Desire Is a Business Model

The horse, the well, and abundance.

I was on the phone with my dear friend Michael the other day — it was one of those long, winding roads of a conversation that landed somewhere unexpectedly precise. We’ve had years of them. Entire highways’ worth.

We met when I was a teenager, freshly kicked out of boarding school and living with my grandfather, whose only condition for letting me stay was that I get a job. So I did — at Blooming Hill Farm, back when it was still charming in that unselfconscious, pre–”farm aesthetic” way. Michael would come every Saturday with his partner, impossibly well-dressed ordering the same gluten-free vegan spelt loaf to snack on while they shopped. I knew they were the best-dressed people in the county because I knew the county.

We became friends in that immediate, unexplainable way — bonded by hiking, long drives, a shared tolerance for hours of conversation. We’ve probably spent more time in a car together than anyone else in my life, tracing the Hudson Valley and Maine’s coast, circling the same ideas until they sharpened into something useful. There’s a particular intimacy to that kind of time. It’s something I miss now, living on an island where every road eventually loops back on itself.

Michael has always been obsessed with one idea: abundance. He read Think and Grow Rich at nineteen, decided he’d build a billion-dollar company by fifty — and did,(firstdibs). But what’s always been more interesting than the outcome is the framework. The way he thinks. This time, as we spoke on the phone he talked about : Synthetic lack.