Thin desires are eating life

I bake bread. I have spent a good deal of time optimizing the recipe for deliciousness but also for time efficiency. Proving in a warm oven is a great tip. Also baking two loaves at a time!

All this nit picking about writing style is disappointing. I like that this person got their ideas out there. They are good ideas. Legible and easy to parse == good enough. I don't care about the writing style any more than that and you shouldn't either. It is a waste of everyone's time... yours especially.

It's very nice to hear about someone else who is interested in doing hard things/real things. Seems like there ought to be a meet up or a get together opportunity for people working on stuff like that. Perhaps a get-together where everyone gives a 2-5 minute talk about something they are working on then we all hang out for another hour or two. Seems like alcohol might help get the wheels spinning?

I fully appreciate the need for a catchy headline with a hook (it got me!) but I wonder if these ideas would be more powerful/useful if expressed in positive language rather than doom speak? I guess doom speak is the fashion these days and we all have to conform to the dominant paradigm... at least a little around the edges.

Generally... Bravo. Nice piece. Nice ideas.

I expected the author to have language learning as an example, but they did not include it. I wonder where Duolingo fits in this, I see a new language learning app every week.

This changed everything. I found I was pretty good at it. It felt good because it was tangible, and it required me to learn and probe and practice. I kept at it. This grew in ways I couldn't imagine.

Now, I make collectible resin maquettes and busts and I even started making latex halloween masks. It's been a crazy journey to where I am now, with so much more ahead. I've met people and interact with people in ways I didn't just a short time ago. It's changed my life. It's thick. All of it.

> The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.

Joke's on them! I run my oven until the temperature inside is ~100F - about a minute or so. Then I turn it off and set the dough in there along with some water (for humidity). It rises super fast compared to my kitchen which is ~65F in the winter and the bread is just as flavorful. Definitely not indifferent to my optimization.

What helps me is to focus on today. If I can spend even an hour on a topic and get lost in it or even get frustrated by it, it is time well-spent. I was going to say "it is progress" instead of "time well-spent" but even that's a trap. Progress implies moving forward in a preferred direction. While I can't say I don't want to make progress, I am training myself to care less about it. It is really the time spent engaging that's most valuable (at least to me).

Every sentence is separated into its own paragraph, like each one is supposed to be revelatory (or maybe tweet-worthy). It's pretty common design knowledge that if you try to emphasize everything, you end up emphasizing nothing. The result is that reading the article feels choppy, and weirdly unsatisfying, since the larger arc of each point is constantly being interrupted.

Why choose such an antithetical form, to what is otherwise an important and deep message?

The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.

EDIT: Some later posts mentioned it, but philosophers and religions have contemplated this stuff for centuries. Nevertheless I do think it's an exacerbated problem in the modern world due to technology and scale.

> Maybe because we've gotten good at giving people what they want in a way that prevents them from wanting anything worth having.

This has a political interpretation too. Have you noticed that online "petitions" have mostly disappeared lately ? Maybe this disappearance is based on now-widespread recognition that the way to get the attention and concern of the political establishment is to get out on the streets and make some noise.

Online activity can _motivate_ protest, but it cannot really express protest in a way that "matters". It's busy work. Keep the monkeys at their typewriters.

Online is the equivalent of hanging a sign in your window; it does not tell you whether your opinion is shared by most of your fellow citizens. Thousands of likes versus the knowledge that social media keeps each of us in our bubble, feeding us more.

But a monster rally in your city and elsewhere can tell you precisely that your opinion is shared by most (or "sufficiently many") of your fellow citizens. Pithy placards to the fore!

If i would have money tomorrow, i would know immediadly what i would do: Slowly and steadily renovate a old house, building a park/garden, having greenhouses and doing pottery.

Having a workshop and doing everything thick.

I hope i can achieve this before i'm 45 because i have the slight worry, that either AI will take over and my dreams break or i'm to old/fragile/broken to enjoy that.

  Thin: A desire to enjoy a book, video game, movie, musical performance, new technology, love, ...
  Thick: A desire to make any of the above.

I certainly think hijacking our short term rewards is a big part of it, but in addition, that hijacking prevents people from putting in the effort that make collective alternatives competitive.

As a software engineer, I decided to build an app about side quests. Reading this article I realized I could not put a finger on what I was getting at either, but I just knew I hadd to add wholesome activities that were not part of my life into my life and I kinda built this app for myself (initially for a hackathon) and just shared it with friends.

Hopefully it's useful to someone else on here (nasty self promotion): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sidequests-hq/id6751321255

"The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to justify its existence."

Maybe she points to /tech industry/ and not /software/

Tech doesn't give us the wrong desires but the easier versions of the right ones, and those end up hollow.

Idiot wisdom - is generic platitudes that sound nice, but aren’t actionable.

Wise wisdom- might not always sound nice, but is actionable.

My ego likes this article, if I believe that I pursue thick desires.

But some part of me thinks (and perhaps due to the written style ). That this is idiot wisdom.

Another commenter mentioned it ties to Tanha in Buddhism.

I don’t know. But- off to read some Shunryu Suzuki….

There are some insightful observations but the whole thick/thin perspective just doesn't resonate with me. As an old man (shakes fist at clouds), we have stopped prioritizing people. It is all about building and maintaining relationships and we've gotten lazy. And maintaining relationships is a lot of work and without it we do feel more isolated. So we try to fill that void with things that don't require effort like buying crap we don't need on Amazon and chasing likes on social media. We aren't happy so we try to be busy so we don't notice so much.

We saw a bit of a teeny correction during covid when people starting going outdoors and baking bread and cooking home cooked meals. But now everyone is back to working from home in their pajamas and tell themselves how happy they are with all the time they save not driving but skip over the lack of adult interaction (both good and bad).

But the problem is easily solved for each of us by things as simple as hobbies and volunteering and organizations (church, civic, etc.) Personally, I design board games and have friends over to test them and go to board game conferences. We've built a group that still test and communicate online but are happiest when we get to hang out and play games and go for dinner. There is no shortage of these opportunities but you have to get off the couch and join in. It is a place where you will make new friends and find happiness but you have to decide it is worth it.

You're describing consumer manipulation not an actual attribute of population.

> And so the infrastructure for thick desires has been gradually dismantled.

You're describing the consequences of inflation and manipulated market outcomes not actual desires of participants.

> The thick life doesn't scale.

This is almost entirely why we invented cities and society and put up with their consequences in our lives.

> So: bake bread.

So: stop making me pay taxes.

Maybe it's just me. I get easily irritated when I detect casual misanthropy dressed up as a "think piece."

https://findingfavorites.podbean.com/e/ry-jones-postcards/

   > Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

   > Economics is about allocating limited natural resources to unlimited human desire.

Yes, but… The call to hipsterdom (doing something precisely because it doesn’t scale) may not be necessary - if a person has successfully weened themselves of the pacifier of cheap dopamine they should use all of that spare brain power to create things other people who are still addicted can use to get out of the quicksand of social media. Or to make things that will help the world - scaling is up to the creator. No merit to sealing off away from the world. Improve the world.

I find it hard because thick desires require a lot more activation energy before it becomes pleasant.

     'The surveys all point the same direction: rising anxiety, rising      depression, rising rates of loneliness even as we've never been more connected.
     
     How could this be, when we've gotten so good at giving people what they want?
     Maybe because we've gotten good at giving people what they want in a way that prevents them from wanting anything worth having'

Made me reflect on my own persuasion of thin desires and my struggle to control them.

It also made me see that my hobbies and my career are actually about following my thick desires. I'm in tech, yes. But I chose, among all the possibilities, to be an analog circuit designer. The analog part is what makes it a long hard skill to master, and my day job feels like constant learning from my interactions woth the world. I can't imagine doing anything which isn't interacting with the actual physical world!

We all cheer. We know this. Then we move on.

A catchy title. A novel enough term. That will hook them.

We all read. We all smile. The daily grind.

This insight is not original to me.

[1] It’s just content now

Not essays

Not music

Content

By the time I got to that part my reading had degraded to mere skimming -

a perfectly placed reminder :-)

Here's another angle on the issue: As humans, we evolved these useful litte machines of desire.

Desires to feed, mate, socialize attend and get attended to. All of those came about because they had some utility, a purpose.

Over time we found ways to exploit those machines using substitutes.

- Sweets are a substitute for nourishing food.

- Porn feeds on our desire to mate.

- Social media overloads the fine-tuned machine meant to orient us in the tribe.

I suspect a big part of capitalism is creating ever more efficient and subtle ways to highjack these aspects of our humanity on a grand scale.

Damn.

Anyone got content suggestions or a syllabus I can use to learn to "enjoy" calculus?

I understand the basics, what it is for, chain rule, power rule, product rule... but still, no joy.

Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.

It feels weird how after a very good explanation of why thick desires are in the end more rewarding, she focuses on the (ostensible) negatives here, like some sort of obligatory tax or payment that you're evading by focusing on "thin" desire.

Formulated like this, the obvious retort would be "yeah, so what? - why should I bother with obligation and vulnerability if I can have the same rewards without them?"

Of course everyone who has 100 online friends but no one to go to a party with knows why this is bullshit - but it's not following from this paragraph.

Maybe a better way would be to explain that the "negatives" are in fact positives: e.g. The obligation is what lets one build upon a friendship - both for you and your friends - but you do have to explain it, you can't just take it for granted.

They are hard to read.

See: this post.

  > A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.
  >
  > A thin desire is one that doesn't.
  >
  > ...
  >
  > The person who checks their notifications is [a thin desire],
  > afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their
  > notifications five minutes ago.

The author, I think, would label the desire for sugary drinks as a thin desire. However, that desire tends towards unfavorable consequences: mood swings, poor dental hygiene, weight gain. Thus it undermines one's body. This "changes you" -- for the worse, yielding a contradiction. If the preceding logical analysis is sound, the article's terms or argument are flawed.

>A thin desire is one that doesn't.

TL;DR

Thanks OP for enriching my thin vocabulary today, pun intended.

After all who says change is always a good thing? When you are doing well maybe it's better to stick to thin desires?

Its like reading Rick Rubin from a loser whose opinions I don't value at all.

> There are two kinds of desire, thin and thick. Thick desires are like layers of rock that have been built up throughout the course of our lives. These are desires that can be shaped and cultivated through models like our parents and people that we admire as children. But at some level, they’re related to the core of who we are. They can be related to perennial human truths: beauty, goodness, human dignity.

> Thin desires are highly mimetic (imitative) and ephemeral desires. They’re the things that can be here today, gone tomorrow. Thin desires are subject to the winds of mimetic change, because they’re not rooted in a layer of ourselves that’s been built up over time. They are like a layer of leaves that’s sitting on top of layers of rock. Those thin desires are blown away with a light gust of wind. A new model comes into our life; the old desires are gone. All of a sudden we want something else.

Comparing the above conceptualizations with the ones offered by Westenberg (OP) could consume hundreds or thousands of words -- more than I want to spend at the moment -- but I will say this: both sets feel wrong, by which I mean they trigger my early warning detectors.

I'm not asking anyone else to trust my intuition. But you should trust yours. Intuition is usually a good starting point, at least.

With intuition alone -- without writing a full analysis -- we can see the above quoted explanations/definitions are highly complected. [2] Also, in my view, the offered metaphors don't carve reality at the joints. [3]

When I put ~20 minutes of concentrated thinking into the problem, here are some of the constituent parts of "desire" that I can unpack. (These are only fleetingly glossed over in the article.) In no particular order, to what degree are desires:

  - conscious?
  - intentional?
  - intentionally trained and reinforced?
  - authentic?
  - ones we want to have?
  - situational?
  - pattern-matched responses?
  - evolutionarily-selected?
  - socially constructed? (imitative, mimetic)
  - moral? (positive, neutral, negative)
  - permanent, durable, lasting?
  - self-reinforcing?

Over-simplication can be a disservice. Adding another metaphor reminds me of the "N+1 standards" problem. [4] Maybe the new metaphor helps, maybe not. Either way, now we have more to sift through.

[1]: https://bigthink.com/series/explain-it-like-im-smart/mimetic...

[2]: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...

[3]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-t...

[4]: https://xkcd.com/927/

I do not have more than I need. Very much the opposite - despite making a decent living, I cannot afford the bulk of my medical care that makes my life a lot more comfortable and extends my lifespan. making ends meet is sometimes difficult.

> We're hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies.

See above.

> We're hungry and we don't have words to articulate why.

I can articulate why, and a lot of it has to do with the protestant work ethic hell we've decided runs the entire world.

> We're hungry, and we're lacking and we're wanting.

Ok, finally I agree.

> We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot actually be gotten, that we can't define, from a source that has no interest in providing it.

I am pretty sure what I am wanting - security, healthcare, housing, food, reliable work/career can be defined, and can be gotten.

> The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.

Trivial counterexample and one that has happened to me - "Your father has had no pulse for 30 minutes, you need to get to the ER immediately." Definitely wasn't the same person 5 minutes after that. Or even, "Your role has been made redundant, please return your equipment to IT staff." Can probably think of many others.

This seems like fluffery that ultimately isn't saying much or anything at all really. Of course, in an economy full of thin fulfillment supply (such as the examples given in the writing here - porn, social media, etc.) and lacking in thick fulfillment (loneliness epidemic, bad economy if you're not on the tippy top of it, etc.), people will reach for thin ones. You can't wish or grind or hustle your way out of some of this, it is systemic, and in that, I agree with the conclusion here. I just don't believe it really accomplishes much of anything. There are those of us alive who aren't really even that old that remember the world when it was not this way.