More Than Anything Else… You Are a Wanter

Identity is Formed by What You Want—But Who Taught You to Want?

In his article “Human After All,” Ben Christenson lays out something we’re all starting to realize, whether we’ve admitted it to ourselves or not: algorithms are not just helping us find content we like—they’re actively shaping what we like. They are, as he puts it, reshaping our very humanity.

This isn’t just some abstract academic claim. The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma gives us a front-row seat to the unsettling reality behind our screens. Former tech insiders—engineers and designers from Google, Facebook, and Twitter—admit they helped create tools that now manipulate our behavior on a massive scale. They explain how social media doesn’t just offer content we might enjoy; it studies us, predicts us, and ultimately nudges us.

The goal? Keep us hooked. And the method? Appeal to our base instincts: our fears, insecurities, cravings, and vanities.

It’s not just about serving your interests anymore—it’s about shaping them.

Christenson writes:

“Algorithms don’t merely find content to match your tastes, they can conform your tastes and opinions to fit the algorithm. And what we’re witnessing is that the simplest solution for maximum engagement is an appeal to, and reshaping around, base instincts. Inflame insecurities, anxieties, and sinful appetites. Play to the least-common-denominator.”

Jack Dorsey, ex-CEO of Twitter (quoted in Christenson’s article), goes even further:

“I think the free speech debate is a complete distraction right now. I think the real debate should be about free will. We feel it right now because we are being programmed. We’re being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in, and we are told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting… [That’s] why these corporations became so large and so valuable is because they solved the discovery problem on the internet.”

In other words, we don’t just consume anymore—we are being consumed. And that’s because, at our core, we are not independent thinkers as much as we are want-driven beings. We are wanters.

You Are What You Want

This article is the third in a series on human identity. In my last post, I explored how we are feeders—creatures defined by what we consume. You can check that article out [here]. This follow-up dives into a complementary idea: just as we are defined by what we eat, we are shaped by what we want.

Now, at first glance, that might sound a little too simple. A bit too obvious.

But let’s go back to the beginning.

If anyone had it all, it was Eve. She had the perfect marriage, the ultimate dream home—literally paradise—a perfect body (probably zero cellulite), apparently talking animals, and a mission of eternal significance. She had a high, royal, God-given calling to rule creation alongside her husband and help him in his mission.

She had it all. What more was there to want? And yet Satan STILL got at her through her desires. “She looked, she saw, she wanted.”

She listened to her own desires. And in doing so, she set the pattern for every human after her.

The modern identity quest—“find yourself,” “listen to your heart,” “follow your truth”—is basically Eve’s story in different packaging. We’re told not to follow tradition, family, or faith. We’re told to find our own path and feel our way forward.

As Northrup Frye put it:

“To fall (sin) is to choose an illusion—it’s not about choosing the wrong reason.”

That illusion is that our desires are neutral, pure, authentic. That if we follow them, we’ll find ourselves. But the biblical picture says otherwise.

Mimetic Wanting: You Don’t Want Alone

René Girard, a French philosopher, put forth a radical idea that flips our understanding of desire on its head: we never desire anything independently. That might sound strange, but stay with me.

We tend to imagine desire as a two-way street: me and the thing I want. I see it, I assess it, and I decide, based on my good sense, that I want it.

But Girard said that’s not how it works.

There’s always a third party—a model—in the equation. Someone we watch, consciously or not, who shows us what is desirable. Our wanting is mimetic—we mimic what others want. We desire not just objects, but the desire of others.

In unpacking Girard’s philosophy, Luke Burgis makes this theory clear in his book Wanting:

“In other words, we assume that we go throughout our day neutral, unbiased, objective observers making independent choices. But this is very far from true.”

All day, every day, we move from one desire to another. We scroll, we shop, we compare. And we’re doing it not as sovereign individuals, but as deeply influenced wanters in a sea of other wanters.

Burgis sums it up:

“Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we are born with; it’s a freedom we have to earn.”

That’s the core of the Christian understanding, too. The goal isn’t to stop wanting, as Buddhism suggests, but to want rightly. We were made to long, hunger, desire. But it’s what we aim our desires at that determines whether we become slaves or free people.

The Takeaway: Train Your Desires

The modern search for identity is built on a foundation that’s way too childishly simplistic: What you want is the starting and ending point of your identity quest. But that’s not just naive—it’s dangerous.

Instead, we should learn something from the very algorithms that manipulate us. Just as they train our desires (for their own profit), we should intentionally train our desires for goodness.

The modern craving for social media originates from a good hunger to be fed with loyalty-aligning, imagination-based stories.

C.S. Lewis believed that stories were a key way to do this. Great stories, he argued, hijack our imagination and channel our desires in the right direction. They form us. They reshape what we long for.

Stories hijack our felt longings while satisfying and conditioning them. They create both Christian hedonism and desire training in one easy package. Stories work on us in the same way algorithms do—but for good.

God made us this way. That’s why the Bible doesn’t just give us commands—it gives us visions, parables, images, and stories. It taps into our hunger for fulfillment and our longing for love.

“I will restore Israel to his pasture, and he shall feed on Carmel and in Bashan, and his desire shall be satisfied on the hills of Ephraim and in Gilead.”

—Jeremiah 50:19

So the question isn’t whether you want.

The question is: Who taught you to want what you want?

And the deeper question is: what are you doing to train your desires toward the good, the true, and the beautiful?