Someone Else's Dream

How to Stop Chasing Goals You Never Chose

You're working hard for something you don't actually want.

That promotion. That lifestyle. That relationship status. Somewhere along the way, you absorbed it from someone else — a colleague, a friend, a face on social media — and now you're chasing it as if it were yours.

This is mimetic desire: the hidden force that shapes what we want. We don't generate our desires independently. We copy them from others, usually without realising. And then we wonder why achieving our goals leaves us feeling empty.

Someone Else's Dream is a practical guide to breaking free.

Drawing on René Girard's mimetic theory, Dan Siegel's neuroscience-based COAL framework, and psychological techniques for rewiring unconscious patterns, this book will help you:

• Recognise borrowed desires before they consume your time and energy
• Understand why social media makes the problem dramatically worse
• Identify your mimetic triggers and trace your goals to their real origins
• Distinguish between what you actually want and what you've been trained to want
• Build a life around authentic desires rather than inherited scripts

This isn't about rejecting ambition. It's about making sure the ambition is actually yours.

Short, practical, and designed to be used — not just read.