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Anti-Mimetic Medicine—Part I

Navigating the U.S. healthcare system after your fourth wall has been shattered

10 min readAug 11, 2023
Robin Williams as “Patch Adams”

Default imitation often leads us into health trouble.

If you eat the way that everybody else eats, you’re going to feel miserable. You cannot simply accept the choices offered to you on the menu of the convenience-driven, standard American diet. To be truly healthy, you need to swim upstream and make intentional choices that may not readily present themselves — they require effort to discover and adopt. (Unless you were lucky enough to be born into a family for whom the Mediterranean Diet was passed on culturally, so that it’s part of your very soul — but even then, you still likely have to work very hard to make it part of your daily life.)

The same goes for exercise. If you were to walk into a gym and look around at the machine-patterned movements surrounding you, you’d be severely restricted in the progress you could make. Despite its problems, this is why CrossFit was effective in its early days — it broke people out of the standard patterns, although CrossFit later became a hotbed of internal mimesis itself.

This brings me to what I’ve been thinking about for much of the past seven months as my wife, Claire, and I have been navigating our first pregnancy. I’ve seen a new side of the…

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Luke Burgis
Luke Burgis

Written by Luke Burgis

Author of “WANTING: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life.” Find more at read.lukeburgis.com

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