About - Luke Burgis

Hi, I'm Luke

Here's a quick version of my personal story

Here are some of my impressive achievements.

I grew up wanting things I didn't choose. Football was the first one. I was good enough to walk on at a Division I program, and for a while I thought that was the whole point — to be the kind of person who could. Then an injury took it away, and I had to find out who I was without the uniform. I went looking for the next thing to want.

I didn’t handle it well.

My grades tanked, and I was kicked out for fighting.

Wall Street, briefly. Then entrepreneurship. I co-founded four companies in my twenties — one of them I sold, one of them collapsed in a way that still teaches me things. I was chasing the shape of success that the people around me had agreed was the shape of success. I was very good at wanting what they wanted.

At 23, I left it to start a healthy vending machine company out of a spare bedroom in Hollywood.

My second book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in an Age of Social Contagion, comes out June 16, 2026, also with St. Martin's Press. If Wanting diagnosed why we chase the wrong things, The One and the Ninety-Nine is about how to remain a person — a singular, particular, irreducible person — in a world engineered to dissolve us into the crowd.

Then I realized I hadn't found anything at all. I was on a Sisyphean journey with no escape.

Italy is where that broke open. I went to Rome to study philosophy and theology — partly to think, partly to escape, mostly because something in me knew that the answers I needed weren't on a P&L. I read Augustine and Aquinas and walked a lot. I encountered René Girard's work and, for the first time, had language for what had been driving me all along: mimetic desire. We don't want things spontaneously. We want them through other people. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

That insight became my first book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St. Martin's Press, 2021). It found readers I never expected — founders, therapists, teachers, parents, monks. The mail I still get tells me Girard was right about more than I knew.

The work I do outside of writing flows from the same questions. I founded and direct the Cluny Institute, where we're trying to recover the older tradition of formation — the long, patient work of making a soul — and put it into conversation with the technologies and economies that are remaking us. This July, I'm launching Work as Soulcraft, an eight-module course at learn.lukeburgis.com on how to do your work in a way that builds you rather than empties you.

I live between Washington, DC and West Michigan with my wife Claire and our children. My intellectual debts run deep — to Girard, to John Paul II, to Tocqueville, Boethius, Simone Weil, Ivan Illich, Christopher Lasch. People who took the human person seriously. What drives me now is simpler than what drove me at twenty-five. I want to help people want better things, and to become the kind of people who can. That's the project. Everything else is a means to it.

I believe that the future, like each of our lives, depends on what we learn to want today.

Writing

Speaking

Workshops

Consulting

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Keep up to date with what I’m thinking and writing about. I publish to Substack on a weekly basis.

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