The Nike shoes arrive on Tuesday. By Wednesday, you have the watch, the running app, and a saved list of marathons you might enter. You know what the serious runners wear. You have opinions about their equipment. Your mornings look exactly as they did last week.

The purchase happened.
The running hasn’t.

I keep seeing versions of this everywhere. In people’s personal lives. In the way we consume books and talk about knowledge. In businesses that announce a transformation because someone finished a presentation.

We want what the person has at the end. We are much less interested in what happened between wanting it and being able to do it. Sometimes, when we finally look closely at that person’s life, we discover we don’t particularly want that either.

In the clips below, Oren discusses Gear Acquisition Syndrome: becoming absorbed in acquiring equipment while spending little time on the activity itself. A separate video by @theryanexperience, “The Corruption of Taste,” looks at how people can spend years wanting an experience they don’t actually enjoy.

Together, they point to something larger than buying too much stuff. We can borrow an ambition, buy its visible signs, and feel closer to a life we haven’t examined.

We usually encounter success after much of its history has disappeared from view. We see the published photograph. We don’t see the photographs that were deleted, or the years in which the photographer learned to notice what was worth photographing.

Suppose that one shot required an eight-hour trek, a return trip after bad weather, and the judgment to wait another twenty minutes. None of that is included with the camera. Neither are the countless bad photographs that helped the photographer learn what to do differently.

The camera is easy to identify. You can look up the model and order it. Learning to see takes a different kind of involvement. That is why a camera isn’t photography. Zoom isn’t collaboration, HubSpot isn’t marketing, and an architect’s desk is not architecture. These things can help someone practise a discipline. Owning them tells us remarkably little about how well someone practices that discipline.

Obsessed with the effect with zero fucking clue to its cause.

The confusion gets worse when we explain success by looking backward from it. A successful person owns an expensive desk, follows a morning routine, and uses a certain app. We assemble those details into a recipe. Some may have helped. Others may be preferences or things success allowed them to buy.

Even the invisible history includes more than effort. Someone had help. Someone had time another person couldn’t afford. Failed attempts, advantages, relationships, and breaks could have gone another way. “They worked hard” can be just as lazy an explanation as “they used this camera” if we use it to stop investigating.

But understanding what produced the result still leaves another question: why do we want that result in the first place?

René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire offers one way to examine this. In his account, others shape what we want. Someone becomes a model for us, and what they desire becomes desirable to us. What feels like a personal ambition may have taken shape through our attention to someone else.

@theryanexperience

We rarely choose things because we want them. We want them because we’ve been told to want them. Mimesis is not new, but the method of mimesis is. It used to be a friend, a social circle close to ours, now it’s been corrupted by influence, social media, and machinery of marketing. This isn’t inherently wrong. But it does mean brands need to be smart about how they seek to build and design their experiences.

♬ original sound – Ryan

Think about a content creator selling a product from a beautiful apartment. You see the income, the apparent freedom, the audience that listens when they speak. You start imagining yourself with the same business.

Then look at an ordinary Tuesday inside it.

Suppose the morning involves rewriting a script that still isn’t working. The afternoon goes into filming, reviewing footage, and fixing an explanation people keep misunderstanding. There are customer questions, a refund request, and a product that needs updating. A launch did less than expected. The next piece still needs to be made.

Some creators have teams for parts of that work. Hiring, paying, and directing those people becomes part of the job. The particular arrangement varies, but the business has recurring obligations beyond the moment you saw on your phone.

You would also need to understand what came before: how they found their audience, which products failed, what they invested, and what they gave up to keep going. Their current setup doesn’t show you what it cost to get there.

You might look at that day and think, “Oh shit. I don’t actually want to do this.”

You wanted the income and the control over your time. Those are understandable desires. That doesn’t mean you want to spend your time running this particular business. Enjoying someone’s videos is a different relationship to the work from producing them. The same is true of loving a hotel and wanting to operate one.

You don’t have to enjoy every task to choose a worthwhile life. But you do need to understand the obligations you are accepting. The freedom you admire may be worth the obligations it demands of the person living it. You may prefer a different trade.

The marathon runner makes this easier to see. The finish-line photograph records a moment. The runner has lived the training: fitting runs around work, adjusting plans, protecting time for recovery, and choosing what else will get less attention. The tracksuit doesn’t tell you much about those choices.

You might want the pride of finishing a marathon. You might discover you enjoy training for one. You might also discover that you love a short run and have no interest in arranging your life around a race. That is useful information about what you want.

The fantasy lets us imagine receiving the rewards while leaving our ordinary days largely untouched. The life itself requires us to decide what those days will contain.

You could learn the skills, build the business, and reach the income goal, then discover you dislike the life you’ve created. Getting good at something doesn’t settle whether you want it to fill your days.

Other people can also introduce us to things we come to love. A friend gets you running. A photographer makes you curious enough to pick up a camera. Someone else’s work opens a possibility you hadn’t considered. Being influenced doesn’t make the resulting interest fake.

We don’t need to prove that every desire originated independently inside us. We need to let experience tell us something about it. Does the interest grow as we participate? Are the rewards worth the costs? Do we want enough of the actual life to keep choosing it?

Shopping gives us an easier question to answer.

Yesterday, becoming a photographer was a vague ambition. Today, a camera sits on the table. You can hold it, learn its controls, and picture yourself using it. The purchase is complete. You have evidence that something happened.

Consumer researchers have studied how purchases can help people feel closer to an identity they want, including through symbolic self-completion. That emotional value can be real. The shoes might make someone feel comfortable joining a running club. The camera might get them out of the house.

The problem begins when that feeling becomes sufficient evidence that the larger change has happened. We can become satisfied with preparing to do something, or keep preparing because the first attempt will expose how poorly we currently do it.

The equipment arrives finished.
Our ability doesn’t.

The bookshelf belongs in this conversation too. You can own the books, recognize the names, highlight the passages, and become fluent in a subject’s language. That fluency can conceal how little you know what to do with the ideas. Take away the book and put an unfamiliar problem in front of you. Can you explain what’s happening? Can you use the idea without forcing the situation to fit it? Can you recognize where it stops being useful?

Reading can change how we see. But when the claim is that we have developed judgment, the number of books we’ve finished cannot settle it. We have to try using the ideas and find out where we got them wrong.

I learned something about this through copywork during college. I studied advertisements, including Neil French’s work and GQ magazine. I copied the writing and paid attention to how words, sentences, and paragraphs were put together as I developed my own English.

Copying was part of the work. Imitation can help develop ability when it requires close attention and practice. Studying how someone made something is a different activity from putting their finished result in your window.

“Do the work” also needs to mean more than accumulating hours. Someone can repeat an ineffective approach for years. Someone else can find a better tool or teacher and improve much faster. Relevant work means trying, noticing what happens, and adjusting. Otherwise, effort becomes another thing to display.

This is what frustrates me about so much advice circulating online. The explanation leaves out the conditions that made something work, then presents the visible pieces as a repeatable path to the same result.

Use these words.
Follow this routine.
Copy this homepage.
Install this stack.

Following the advice produces an immediate change. Your writing sounds more like the writing you admire. Your website resembles the websites of companies you want to compete with. You have something to show before you’ve established whether it solves anything.

I understand the appeal. An unresolved problem is uncomfortable. A template gives you somewhere to start. A checklist tells you when you’re finished. The trouble is when people sell finishing the checklist as solving the problem.

What had to be true for the original approach to work? What was tried before it? Which part depended on resources you don’t have? A neat recipe can look much more convincing when nobody asks about the missing history.

The promise can also change halfway through. You wanted more control over your life. You were shown a creator’s business. Now you’re buying a course about running that kind of business without examining whether its daily demands would give you the control you wanted.

Another question worth asking when we find ourselves chasing something: what does pursuing it let us avoid?

Someone says they want to build a large audience. They want to become known. Ask why, and they say, “So clients come to me.” Ask how many new clients they actually need each month, and they say, “One or two.”