The Fantasy That Someone Else Holds the Secret to Your Life
Why some people search for themselves in others.
Updated May 18, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
One scene still lingers in my mind when I think back on it. After a session, one, two, sometimes even three or four people in their early twenties would surround me in the hallway and stop me from leaving, pressing me to explain exactly how I had arrived at this point in my life. I was old enough to represent a version of success they wanted, yet still young enough to feel psychologically within reach — close enough to sustain the fantasy that a life could be copied if only its hidden logic were revealed.
On the surface, these interactions appeared harmless:
“How did you get to where you are today?” “What exactly did you do?” “What was the secret?” “How did you make it work?”
Human beings naturally learn through observation and imitation. We are curious about people we admire. We want guidance, reassurance, and perspective from those who seem further along in life than we are.
But over time, I began to notice that some questions are not really questions at all.
Some people are not seeking perspective or knowledge; they are seeking replication—and psychologically, those are very different things.
Healthy curiosity usually has a clear structure. A person asks for your thoughts, your interpretation, or your experience in order to better understand themselves and their own situation. The boundary between self and other remains intact. They may admire you, learn from you, or be inspired by you, but they still experience themselves as fundamentally separate individuals with their own path, limitations, temperament, history, and possibilities.
But there is another kind of interaction that feels very different.
In these conversations, the other person’s attention becomes intensely focused on you rather than on the actual issue they supposedly came to discuss. The emotional tone underneath the interaction often carries a strange mixture of admiration, anxiety , dependency, comparison, and concealed hostility.
It can begin to feel as though the person is not asking, “What can I learn from your perspective?” but rather, “How do I become you — and obtain the life you seem to possess?”
That shift matters because underneath it often lies a fantasy that another person’s life can somehow be decoded, extracted, and reproduced — as if fulfillment, identity , or success exist as transferable formulas rather than deeply individual developmental processes.
Many people unconsciously carry the belief that if they could only eliminate the “information gap,” their life would finally fall into place. If only someone (seemingly) successful would tell them the hidden strategy, the exact pathway, or the invisible shortcut, then they too could arrive at the same destination.
But this fantasy rests on a profound misunderstanding of human life. It assumes that people become who they are primarily through techniques rather than temperament, suffering, contradiction, instinct, endurance, relationships, history, and internal structure.
It also quietly denies individuality itself, because if another person’s life can simply be copied, then their life was never truly theirs to begin with.
Over time, I realised that what unsettled me in those scenes that stayed with me was not curiosity itself. It was a weakening of boundaries . Some people do not fully experience others as psychologically separate individuals. Instead, they experience others as templates, extensions, or containers for their own unrealised self.
This dynamic can emerge in certain environments: highly achievement-oriented cultures, enmeshed family systems, socially comparative spaces, or communities where individuality is weakly differentiated and external validation becomes central to identity. Under these conditions, another person’s success can become psychologically difficult to tolerate.
Because instead of recognising, “That person has their own life,” the unconscious assumption becomes, “If they have it, then perhaps I should have it too.”
And once that assumption takes hold, admiration can quickly collapse into envy , resentment, entitlement, or obsessive comparison. The other person becomes a mirror against which one’s own inadequacy is constantly measured.
At its core, this is often not really about ambition but limitation.
One of the hardest psychological tasks in early adulthood (roughly from age 18 to 30) is accepting that life is inherently unequal, incomplete, and finite. You cannot become every possible version of yourself. You cannot live every life. You cannot possess every talent, experience, relationship, identity, or future.
And yet many people continue to live psychologically as though this reality should not apply to them.
This creates what psychoanalytic thinkers might describe as omnipotence fantasies — an unconscious refusal to fully accept limitation, separateness, and reality itself.
Modern culture often intensifies these fantasies rather than softening them. Social media constantly exposes people to curated identities, idealised lifestyles, and visible markers of success. Gradually, many people begin to feel that every life should theoretically be attainable.
But psychologically mature people eventually understand something difficult: You cannot have it all.
Paradoxically, accepting this limitation is precisely what allows people to become calmer, more grounded, more internally stable, and happier.
The happiest and most psychologically mature people I have known all seem to share a similar quality. They do not spend their lives trying to decode other people’s existence. Because they are capable of recognising the legitimacy of other people’s success without collapsing into comparison. Perhaps most importantly, they are not consumed by fantasies of becoming someone else, they are capable of appreciating what they already are and have.
Increasingly, I believe psychological maturation begins precisely there: when a person stops searching for the secret to someone else’s life and begins the far more difficult task of building their own.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality . Tavistock.
Klein, M. (1935). A contribution to the psychogenesis of manic-depressive states. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 16 , 145–174.
Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism . Jason Aronson.
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Elizabeth Li, Ph.D., is a researcher, lecturer, and psychotherapist exploring how mental conditions take shape—and how psychotherapy helps.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.