Work as Soulcraft
You have been wanting things your whole life.
Have any of them actually been yours?
Work as Soulcraft is an 8-module course on desire, agency, and becoming the author of your own life.
Begin the courseThe problem
Most people spend their careers wanting what others want. The right title. The right salary. The approval of people they admire. The path that signals success to the people around them. It looks like ambition. It is actually something else.
The philosopher René Girard called it mimetic desire—the tendency to want what others want, not because we have chosen it, but because we have caught it. It is invisible. It is contagious. And it is, right now, running your career.
Soulcraft is the opposite. It is work that actually forms you—that builds something in you rather than just consuming your time. Most careers are not soulcraft. They are transactions: your hours for their money, your compliance for their approval, your ambition for a borrowed sense of self.
This course is the practical translation of a better idea. Eight modules. Five structured challenges. One animating question: what do you actually want?
Interactive
What is your desire type?
Three questions. Honest answers. A diagnosis that Module 1 was built around.
1.When you imagine succeeding at work, what does that feel like?
2.When someone you respect disapproves of a decision you have made, you:
3.The last time you changed career direction, it was because:
The curriculum
Eight modules. One question.
Each module builds on the last. The five interactive challenges are not optional exercises—they are where the real work happens.
The Nature of Work
What work actually is—across its objective, subjective, and transcendent dimensions.
The Work Profile
Discovering the motivational pattern that is already shaping your choices.
Inherited Desires
Mapping the desires your family handed you before you had any say in the matter.
Models: Mediators & Obstacles
Naming the people whose desires you have absorbed—and deciding which ones to keep.
Contagion
How desire spreads through culture, institutions, and the people closest to you.
Thick vs. Thin Desires
What is actually worth wanting—and how to tell the difference from the inside.
The Long Game
Writing the letter your future self will either thank you for or have to explain.
Agency
Translating clarity into a 90-day commitment you will actually keep.
The companion book
The One and the Ninety-Nine
This course is the live companion to The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in an Age of Social Contagion (St. Martin’s Press, June 2026).
The book gives you the framework. The course makes it operational in your actual work and life.
Pre-order the bookWhy this course
What makes this different
Not content, formation
Most courses deliver information and leave you to figure out the rest. This one delivers challenge. Every module ends with a structured exercise that forces contact with your own situation.
AI that knows the material
The Ask Luke widget is trained on all of Luke Burgis’s books, essays, and thinking—including Wanting, years of writing on mimetic theory, and the research behind this course. It is not a chatbot. It is a tutor.
Built for your specific situation
The course begins with an intake conversation that shapes everything that follows. The challenges respond to your answers. The profile is yours. This is not a template.
The community
The Wall
Every cohort leaves a mark. When students write by hand — their desires, their commitments, the sentences that matter — they add them here.
Physical handwriting appearing in a digital feed. The strangeness is the point.
See what students are writing →Stop inheriting your ambitions.
8 modules. Real exercises. One question: What do you actually want?
From $199
Enroll in Work as SoulcraftLifetime access · All 8 modules