A response to The Harper Review’s Winter 2026 proposition, “The party is over.”
Dear editors,
Are you ready to take the next step? Of course, I mean joining a run club, being added to a “Japan 2026” group chat, updating your LinkedIn profile to recruit for internships, or submitting a master’s application—the laundry list of adulthood is endless in one way or another. Nonetheless, you may relate to any or all of these pursuits. All of these signs, I believe, are indicative of the party, the literal, carefree, going-out kind, being over: whether it is locking down long-term relationships with a ring or recommitting to wellness by swapping White Claws with ginger shots, there are whispers of the party, or this sense of carefreeness, not being en vogue anymore.
The algorithm tends to play tricks on you. Everyone appears to be moving forward but if you’re in your twenties, it will take you no less than five Instagram reels for someone to talk about their quarter-life crisis. Is founding an AI start-up, moving to New York City, or going on that trip to Asia going to offer you the life you deserve, a life where you can swap the anxiety of your next footsteps with some sort of inner zen?
French anthropologist René Girard speaks to this zeitgeist of destabilizing ambition to “move on” with adulthood through mimesis—the idea that our desires are not self-generated but learned through the imitation of others. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire asserts that our desires are manufactured—others want first and we merely follow their lead, confusing borrowed desires for our personal authentic selves. Desire, what we think to be interior, is really a social endeavor, and it’s not just clicking an influencer’s Amazon affiliate link and buying a “life-changing” polyester cream sweater. It is absolutely pervasive in our love life, academic pursuits, sociality, and self-conception. Troublingly for Girard, desires shift from wanting an object to coveting the person who possesses it and appears to be fulfilled by it, breeding resentment as the admired person becomes the obstacle to your satisfaction. Girard coins this sort of desire as “metaphysical desire” and coveting another person’s lifestyle as mimetic rivalry. What is a party, in the most literal form, if not a mimetic arena in which our desires become a performance and our achievements demand an audience?
What happens when your rival isn’t your best friend but a random twenty-something influencer? The fact that mimetic rivalry becomes ever more expansive under social media turns the party—the mimetic process—into a panopticon. Under the guise of the social media algorithm, tailored just for us, the mimetic process is amplified by making our people-watching (and wanting) constant, reciprocal, and inescapable. Marathons, acceptance to grad programs, and travel stamps on a passport are legible markers of progress, but these things could be reduced to more fundamental desires: being fit, well-learned, or cultured. Must these desires take these specific forms, or is it the comparison with the countless others in view that causes our dissatisfaction? The quarter-life crisis comes from this surplus of comparison; there are infinite rivalries and only so many moves to make.
The resurging nostalgia for earlier decades and fantasies of escape are not necessarily complete refusals of adulthood so much as attempts to evade mimetic pressure. Trends like “millennial optimism” or reliving 2016 try to resuscitate a previous party, untainted by the plague of social media’s surveillance. We yearn for an “adult” life that has not yet begun, or a carefree adolescence with no finality in sight. Even the allure of homesteading, the impulse of going off-grid, and untethering from Slack notifications follow the same logic. Our Peter Pan syndrome is a rejection of mimesis. We don’t desire the upkeep of a farm or the tricky logistics of moving across continents. Rather, we crave freedom from comparison. But escaping the current party opens its own Pandora’s box of mimetic rivalries on social, and thus aestheticized, display. For Girard, this is the trap: there is no fundamental self laying dormant beneath the layers of comparison, only shifts in who and what we imitate.
The engine of our present social order, organized by constant visibility and comparison, is running out of mimetic fuel and leading to generational burnout. At what point, beyond the gaze of others, do we confront what our inner desires really are? Perhaps what comes with ending the current mimetic party is further introspection. Girard reminds us that although we cannot outrun mimesis, we can reckon within ourselves which models are worth imitating and which commitments are worth staying for. And don’t worry about being late to that kind of party.
Provisionally,
Sarah Peter
Image: John Everett Millais, Isabella, oil on canvas, 1849 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, United Kingdom).