew I probably would fail, but it would be worth attempting anyways. Your life is not a dress rehearsal. This is the only shot you get. And the worst thing that can happen isn't that you'll fail at pursuing your authentic dreams. The worst thing that can happen is that you'll succeed at pursuing someone else's. You'll build the perfect replica of a life you never actually wanted. You'll reach the end having never asked yourself what you truly desired. And you'll die like Grace. There's no need to sugarcoat it with tears on your face, whispering about the life that you never had the courage to live. For most of us, the dreams that we are living are not ours, but the dreams that you could choose to live are. The question is, will you make that choice?