The Dreams You're Living Aren't Yours
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
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Grace was dying.
After 67 years of marriage, three children, and a life that looked perfect from the outside, she lay in the hospital bed with tears streaming down her face.
“I wanted to travel the world,” she whispered to her palliative care nurse. “I wanted to write stories. I wanted to live alone in a small apartment in Paris and eat croissants every morning.”
She paused, struggling to breathe.
“But everyone expected me to be the perfect wife. The perfect mother. I lived the life they wanted me to live, not the one I dreamed about.”
Grace died three days later.
Her nurse, Bronnie Ware, would later write that this was the most common deathbed regret she heard: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
But here’s what Ware didn’t realize—and what you need to understand: Grace’s story isn’t just about lacking courage.
It’s about something far more disturbing.
Grace never had her own dreams to begin with.
The Lie You’ve Been Living
French philosopher René Girard spent his life studying something he called “mimetic desire”—the idea that human beings don’t actually know what they want.
Instead, we copy the desires of others.
We see someone driving a Tesla, and suddenly we want a Tesla. Not because we analyzed our transportation needs, but because someone we admire or envy made that choice seem desirable.
We watch someone building a startup, getting married, moving to New York, buying a house, having kids—and we start wanting those things too.
Girard called this “the romantic lie”—the belief that our desires spring from some deep, authentic place inside us. The truth is more unsettling: we’re constantly borrowing other people’s dreams and mistaking them for our own.
Think about it.
Why do you want the relationship you want? The career you’re building? The lifestyle you’re pursuing?
Is it because you sat quietly with yourself and carefully considered what would bring you joy and meaning?
Or is it because you’ve seen others live that way and decided it looked appealing?
Most people—if they’re honest—will realize their desires are borrowed. Copied. Mimicked.
They’re living someone else’s vision of a good life.
The Instagram Prison
Social media has turned mimetic desire into a precision weapon.
Every day, you’re exposed to thousands of curated versions of other people’s “successful” lives. The entrepreneur with the beachside laptop. The couple with the perfect wedding. The friend with the dream job.
Each image plants a seed: Maybe I should want this too.
You start following people whose lives you want to copy. You bookmark their posts. You screenshot their quotes. You study their strategies.
Without realizing it, you’re replacing your own inner compass with someone else’s GPS.
The result? You end up spending years—maybe decades—chasing goals that were never really yours to begin with.
You build the business you saw someone else build. You move to the city everyone else thinks is cool. You optimize for the metrics that make others impressed.
And then one day, you wake up feeling empty.
Because you’ve achieved someone else’s dreams, not your own.
The Tragedy of the Unlived Life
There’s a special kind of suffering reserved for people who reach the end of their lives and realize they never actually lived.
Palliative care workers report the same story over and over:
People on their deathbeds don’t regret the chances they took or the mistakes they made. They regret the chances they didn’t take because they were too busy living up to other people’s expectations.
They regret working jobs they hated to buy things they didn’t need to impress people they didn’t like.
They regret staying in relationships that felt safe but empty.
They regret playing small because big dreams seemed too selfish, too risky, too different from what everyone else was doing.
Most heartbreakingly, many of them regret never figuring out what they actually wanted in the first place.
Carl Jung wrote about this phenomenon—the tragedy of the unlived life. The parts of ourselves we never explore because we’re too busy being who others expect us to be.
The dreams we never pursue because they don’t fit the template of success we’ve absorbed from our culture.
The paths we never walk because they seem too weird, too risky, too far from what others would understand or approve of.
This is the deepest source of human suffering: not living your own life.
The Myth of Authenticity
“Just be authentic,” they say.
But what if you don’t know who you authentically are?
What if you’ve spent so long copying others that you’ve lost touch with your own desires, your own values, your own vision of what a meaningful life looks like?
This is the trap most people fall into. They hear advice about “following their passion” or “being true to themselves,” and they panic because they realize they don’t actually know what that means.
Their passions feel borrowed. Their values feel inherited. Their dreams feel like hand-me-downs from people they’ve admired.
The solution isn’t to just “dig deeper” and try to find some buried authentic self. That self might not exist—at least not in the way we imagine.
The solution is to consciously choose what to want.
The Art of Conscious Desire
Here’s what Girard understood but few people teach:
Since all desire is learned, you can learn to desire consciously instead of unconsciously.
You can choose your models instead of letting random influences on social media choose them for you.
You can ask better questions:
Instead of “What do I want?” ask “Who am I copying, and do I want to become like them?”
Instead of “What should I do?” ask “What would I regret not trying?”
Instead of “What will make me successful?” ask “What would make me feel alive?”
This is the difference between mimetic desire and conscious desire:
Mimetic desire copies what others have already chosen.
Conscious desire chooses based on what you want to become.
The Questions That Cut Through the Noise
Want to know if your dreams are really yours? Ask yourself these questions:
If no one else would ever know about your accomplishments, would you still want them?
Most people want recognition more than they want the actual thing they’re working toward. Strip away the audience, and you’ll discover what actually matters to you.
If you could live five completely different lives, what would they be?
This question bypasses the either/or thinking that keeps people trapped. You don’t have to choose just one path—but you do need to know what paths actually appeal to you.
What did you love doing before you cared what others thought?
Childhood interests, before they got filtered through social expectations, often point toward authentic desires.
What would you do if you knew you’d die in exactly ten years?
This removes the pressure to build something that lasts forever and focuses attention on what feels meaningful right now.
What are you afraid people will think if you pursue what you actually want?
Often, the thing you’re most afraid to want is the thing you most authentically want.
The Loneliness of Authentic Living
Here’s the part no one tells you about living authentically:
It’s lonely.
When you stop copying other people’s dreams and start pursuing your own, you leave the crowd behind.
You stop getting likes for the content that resonates with everyone else.
You stop fitting into neat categories that people can understand and approve of.
You stop being able to explain your choices in ways that make immediate sense to others.
This is the price of authenticity: you have to be willing to be misunderstood.
But here’s what you gain: you get to live your own life.
You get to die knowing you at least tried to figure out what you actually wanted and gave it your best shot.
You get to experience the rare satisfaction of pursuing goals that feel genuinely yours, even if they don’t make sense to anyone else.
Your Life is Not a Dress Rehearsal
Grace died with tears on her face because she realized too late that she had lived someone else’s version of a good life.
You don’t have to.
You can start right now asking yourself the hard questions:
What am I doing because I think I should?
What am I avoiding because it doesn’t fit the template?
What would I try if I knew I couldn’t fail?
What would I try if I knew I probably would fail, but it would be worth attempting anyway?
Your life is not a dress rehearsal. This is the only shot you get.
And the worst thing that can happen isn’t that you’ll fail at pursuing your authentic dreams.
The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll succeed at pursuing someone else’s.
You’ll build the perfect replica of a life you never actually wanted.
You’ll reach the end having never asked yourself what you truly desired.
You’ll die like Grace—with tears on your face, whispering about the life you never had the courage to live.
The dreams you’re living aren’t yours.
But the dreams you could choose to live are.
The question is: will you?
Thank you for reading.
– Scott