The Antimime
Aug 16, 2025
Everything you want is just you copying what others want. What you really want is greatness. Greatness requires the ability to choose what you want.
The hierarchy of desire
Humans evolved to satisfy a hierarchy of basic drives:
1. survival: hunger, sleep
2. social: sex, belonging, dominance
3. personal: finding meaning, appreciating beauty, continuous evolution
Everything we want can be reduced to these three universal drives.
Since humans share the same fundamental drives, we evolved a heuristic called mimesis: we infer how to satisfy our drives by copying others. If all your tribe members strive to be good hunters, being a good hunter is probably a good way to satisfy your survival and social needs. If all your friends want to become L9 Google engineers or PE managers or saas founders or AI researchers, those are probably all paths to reach a “good life".
Instead of sifting through infinite possible future paths, mimesis offers a reliable shortcut to satisfying our core drives. It's hard to understand just how caught up in hundreds of mimetic webs you (and everyone else) really are. Internalizing this is a radical change like emerging from plato's cave: it completely reorients your weltanschauung, your worldview.
The hierarchy of mimesis
Not only are we evolved for mimesis, but all the constructs of modern society are set up to help you fit in. The education system is not designed to "bring out the unique potential in each person", rather it is a filtering mechanism for a specific set of criteria: who can maximize a goal given to them, who has innate mental capacity, and who can work hard.
Early in life, you are low in the pyramid of desire, and mimesis serves you well. Bhe further you go up the categories of drives (from one to three), the less mimesis serves you.
survival: If you want to know what to eat, copying others works well because food changes little across time. Exploring novel food combinations will, in the best case, yield yet another good choice among the thousands of options.
social: If you want to climb the modern social hierarchy, mimesis can get you some ways up. But the pinnacle of the hierarchy requires you to achieve something both unique and impactful. Those atop the social hierarchy went against traditional mimetics of their time (Elon, Dimon, Buffett, Munger, Thiel, etc).
personal: On your journey of self-actualization, mimesis is a mortal enemy. Cloning the path someone else took will lead you away from where you truly ought to be. Self-actualization is your personal and unique journey toward greatness.
Mimesis is not all bad. Anything that has either 1. lasted the test of time (Lindy) 2. Is common across the world (and thus is fundamental to humanity) likely satisfies a core element of being human. Examples are marriage, storytelling, artistic craftsmanship, raising children, leadership, and athletic greatness.
Antimimesis
At the stage in your life where self-actualization becomes most important, you need to break out of your conditioning "think independently". This is a more radical statement than may initially seem, because your entire identity is the product of a system optimized to craft mimetic students.
Run this thought experiment:
“What would you do if there were no other people in the world?”
An honest answer would get to your true internal motivations, eliminating sexual competitive drives or hierarchy optimizations. It also helps in zooming outside your local circles. The keyword is honest, because your hidden conditioning will yield a few initial inauthentic answers.
Once you know what you want, you must choose to surround yourself with positive influences that align with your true self. Who you choose to surround yourself with is the single most important decision you can make, because no matter what, you will clone what’s around you. Youc an use mimesis to your adventage: surrounded by the right people, you are nearly guaranteed to succeed.
Your personal god is what you strive toward, your definition of the best "good life". It is antimimetic in nature, necessarily one-of-a-kind, because each person has different essences and memories which motivate their true desires. So it cannot be found via mimesis. Strongly defining this personal god, essentially knowing what you truly want, is the first step on the good path. This first step thus requires you to be able to tune out mimetics.
Some asides/clarifications:
1. Babies operate at the lowest possible point on the hierarchy of desire, so they are entirely mimetic entities. The best babies are the ones who clone behavior efficiently (for example, language acquisition is an entirely mimetic process).
2. By telling others what you’re doing, you increase the power mimesis holds over you. You start to subconsciously do things for the reward of telling others, rather than for their own sake.
3. LLMs are aggregated universal mimetic entities. By default, the more you rely on them, the more you regress to the mean (though you can condition models out of this).
4. Alpha of any kind is by definition not known to others. Mimesis is antithetical to seeking alpha. This is the bedrock of Thiel’s operational philosophy.
5. It is still typically useful to achieve some marker of success along the “traditional dimensions” to act as an efficient credibility stamp. Most great things were built in collaboration.
6. You are on a journey for its own sake.