You've been building toward a specific outcome for months. What if the outcome was never the point?

You hit the milestone. The revenue number, the launch, the thing you said would change everything. And for a moment, it does. A flicker of satisfaction. Maybe an hour of genuine excitement.

Then a strange flatness. Like arriving at a destination and realizing you don't recognize the place.

What Every Want Has in Common

You've been shipping. Features, campaigns, outreach. You have a clear picture of what success looks like. But trace that picture to its root and you'll find something interesting.

Every desire you've ever had is a desire for an experience.

The desire for a profitable company is really the desire for the experience of security, creative autonomy, or recognition. The desire for a house is the desire for the experience of stability or belonging. Ten thousand followers? That's the desire for the experience of being heard.

This holds across every category. Tangible goods, achievements, relationships, creative work, freedom, legacy. Strip away the object, and there's always an experience underneath. The feeling of safety. The rush of mastery. The warmth of connection. Even wanting to "leave a legacy" is about the present experience of believing your life matters.

A philosopher once proposed a machine that could simulate any experience perfectly.¹ Plug in, and you'd feel everything you've ever wanted to feel. Most people refuse. His point: we must want something beyond how things feel. Maybe. But even the pull toward "realness" is something you feel. You can't want anything, even things beyond experience, without going through experience to get there.

In practice, every desire passes through experience. Even the ones that might point beyond it.

The Desires You Inherited

If every desire passes through experience, one question becomes unavoidable: whose experience are you chasing?

A founder reads about someone's $10M exit and feels a pull. What they're really feeling is desire for the experience they imagine that exit would bring. Freedom, validation, options. But that imagination was assembled from someone else's highlight reel. The experience they're chasing is a projection.

Rene Girard called this mimetic desire.² His argument: we rarely generate wants from scratch. We absorb them from the people around us, from culture, from social media, from family. The absorption is so gradual that borrowed desires become indistinguishable from genuine ones.

And the most dangerous borrowed desires don't look borrowed at all. They sound profound. "I want to make an impact." "I want financial freedom." "I want to build something meaningful." These can be deeply authentic. They can also be mantras you adopted because they sounded right, because they performed well in your social circle, because everyone you admire seems to want them too.

The Experience Audit

Here's a test I keep returning to.

  1. Name the want. Be specific. "A successful SaaS product" is more honest than "success."
  2. Trace it to the experience. What would this feel like, day to day, once you have it? Not what it "means" abstractly. What it feels like in your body at 2 PM on a Tuesday.
  3. Check the source. Have you actually tasted this experience before, even briefly? Or is your entire picture constructed from podcasts, Twitter threads, and other people's stories?
  4. Test the shortcut. If the desire is about the experience, can you get that experience another way? Sooner? Without the three-year detour?

Step 3 is where most borrowed desires collapse. You realize the experience you're chasing is a fantasy assembled from other people's narratives. Not a memory. Not something your body recognizes.

Step 4 is where it gets liberating. Sometimes the experience you actually want is available right now, through a completely different path.

A caveat: some untasted desires are genuine. The question isn't whether you've had the full experience, but whether your picture of it comes from your own intuition and small encounters, or wholesale from someone else's narrative.

The Freedom Trap

I see this pattern constantly among indie hackers. Someone says they want freedom. They build a product, optimize for passive income, grind for years. Then they get there, the business runs itself (as much as possible), and they feel... restless. Lost.

Because "freedom" was a word. The experience they actually wanted was creative engagement, the feeling of solving interesting problems every day. And they designed a life that optimized that away.

The desire was real. The translation was borrowed.

This happens with every abstract goal. "Impact" might mean the experience of watching someone's face light up when your tool solves their problem. Or it might mean the experience of seeing your name attached to something big. Different experiences and different life designs. But we collapse them into one word and assume we know what we mean.

Build Toward What You've Actually Tasted

If you're building a product, a company, a creative practice, you're investing thousands of hours. Those hours are being exchanged for an expected future experience.

Worth spending thirty minutes asking: is that experience one I've actually felt and wanted more of?

The founders who seem most alive aren't the ones hitting the biggest milestones. They're the ones whose daily work generates the experience they were after in the first place. They wanted the experience of building, and they're building. They wanted the experience of teaching, and they're writing. The destination and the journey produce the same feeling.

Every desire is a desire for an experience. Trace yours to the root. If the experience you find there is one you've tasted, felt in your bones, and wanted more of, want a bigger version of, go. Build toward it with everything you have.

If it's a picture assembled from someone else's story, pause. The gap between what you think you want and what you actually want is where most quiet suffering lives. Not dramatic failure. Just a persistent whisper: this should feel better than it does.

  1. Robert Nozick's "Experience Machine" thought experiment, from Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Nozick argued that most people would reject perfect simulated experiences, suggesting we value something beyond how things feel. The counter: even that preference for reality is itself accessed through experience.
  2. Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire, developed in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961). Girard showed that desire is fundamentally imitative, that we learn what to want by watching others. Most of what feels like personal ambition is actually social contagion.

Rabbit Hole

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