Why we all want the same crap

There's a queue outside a Pop Mart in Sydney's CBD. It's 7am. The people in it are waiting for a small, ugly monster doll called Labubu. They will pay anywhere from $30 to $700 for one, depending on which blind box they pull. Adults, grown, taxpaying, mortgage-holding adults, are camped on a pavement at dawn for a soft toy with teeth.

A few blocks away, someone is paying $24 for a green smoothie because Hailey Bieber drank one. Someone else is driving across the city to find a chocolate bar from Dubai filled with pistachio paste and shredded pastry, because they saw a stranger eat one on TikTok. A 1.2-litre Stanley cup has appeared on a desk in every open-plan office in the country, because last year it appeared on the desk of a woman with two million followers.

We are not, as a culture, doing well.

Is it your desire or borrowed desire?

There's a French philosopher called René Girard who spent his career arguing one quiet, devastating idea: we don't choose what we want. We copy what other people want, then tell ourselves the choice was ours. He called it mimetic desire. Luke Burgis wrote a sharp, accessible book about it in 2021 called Wanting, which is probably the most useful thing you can read this year if you're tired of buying things that don't make you happy.

Girard's point wasn't that we sometimes imitate. It's that imitation is the engine. We look around, identify what's being wanted by people we admire, or envy, or even fear, and we start wanting it too. The model can be a friend, a stranger on Instagram, a celebrity, or an algorithm. The mechanism is the same. We borrow the desire and then forget we borrowed it.

This is why you suddenly need bouclé furniture. It's why every kitchen renovation in Australia looks like every other kitchen renovation. It's why you booked Tokyo this year. It's why your daughter wants Drunk Elephant skincare at the age of nine. None of this is coming from inside you. It's being inserted, gently and constantly, by people whose job is to make you want what they want you to want.

Enter the algorithm

Girard developed mimetic theory in the 1960s, long before any of this. He was talking about literature, religion, and scapegoating. He could not have anticipated TikTok. But the algorithm is mimetic desire on industrial-scale steroids.

The feed is not neutral. It is a desire factory. It watches what you linger on, calculates what you might next be persuaded to want, and serves it back to you wrapped in a beautiful person's daily routine. The genius isn't the targeting. The genius is that you experience it as discovery. You think you found the linen jumpsuit. The linen jumpsuit found you. Two hundred thousand other women are wearing it this season because the same algorithm found them too.

Jia Tolentino wrote about this in Trick Mirror; the way the internet doesn't just reflect us, it reshapes us into versions of ourselves that perform better online. Johann Hari covered the attention economy side of it in Stolen Focus. Will Storr's The Status Game explains the deeper machinery: we are hierarchy-obsessed primates, and the feed has weaponised our oldest software.

What all of these books say, in different vocabularies, is this: you are being farmed. Your desires are the crop.

The curated life you can't afford

Perhaps the worst part isn't the wanting, it’s the spending.

We are not just borrowing desires. We are borrowing them from people whose income, lifestyle, sponsorship deals and unpaid styling teams we do not have. The woman demonstrating her morning routine has been gifted the $300 silk pyjamas. You bought yours on Afterpay. The kitchen you're saving for belongs to a couple whose mortgage is being paid by a brand deal you don't know about. The trip looks effortless because someone else booked it, someone else photographed it, and someone else is editing the reel.

We are running our actual, finite, taxed lives against a benchmark set by a fictional one. And we're losing, because the fiction is designed to be unwinnable. There is always another routine to copy, another aesthetic to chase, another ugly little monster doll to queue for at dawn.

How we forgot how to want

Somewhere in the middle of all this, a quieter loss occurred. We forgot how to ask the question.

Not what's trending. Not what would look good on the grid. Not what would my friend think. The actual question: what do I want?

Most women I know in their forties and fifties have not asked themselves that question in any serious way for years. They've been answering adjacent ones. What's expected. What's appropriate. What's on offer. What everyone else seems to be doing. The real question got buried under a decade of feed.

Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing is a slow, stubborn book about exactly this, refusing the attention economy long enough to remember you have a self. Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism takes the more practical route. Anne Helen Petersen's writing on burnout and middle-class striving fills in the economic context. None of these books are difficult to read. All of them are difficult to act on because the algorithm starts pulling you back the moment you put the phone down.

Quietening the world enough to hear yourself

There is no clever way to do this. The fix is not a new app. It's not a fortnight in Bali. It's not a course.

The fix is friction. Remove the inputs long enough to hear what's underneath them.

Stop scrolling for a week. Not as a detox. As an experiment. Notice what you stop wanting once you stop seeing it. Notice the things you thought you needed that quietly vanish from your mind by Wednesday.

Unfollow anyone whose life makes yours feel insufficient. This is not a moral judgement on them. It's hygiene. They are doing their job. You don't have to be their audience.

Audit one recent purchase. Where did you first see it? Whose feed? Whose body? Whose kitchen? Whose holiday? Track the desire back to its source. Most of the time, the source is not you.

Sit somewhere for thirty minutes without your phone. A park bench. A cafe. The car. Be bored. Be uncomfortable. Be the version of yourself that existed before continuous input. That person still has opinions. She's just been drowned out.

Ask the question on paper. What do I actually want in the next six months that has nothing to do with what I've seen online? Then sit in silence, because the answer doesn't arrive immediately. It's been gone for a while.

The point

You are running out of time to live a life that is actually yours. Not because midlife is the end of anything, but because attention is finite and yours is being spent. Every hour you spend wanting what the algorithm wants you to want is an hour you are not spending on what you would have wanted on your own.

The Labubu will not love you back. The smoothie will not change your life. The kitchen will be obsolete in four years. The aesthetic will date. The woman whose life you're copying does not know you exist.

You exist. That's the whole thing. Start there.