Under the Influence

Three rules for staying sober in a world without commercial breaks

Quick programming note: Thanks to all the new subscribers — and a special shoutout to those who graciously donated. I’m genuinely grateful. Especially since my publishing schedule has been, let’s be honest, grossly erratic.

My ongoing intention is to write tighter, shorter pieces more frequently. Since I started writing this newsletter, it’s become even clearer to me: people want more from money than just more money.

I hope this piece speaks to that deeper want and encourages you to keep the conversation going in the comments.

Sneak Preview: The Power of Wants

• Why influencers are building a Death Star for your desires

• What a hermit in the woods can teach us about self-control

• Three practical steps to regain control of your wants and build a life that’s actually yours

I thought of myself as a self-possessed man. Certain of what I wanted. Impervious to peer pressure. Disciplined.

Until an influencer made me look like a fool.

No, worse than that… a hypocrite. And not just any hypocrite, but a hypocrite in front of the two most important people in the world: my kids.

As I assume many parents are doing these days, I was reprimanding them for blowing their allowance on video game purchases. When I was a kid, you pressed A or B, ran or jumped. Now they’re bankrolling sports cars, military-grade weapons and colorful outfits. Gaming nowadays is less about saving the princess and more about building a wardrobe like one. All with real money.

They tried to explain: they wanted to boost their performance, wanted to personalize their avatar, wanted to do what all the popular YouTubers were doing. I waved off the excuses and launched into a sermon on the virtue of saving money.

Suddenly, over the sound of my sanctimonious voice, we heard the unmistakable thud of a package at the door. A package for me, containing an assortment of health supplements: gels, powders, pills, drinks, bars.

My kids asked what it was all for, how it was any different from the other stuff already crowding the kitchen cabinets.

I explained that I wanted to boost my running performance, wanted products that were more personalized to my body, wanted, wanted, wanted…

I wasn’t playing a video game. But I was playing the same “wanting game” as my kids.

Truthfully, I spent more money than I should on products that I probably don’t need because of a shirtless middle-aged man on Instagram who screamed at people for being “soft” as he sprinted up a mountain. It felt as if he were screaming at me. So, I wanted to be faster and stronger. I wanted to be up before sunrise, already finished with a run up and down a mountain before most people had finished their first cup of coffee. I wanted to prove that I was a self-possessed man.

In personal finance, there’s a common refrain about separating needs from wants. Taken a step further, the ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus said,

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

That still rings true. But I’d argue it was easier 2,000 years ago, when there were literally fewer things to want. Today, everyone everywhere at every moment is showing us something new to want.

Sometimes it’s a selfie that makes us long for an exotic vacation. Sometimes it’s a trick-shot video that inspires us to start flipping water bottles. Spend any amount of time online and you can’t help but come away wanting to buy something, possess something, do something, be something.

If “few wants” made you wealthy in the shadow of the Acropolis, what does that make us now, glowing in the light of our phones, binging on an endless stream of digital desires?

To paraphrase Ken Kesey, it’s like being a drunk who, every time he puts the bottle to his mouth, doesn’t suck out of it… it sucks out of him.

That moment with my kids sparked a personal curiosity about wants. Where do our wants come from? Why do they so often contradict who we think we are or who we want to be? Can we control them? And if so, how?

Most of all, how can we live freely in a culture saturated with influencers, where escape seems impossible for any woman, child… or supposedly self-possessed man?

Having so easily succumbed to the power of wanting, I figured the only way out was to live under a rock.

Or deep in the woods...

A want in the woods

For a long time, the sleepy village of North Pond in central Maine was haunted by a ghost.

Or maybe it was aliens. Or Bigfoot. Or, most likely, a group of bored, unruly teens. Or maybe it was all in their heads.

Someone – or something – was breaking into people’s properties in the dead of night, leaving little trace beyond the absence of an item. A favorite blanket. Food from the freezer. A full propane tank replaced with an old, empty one.

These strange occurrences went on for nearly three decades. No one ever saw the culprit clearly, giving the mystery a supernatural aura and elevating it to local legend.

Then, the cunning apparition was finally caught. It wasn’t a myth. It was real. But it – or rather, he – was perhaps the last of his kind: a person the world may never see again. He was “the last true hermit.”

After driving his car until it ran out of gas, Christopher Knight lived alone in a tent hidden deep in the Maine woods for 27 years.

Part of Knight’s camp

More than once, he nearly froze to death during the state’s brutal winters. All he had to do was walk out of the woods. But despite the harsh living conditions, he chose to stay. He wanted to be there. He was happy.

Of course, after years of theft and trespassing, Knight was arrested and jailed. Interviewed in prison, he didn’t fully explain why he became a hermit. But he did say something revealing, and in a world of nonstop connectivity and noise, something oddly poetic and moving:

“With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there.
There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant.
The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand…
To put it romantically:
I was completely free.”

Alone in the woods, there was no one to impress (except maybe a few judgmental squirrels). No worrying about what clothes to wear, what car to drive or what job title to hold. No need to track status in a world obsessed with it.

But maybe even more liberating was this: there was no one to impress him. He was free from the influence of others. His wants and desires were all his own.

Because it turns out, many of the things we think we want in life may not actually come from within us. Instead, we absorb them, often unknowingly, from others.

This is what philosopher René Girard called “mimetic desire.” He explained:

“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”

We want what others want, and we want it because they have it.

Put two kids in a room full of toys. Whatever toy one kid picks up, the other suddenly wants it even though a dozen others are still on the floor.

Like entangled electrons, we tend to mirror the people we come into contact with. And the effect multiplies.

Research suggests that it only takes 5% of “informed individuals” to influence the direction of a crowd, prompting the other 95% to follow without realizing it.

Just imagine going grocery shopping. Five people in the store have a bag of Doritos in their carts. Suddenly, you and the other 94 people start reaching for a bag, too.

But mimetic desire goes beyond snack choices or which brand of toothpaste to buy. If I admire someone’s career or lifestyle, it’s often because someone else modeled it in a way that made it appear desirable to me.

This monkey-see-monkey-want reflex offers an answer to big questions about money and life: Why do I buy what I buy? Where did my personal interests come from?

I can relate to Knight’s desire to disappear into the woods. We’re bombarded with an average of 74 gigabytes of information per day. That’s more than a highly educated person would consume in their entire lifetime 500 years ago. By embarking on a voluntary solitary confinement, Knight avoided the flood of headlines, opinions and status updates.

But I identify more with the residents of North Pond. Specifically, the eerie feeling that someone unseen is slipping into your space. Only in our case, it’s not someone taking something, it’s someone leaving something. A new want. A new desire.

Even if I don’t see it happen, I experience it: the package landing on my doorstep, the late-night scrolling, the sense of FOMO.

Now when I make a big life decision (about money, work, love) I have to wonder, is it really me making it? Or is it mimetic desire pulling the strings?

It’s the psychological equivalent of someone slipping something potent into your drink. And right now, many of us are drunk on a mimetic cocktail that only seems to be getting stronger.

Peer pressure

Something I never thought I’d say: I miss commercial breaks.

Not because I long for the days before ad-free streaming. I simply miss the days when we could take a break from someone somewhere pitching us something. Turn off the phone. Hang up the phone. Put the magazine back on the rack.

The internet is now more shopping mall than town square. Every piece of content is a form of product placement.

On Substack, every artist displays their workspace and tools like a department store catalog. On LinkedIn, every story – whether it’s about slipping on a banana peel or surviving a Mexican drug cartel kidnapping – is crafted into a lesson on improving sales. On Instagram, everyone is somewhere cooler, doing something cooler, apparently all thanks to AG1. And the show notes of every podcast now double as a digital coupon book.

We live in a world without commercial breaks.

Society has been commercialized by Silicon Valley. Kids today want to be influencers more than doctors – and so do the adults.

Always be selling. Always be optimizing. More of everything, or nothing at all. More likes, more clicks, more eyeballs.

As documentary filmmaker Faye Tsakas put it:

“Capitalism and modern technology have mixed to create an internet world where users are transformed into brands.”

To be fair, sponsorships support a lot of the things I love. And many influencers truly inspire people, myself included. So, I don’t begrudge anyone for earning money this way.

Still, it reflects something deeper: we now live in a culture of wanting. We want to influence others’ wants so we can get what we want. Every click, every scroll, every engagement is a chance to implant a new desire.

Why is everything like this? Because influencing works. It runs on our default behavior to copy the desires of other people.

One study found that when people lacked strong preferences, they simply copied the choices of others. Rather than asking questions or researching products, they deferred to the “social default.”

According to a 2024 survey, 74% of U.S. consumers have purchased something after seeing it recommended by an influencer.

Perhaps, most telling: WPP Media says ad revenue from user-created platforms, like YouTube and TikTok, is now surpassing what’s made from professionally produced content. And the money pouring into these influence engines is only increasing. The global influencer marketing industry is projected to grow by 36% between 2024 and 2025, reaching $33 billion, according to Statista.

Years ago, legendary ad man Leo Burnett said:

“Good advertising penetrates the public mind with desires and belief.”

He was describing mimetic desire. And influencing is good advertising on steroids. It’s as if Mad Men created the Death Star, to mix up my fictional universes.

It checks off all the psychological boxes. When we engage with influencers or fellow viewers, we feel connected. That sense of social proof makes us trust their choices and want to mirror them.

Influencers are seen as authoritative yet relatable. They’re more accessible than a celebrity, so it’s easier to imitate their behavior.

But of course, there’s a dark side. In a world without breaks, scrolling endlessly, we chase one desire after another and never feel satisfied.

As journalist Nicholas Carr writes in Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart:

“We’re not being manipulated to act in opposition to our desires. We’re being given what we want in quantities so generous, we can’t resist gorging ourselves.”

We’re chasing proverbial windmills – unrealistic, imaginary, impossible goals.

Which is why Girard wrote:

“The distance between Don Quixote and the petty bourgeois victim of advertising is not so great as romanticism would have us believe.”

In other words, the deluded knight tilting at windmills isn’t so different from the rest of us, easily swayed by content and social cues.

Writer and researcher Michael Easter says various surveys indicate that most people feel they’re not living true to themselves.

Instead of acquiring what we want to become who we are, we drift further from ourselves. The noise of influence smothers the one voice that matters, the quiet voice of genuine desire within, telling us who we really are and what we truly value.

To me, the thought that some of what I want – some of what I think is me – might not be truly mine but the echo of someone else’s desire… is terrifying.

Having experienced it, I understand the temptation to escape. But fleeing into the woods for 30 years isn’t practical. And besides, I don’t like to steal.

So instead, I’m trying to get better at recognizing what’s influencing me and taking back control.

This led me to the work of Luke Burgis, who has written extensively about Girard and mimetic desire. One of his most helpful contributions is a guide on how to live in a more “anti-mimetic” way. I highly recommend it.

Inspired by his ideas, I’ve developed a few personal rules based on them to help stay grounded, to resist being swept up in the latest desires and to keep moving toward what really matters.

They’ve helped me stay sober (mostly) in a digital world drunk on influence.

And they might help you too.

3 rules for staying sober in a world without commercial breaks

1. Identify the fingerprints on your life – tattoo the positive, erase the rest

What you want matters less than who is influencing what you want.

That means if you want more control over your desires, spend less time scrutinizing what you want and pay closer attention to who you allow into your orbit.

Take it from writer Chuck Palahniuk:

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.”

We’re like putty – malleable, impressionable. The world leaves its marks on us, for better or for worse.

Researchers even have a name for this: the spillover effect. Essentially, the people near us can directly influence our actions.

In a study of productivity at a large tech company, researchers found that high performers boosted the output of nearby coworkers by 15% within just a 25-foot radius. But proximity to a low performer? That dropped performance by 30%.

In other words, influence is contagious. Excellence or weakness can spread from person to person.

It’s a principle Warren Buffett has long believed in, saying:

“Who you associate with is enormously important… you are going to have your life progress in the general direction of the people that you work with, that you admire, that become your friends.”

But in a hyperconnected world, where your circle isn’t just physical but algorithmic, it’s harder to know who’s shaping you. We’ve made it easier to connect, but also easier to be influenced in ways we don’t recognize.

That’s why we need to become intentional about who we let in. Start by auditing your digital environment. Your social feed. Your inbox. The blogs you read. The newsletters you subscribe to.

Ask yourself honestly: Is this making me better or just draining my attention, energy or money?

One clear way to tell is if they help you cultivate virtues.

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and accidental modern philosopher, put it this way:

“When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them.”

Who do you think about when you need encouragement?

You may not always be able to choose your desires. But you can always choose the people you surround yourself with.

Tattoo the virtuous ones onto the skin of your life. Erase the rest.

2. Mute the world, then build your own

One of the more bombastic influencers of recent years (and that’s saying a lot) has been the Liver King, a time-traveling Viking with muscles on muscles who devours animal organs dipped in raw milk.

Except, of course, he’s not a Viking. That’s about as true as his physique, since he was exposed for using steroids. Turns out bull testicles aren’t the secret to a bigger chest. Go figure.

It’s one of many examples of how what we see online is often an illusion.

Desire is said to come from two directions: from the outside or from within. The challenge is knowing which is which.

If you start modeling your life on someone else’s – from the outside – you risk trying to build a life that isn’t attainable.

That can lead to resentment and ingratitude. You start comparing yourself to your neighbors, to strangers, to influencers. What you already have begins to feel insufficient. And your sense of self-worth becomes tethered to how you measure up.

That’s exactly how influencers want it. They don’t want you building your own world. They want you playing in theirs.

It keeps you watching, clicking, scrolling, buying.

In this way, we end up selling ourselves out. We spend our money to imitate a life that’s not real or not truly ours.

It brings to mind the story of the band Nirvana. After the massive success of Nevermind, their record label pressured them to make another album just like it. That’s what the execs wanted. What the fans wanted. What the media wanted.

But the band knew that if they gave in, they’d be betraying their artistic values.

So, in defiance, they intentionally recorded a bad album and played it for the label in a conference room. It was a dare: fire us, or let us make the music we want to make.

They got the green light. And made the music that reflected their own sound, not someone else’s.

People with strong underlying values, whether rooted in religion, philosophy or lived experience, are better protected from the forces of mimetic desire.

Research backs this up. People who prioritize intrinsic values – like relationships, personal growth or spirituality – are happier than those who chase extrinsic ones like money, power, or fame.

In a very different world from grunge rock, mathematician and hedge fund billionaire Jim Simons put it best:

“Mute the world, then build your own.”

When you define your ideals (your values, your virtues), you begin to live in an anti-mimetic way. You stop copying and start creating.

Still, it can be hard to uncover something as solid as your core values. But there are exercises that help. Here’s my favorite:

Imagine you have to leave Earth for good. Maybe a super volcano is about to blow, or an asteroid is incoming. Or, worst case scenario, the Macarena is trending again.

You’re boarding a ship to a new planet, but can only bring a few things. What do you take?

Books? Musical instruments? Hiking boots? A family heirloom? Whatever you choose, it reveals something.

If you don’t need it on Mars, do you really need it here?

Thoreau once said,

“We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.”

Influencers generally want us to paint by numbers, to create a picture that isn’t yours.

Is that really the world you want to build?

3. Serve greater, become greater

Let’s go back to the woods.

For those 27 years, Christopher Knight wasn’t chasing money or status or stuff. He wasn’t pursuing any self-centered goal. His focus was on something greater than himself: nature. His daily mission was to live in sync with its rhythms, to survive without disrupting its flow.

His one desire rested in that one greater thing, like a rock among the swirls of desire.

It’s how you stop chasing, stop comparing, stop fulfilling desires that never satisfy.

In a way, the answer to freeing ourselves from the default of chasing… is to free ourselves from ourselves.

Consider research that suggests we’re happier when we spend our time and money on others rather than on ourselves. Something in our wiring recognizes that helping others lights a deeper, more durable fire than chasing self-interest.

The most powerful way to become anti-mimetic may be to stop focusing on what you want and start focusing on what others need.

The well-being of others is something vastly greater than any one person. And, almost paradoxically, it could be the greatest way to gain influence over the world.

Dale Carnegie wrote:

“The world is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So, the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.”

That doesn’t mean erasing desire entirely. It means replacing shallow wants with something deeper, a desire to nurture. To become more disciplined. More patient. More loving.

While influencers work to hack our brains, to hijack our impulses, what we need now is a different kind of intelligence – thinking from the heart.

Maybe that’s the real problem with the influencer economy. We’re stuck in our heads. Measuring. Comparing. Calculating likes, clicks, net worths.

But our heart is our deep center. It’s the place where we are most authentically ourselves. It’s where the energy lives that nourishes everything else: our body, mind, relationships and spirit.

Consider the words of St. Bonaventure:

“Since happiness is nothing other than the enjoyment of the highest good, and since the highest good is above, no one can be happy unless he rises above himself, not by an ascent of the body, but of the heart.”

To follow your heart, in a world obsessed with metrics and mimics, may be the most radically sober — and hopeful — thing you can do.