In his book, Wanting: the Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, Luke Burgis relates the story of the public relations genius Edward Bernays. In 1929, Bernays was approached by George Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, with a proposition: Figure out a way to induce women to smoke, and I will make you a rich man.

In 1929, hardly any women smoked. The societal taboos were too great. Bernays understood that women would only take up cigarettes if they saw smoking as a challenge to male power. In the words of A. A. Brill, a psychoanalyst who consulted with Bernays, cigarettes would need to be seen as “torches of freedom.” In the age of the nineteenth amendment, it was important to frame smoking as a woman’s right.

Bernays went to work. He planted models in New York’s Easter Day Parade, a huge event at the time (think Super Bowl halftime show), who would demonstrate that strong, attractive women – many accompanied by handsome young men – smoke. He then coaxed young, high society women to stroll down Fifth Avenue over lunch hour, smoking cigarettes, and made sure that professional photographers and journalists were there to capture the moment.

Bernays succeeded in opening an entirely new market for cigarette sales (to say nothing of the cancer treatment industry). The sales of Lucky Strikes tripled in one year. Women who had never even thought of lighting up a cigarette now wanted – and soon needed – a smoke.

The new women smokers thought that they took up smoking of their own free will. They smoked because they wanted to, which was true. What they did not realize was why they wanted to: a little Austrian-born man, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, had planted that desire in them. They wanted to smoke because other people, people they admired, wanted to smoke. Though their desire was genuine, it was not autonomous. Edward Bernays had planted it in them.

We are sometimes aware that we are imitating other people’s style and mannerisms – when we cut our hair the way that actor does, wear the same clothes the cool people do, watch the same YouTube video that 3 million other people already watched – but we are probably not aware that we mimic other people’s desires. Yet this imitation of desire is one of the driving forces in our – or in any – culture.

Desires get passed from person to person like a virus. No one thinks of a common cold as something they produced all on their own; they know they caught it from someone else. But everyone thinks that their desires are completely autonomous, all their own.

This is not true. We catch our desires, as surely as we catch our colds. They are passed onto us, wittingly and unwittingly, by parents, siblings, and friends. They are foisted on us by Madison Avenue Mad Men and Silicon Valley tech giants. I want this team to win because my dad wanted them to win. I must have the new iPhone because the beautiful people on TV love it.

The age of YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook is an era of pandemic desire. Foreign desires grow like invasive species of weeds. We have trouble distinguishing between the desires that are ours – desires that are deeply rooted in our humanity or planted by our upbringing – and the desires that have been planted in us by television and social media.

Psalm 37:4 makes a promise: “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Many people think of this as a kind of bargain: If I will delight in God, he will give me what I desire – a desire that, in all likelihood, was planted in me by someone else. That is not what the psalmist means.

When God gives us the desires of our heart, he is not giving us an object of desire; he is giving us desire itself. The desires he gives enrich our lives. Instead of bringing us into competition with others, they enhance our relationships. They deepen our passions, awaken our minds, and foster our peace. Like other desires, we “catch” them, but these we catch from God himself.

If we spend more time delighting in clever Facebook posts than in the words of the wise God, or in news media reports rather than Gospel narratives, or with clickbait advertisements instead of prayer, we will possess (or be possessed by) desires that were given by the Edward Bernays of our age and not by the everlasting God.

Desires guide and move us, but if our desires are not really ours – they have been implanted in us by peers and colleagues, television and media –where will they guide us? But when God gives us the desires of our heart, those desires guide and move us toward the richly satisfying life he intends for us, the life for which we long and for which we were made.