I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires…
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.
Reading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read.
Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.
Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.
The prose is self-consciously different, makes the reader work a little harder. One can almost feel a literary water ripple or pebble garden, stillness and simplicity.
Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's the point."
A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions.
If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter.
Consider the following excerpt of the post:
The thick life doesn't scale.
That's the whole point.
So: bake bread.
There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stops. I also don't know the author nearly well enough to consider pondering its meaning: To my eyes there is only a need to stop and ponder at most once. It is essentially just noise.
There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author.
PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).
Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)
It's not just you. I've read this person's stuff before. Every sentence comes off as if they are presenting the results of a major epiphany.
You can write things which sound pretty. It's the equivalent of wordy sugar. It's much harder to to write things you've learned from life experience or thought deeply about.
Subject your beliefs to the Socratic method. If they've survived your own criticism to the fullest extent and can be validated by your own lived experience, then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.
Same reaction - I could immediately tell this person had learned to write on Twitter (or Linkedin), not real meaty writing. I had an English professor who wrote "FORM = CONTENT" on the chalkboard; this article would send him into a fury.
In my perspective, this is a style of writing that emphasizes the poetic side of speech. The thin paragraphs you see is a result of a rhythmic decision to make it short burst.
More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition.
I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.
Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.
I agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot.
But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.
Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.
I really don’t like this new feeling of not knowing if what I’m reading is from a person or a machine but I can’t quantify why it bothers me. I wonder if it will be a temporary thing like in 5 years nobody will ever care again even though the chance of it being a machine might be higher.
When I was young my parents were scared that the MTV generation couldn't focus long enough to watch the "real news".
Not long ago I feared that twitters short form content was shortening peoples attention spans so much that they would stop being able to appreciate nuance at all... Then came TikTok.
I don't know what comes next, but I promise you it will be worse. Either way, it's a race to the bottom and we're not there yet.
I think that LinkedIn writing style is so infectious that people who do have something to say wind up getting sucked into it and wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
There’s the prolific curmudgeon with a tomato cannon backed by a whole tomato farm and then there’s what you get when people thought your blog post was written by A.I. Ignore the first.
>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.
From the about page:
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Didn't really come off as design-y or antithetical form and definitely not manipulating lol, maybe a little poetic or artsy fartsy. Agree that it's important and deep.
Same. It looks like the author is playing with poetry to me. They're clearly playing with the stanza with the similar lines and the contrasting lines. Yeah, it's amateur, but who cares? It tracks with the message.
If anything I think the GP's comment is an example of a thin desire. Being nitpicky/petty to justify internalizing and actually reading the post. There's no lines to read between here, it's plain as day. We are addicted to dismissing things because it's gratifying and easy. It's trivial to find errors or complaints about anything, but it's difficult to actually critique. I'd argue in our thin desires we've conflated the two. It's cargo cult intellectualism. Complaints look similar to critiques in form but they lack the substance, the depth.
This resonates. I work in web dev, and a little over 2 years ago I hit a wall. Everything was a screen. All day at work, at home, on the go. Everything felt hallow and unrewarding. I'm an introvert, so outside of my family, I didn't have many relationships. Of course, I was depressed. I began working on it by going to therapy and then one day I decided to try sculpting.
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.
I set foot in a shop for the first time at a hackerspace 11 or 12 years ago and eventually feel deep into machining. I spent huge swaths of my days there, and when I wasn't, I was reading about machining. Books, because there were few Youtubers doing it and the forums are thin. It's not a popular hobby and a lot of the professionals and hobbyists aren't computer savvy.
I focused on it to the detriment of other things. Friends commented last year on how absorbed I became and how much I was absorbing. Puttering around on a computer fell away, since it wasn't that relevant to the hobby. It wasn't necessary to use the aging laptop in my free time; I could read PDFs on my phone or old, used books.
But you're not looking at your phone often, because your hands are dirty. Or busy. Or there's a significant safety concern from lapsed attention. Or when doing related types of metal working, weld spatter might land on a face up phone and take chunks out of the glass. Or maybe a steel chip scratches the screen.
Eventually I drifted away from machining for another hobby, but I've come back to it now that I have space in my garage -- this time with more balance. I'm not out until after midnight on work nights. Instead, I'm up before dawn, working with my hands for an hour or two before work. After work, I spend time on learning things somewhat relevant to my career. On the weekends, I'll spend a few hours each day.
The machining isn't ever useful. I made a nylon washer on my lathe once for a dog harness -- I think that's the only item I've made that's not for the hobby itself. But it's tangible. The projects are incredibly slow, and no undo button means a small mistake can result in hours work thrown in the recycling. I spent maybe eight hours over the past four days making a tiny brass rod (as well as other, failed versions) to repair an older clockwork mechanism. A used replacement would've been relatively cheap on Ebay, but that's never the point.
Kudos on your evolution. But this gets me thinking, remember when computing didn't felt "thin" ? even screen had a different feel. I don't know if it's our brain getting used and losing a kind of magic filter.
Anyway, I should probably imitate you, every time I see some people crafting real things I have a little blip of envy.
It definitely felt different to me in the beginning years. I've been at the web thing for about 12 years now. In the beginning, while it was often very difficult, there was an excitement and freshness. It could have simply been because we were moving to web 2.0, CSS and all of its "magic".
While making stuff is only a side thing, it makes the grind during the week tolerable. I feel like I have something meaningful in my life (outside of my family) and it has given me purpose. I'm grateful for it. And it is so damn fun!
I started using my IT and data management skills on film sets to provide data security around the footage. It’s been a breath of fresh air to use advanced concepts in a field that’s very hands on and a big team effort. A lot of communication and working together. It’s been great.
> 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.
I run a sourdough bakery with my partner, as it happens. Although I'm not a baker, coming from a mathematics background I'm the one most focused on process and quality control. We don't use any commercial yeast so I've picked a few things related to targeting different flavors using the same starter.
We use different temperature profiles during proofing for different products (we have fancy proofing fridges where we set temperature profiles over a 12 to 36 hour period depending on the product). Low and slow is good for certain types of bread, or pizza base. But not so much for a brioche or croissant dough.
I personally love slow fermented, heavy rye based sourdough, but lots of our customers don't and the bread we sell most is a classic white sourdough fermented comparatively quickly at higher temperature for a lighter and less sour taste. It's still very slow fermentation compared to commercial yeast, of course.
The proofing temperature profile for this bread isn't as simple as "start warm and gradually cool down" (i.e. the warm oven method), but that is a reasonable approximation for a home baker.
I found this trick for store bought pizza dough as well. Instead of leaving out for 20 minutes, a warm oven helps it start rising a bit and results in a much better final product!
Baking is weird. You first should start by following instructions to the letter. Then once you get it you'll be able to break all the rules.
The bread rises because of the yeast bacteria eats sugar and expels carbon dioxide. So ask yourself, what does yeast like? Probably not hard to guess that it's a warm, moist environment with plenty of sugar. Too cold and they're slow moving. Too hot and they burn up. But the goldilocks zone is that of most bacteria, a hot summer day in the tropics.
How long to rise? That's more a question of how fluffy you want the bread and how fast the bacteria eats the sugar.
Follow instructions while you're learning but think about things like this while practicing and you'll get your answers pretty quickly. The problem is no one can actually give you a direct answer because there's variance. Besides, the more important skill is to learn to generalize and get the intuition for it. So pay attention to how sticky the dough is, how fluffy, how it stretches, and all the other little things. Think about it during and after. If you do this I promise you'll get your answer very quickly
Depends on the method/recipe. Most of the recipes I follow have at least two rising steps, following by another one after the dough is shaped into its final loaf (or whatever shape you want). Each one would be about an hour and half or so. It could be done with a single rise as well, but two rises tends to give more flavor. If you don't want it right away, a slow overnight rise in the fridge is also pretty good.
"No-knead" recipes usually involve 20-30 minute cadence of "fold-and-stretch" followed by a rise to allow the gluten to develop naturally without kneading. Usually about four times.
Yep, some ovens (like mine) even have a Proof setting that keeps it at 100 degrees F automatically, for as long as you want. We make a lot of bread is how I know this
How long to leave in depends on the dough, but you can get a quick rise in like less than an hour in the right temperature. Definitely don't leave it too long. I routinely forget and then it rises too much and eventually collapses when you go to bake it.
I use like 65% or maybe 70% hydration for bread, little more for whole wheat. Like 25:1 sugar (or less?), 100:1 salt, 100:1 yeast. High protein flour if you can.
For just basic bread, no sourdough, not a sandwich loaf, etc.
Even with thick desires, I sometimes find myself day-dreaming about the state when I have mastered a skill or understood a topic deeply. At the same time, I know from experience that the process never ends. Even when one does master a skill, one is deeply aware of what one doesn't know or understand or what one is not good at within that domain.
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).
Oh yeah decades in I still feel I know f-all about programming. Doesn't help the field keeps expanding expintentially. E.g. I look most things up. I am basicially a slow LLM!
You're kind of the opposite of a slow LLM. LLMs don't look anything up, they enthusiastically assert that they're correct. They have no desire to know anything.
If you didn't daydream like that would you have the motivation to pursue it? Are not those daydreams your kind encouraging you? "Look how great it'll be, this is why you'll put in the hard work now". You can get trapped in the dreams, of course, but they're useful too
My framing for this is "mass production of stimuli." Before industrialization, the number of things grabbing your attention at any given moment wasn't super high. But once you had mass production, and especially the innovation of extrinsic advertising (associating psychological properties not intrinsic to the product being advertised itself), we were all suddenly awash in stimulating signals. But like this article notes, those stimuli go mostly unfulfilled by the action we take (buying the thing, opening the app), and so we all have this low level background noise of frustration and dissatisfaction.
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.
I wrote this following a similar line of thought, but with the root problem being a collective action problem around community rather than an internal psychological tradeoff between short and long term. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-dead-weight-lo...
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.
This also sounds like one of the core themes of Augustinian philosophy. The idea of the "restless heart" in that we are never satisfied with earthly wants and desires.
True to an extent. But why would you want to create (e.g.) a movie if you don't think watching movies is worthwhile in and of itself? You're putting effort into creating something that you don't think is truly valuable. To a person with this mindset, the desire to create is cynical—they're only making movies in pursuit of extrinsic rewards such as money, fame, or success. If watching movies is thin to them, then making movies is also thin.
Conversely, an authentic filmmaker is someone who values movies in and of themselves; therefore, the authentic desire to create a movie must be downstream of a passion for watching movies. I don't think you'll find many artistically inclined filmmakers who would denigrate the act of watching movies as "thin." It's the thickness they feel in the experience of watching movies which inspired them to devote themselves to making movies in the first place.
I'd argue that there's probably a disproportionate ratio of thin:thick, and that the majority of creators have to consume significantly more than they create to find their perspective, voice, purpose and inspiration for their creations. And those that created that which was consumed, consumed that which was created to feed their fire as well.
It's the whole thing about writers and comedians can't craft anything without having first lived, observed, contemplated and been confounded by orders of magnitude more than their output represents.
It's more like Thin is when the consumption is one directional. Like when you browse social media it is one directional. Social media goes towards you and you just experience it, everything is dumbed down into bites that require 0 effort or cognition to consume.
When you read a challenging book it is bi-directional. You will get out of it what you put in and it will be indecipherable if you just let it wash over you mindlessly. So I disagree about creation, I think the effort is what is important.
Yes, and…
The thin is nowadays engineered to be addictive, so weaning off of it may be hard. Going cold turkey during a vacation or completely ditching devices for a while may help.
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.
Like relationships I don't think it's either/or but rather prioritize. Make the book a priority, and make sure you do it, then go ahead and read/comment on HN. The extra knowledge/perspectives/experiences will make your contributions more valuable for everyone.
I think this article is really true, and I think a consequence is that people are really hungry for thick desires these days but they cannot put a finger on it. They notice themselves not growing, they get the dopamine hit they were looking for but it feel like empty calories.
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.
Very nicely written. I've been slowly removing thin desires from my life. It's hard to do at first, but what I've noticed is once I am free from them, I do not miss them at all. Almost like I was under a spell.
I'm not sure it makes sense to classify desires as "good" or "bad" desires, or "thick" and "thin" (or however we may want to label it). One can make such a binary distinction, but it could be just as much as harmful as it could be helpful. There's always a nuance, a hidden variable that makes the whole thing moot.
If there's anything meaningfully binary, I think it's only an internal conflict between one's self-perception (who-I-think-I-am) and one's ideal/goal self-image (who-I-want-to-be) past some arbitrary threshold. Not transforming and not changing is not an issue until there's a desire to transform and become someone else that one has, but that isn't happening (or they don't see it) and that desire is strong or goes for a while and causes some non-negligible grief or stress or something that is not in one's own best interests.
Sure, in stressful modern-day environments, we're especially biased towards more immediate gratification than postponed one. Especially if the postponed one may never happen - modern times are crazy unpredictable. But naively suggesting to dismiss "thin" desires and pursue "thick" ones is dismissive of rest. I mean, people go to beaches and spend literal week doing absolutely nothing. Or binge watch giant series. Or just play games for the sake of it, all day long. And no one has to hate themselves afterwards - all we really need to do is to periodically pause and ask "would it be best to do something else now?" and ponder over that question for a little bit rather than dismiss it with immediate "no I want more".
And there should be a realization brief 5-minute "rest" to check some feeds is unlikely to give any meaningful rest. A non-rest masquerading as resting may be a thing to watch out, but I doubt there's any criteria, except for doing a retrospective observation and questioning oneself "does it satisfy my goals/needs, or am I just wasting my time on this needlessly?".
YMMV, but if there's some meaningful conclusion to be taken out of the article it should be more along the lines of "budget your time mindfully of its value and your long-term goals" than some desire classification model. I'm afraid this "thin vs thick desire" concept unnecessarily obscures the core idea, possibly to the extent it can become sort of a red herring.
Whenever a letter is written on paper or only exists in a digital form shouldn't matter, after all. Neither should a format of resting matter, be it making bread or watching reels, as long as it actually provides rest.
I've slowly pushed away the classic attention manipulating applications -- basically anything that will find new content to keep you engaged. Tiktok feels like the maximalist example, but other similar apps, social media text feeds, and parts of Youtube (though, I've so aggressively tuned Youtube that it has a very limited content base to show me.)
TV isn't for TV's sake; it's for relaxing a little with someone I care about.
I can read longer form news articles and not need to stay abreast of what's happening daily.
I've found that I'll eventually grow bored and annoyed with things meant to steal attention, at which point I'll excise them from my life. It just might take an unfortunate while to get there.
I would watch YouTube for an hour before bed. It got to the point where I needed it to fall asleep, usually with it playing in the background.
Replaced it with reading books and now I just read until I'm sleep enough, usually when I realize I have to reread sentences repeatedly.
After about a week I had no desire to scroll my YouTube feed for videos. I didn't block YouTube or anything, I still watch videos from creators I follow, but I no longer instinctively reach for it to pass time.
Thanks for sharing, that's something I can probably draw some inspiration from. I never really thought about how often I reach to youtube to kill time, including putting something on when heading to sleep.
Us software engineers assume value comes from serving more people, faster, with less friction. But many of the things that actually make life feel coherent such as learning a craft, maintaining friendships and building tools for one person, only work because they’re slow and specific.
Tech doesn't give us the wrong desires but the easier versions of the right ones, and those end up hollow.
I find myself doing this for anything "work related" like slack. It's definitely a thing on Linkedin posts.
The idea is it's like TikTok for text. Short self-contained visual "things" that keep grabbing back your fading attention. I don't like it, but I like that I think about why it is and that, in a "professional" environment, it somehow (sadly) makes sense.
When I come across this sort of writing I skip it. If the writer can't be bothered to organise their ideas I won't do it for them. I find that writing style oddly grating.
I find it ironic that this perspective is being shared in such a "thin" way.
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.
this is really true, and I'm hopeful that people will prioritize fewer, deeper relationships because it's so much work. I feels like networking in all the superficial ways has allowed people to (believe they) have way more relationships than is healthy or even possible. I don't know what the upper limit is (likely different for every individual) but it's way less than 500 professional connections on linkedin, or thousands of personal connections. For deep, meaningful, valuable - and rewarding! - relationships it's probably less than ten. If you're not prepared to let the rest just atrophy and even disappear, you're not going to be happy.
In my experience, it is mostly like 3-5 very close friends and about a dozen "good" friends. One thing I hear from so many people is the mindset of "well, they didn't call me back" and turn it into score keeping. Not all relationships are going to be equitable but they all require investment or they wither.
Completely agree!
The moment after leaving an event/party/service I always feel a greater sense of purpose, contentness, or at the very least, less pessimistic about the state of the world
Excellent piece, easy to read and I agree on most until this part:
'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'
As much as it is true we are technologically more connected than ever, I would argue that much was taken away in parallel to what was given. The capabilities came to fruit but at the same time the governance and politics thinned out much of our desires at their core; ie now we're being told we want more and more because it's been determined we can't have certain things.
I don't see governance and politics as being the primary movers in what I seek out.
My experience is more: I find myself spinning my tires watching yet another youtube video instead of calmly deciding on a worthy investment of a deep pursuit.
No government has forced that on me, that's mostly a corporate entity and platform making (automated, ML mediated) decisions on what I should consume. Of course governments are involved when deciding what I shouldn't be exposed to, but that's a different matter.
We all have a limited reserve of energy, of attention and willpower. When you spend it on shallow desires, you have expended it and tacitly made a choice to not invest in a more meaningful path. If I were to summarize the time I've spent sitting on my ass watching YouTube the last N years, it's really quite depressing (even if it does sometimes provide some very real value).
This post really resonated with me, and some lack of fulfilment I've been working through lately. It seems a lot of commenters felt the need to bikeshed it instead of just trying to understand the point being made.
I'm an Engineering Manager. I print out certificates for people on (and beyond) my teams, referencing something they accomplished (big or small), add one of the "boy scout badges" I bought in bulk from AliExpress (and then retroactively created & reference a set of values based on the iconography) and mail out "Engineering Merit Badges" to our remote employees. Maybe a few think it's dumb but the vast majority love it. The collector-types try to earn the entire set (I made one of the badges really hard to get because of this), while physically getting mail really seems to resonate with anyone under 35. A few people more distant from my teams (i.e. different departments) DID seems supsicious at first when I asked for their home address, and my boss wondered how I spent several hundred dollars in postage last year, but I try and send out at least a dozen a month while still keeping them meaningful. It's actually a bit of work (of course I wrote software to help manage and create everything) but I love it too.
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!
Thanks. It's exactly what I thought, but written in a funny way. I'm so sick of this way of writing, which is actually tuned to appeal to the broadest audience possible and follow every guide on "how to write efficiently".
> Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.
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.
> 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.
[I added the brackets]
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.
The wording was very careful to say the pursuit of the desire changes you. That's very different than obtaining the desire changing you.
It's not a real remedy for your comment because we could probably come up with an example where the pursuit of the desire changes you in a bad way. For example, if you're a heroin addict and you're breaking into homes to steal things so that you can buy drugs. But I think it does help narrow the scope enough that the intent behind the statement becomes more clear.
There is something really interesting about people (which I think I'm borrowing from Atomic Habits by James Clear): Every time you take an action in service of a goal, it helps prove to yourself, a little at a time, that part of your identity involves pursuing that goal. For example, each time I spew out a journal entry or cobble together a blog post, it reinforces the belief "I am a writer."
With this in mind, it suggests a theory: doing the thing itself changes you. After some suitable time delay, perhaps. (This is how exercise adaptation works at least.)
But connecting this together still feels muddled. What is the difference between doing the thing and the consequences of doing the thing? The difference feels ... undefined? Maybe even arbitrary? All of this triggers my "inconsistency detectors" suggesting more thinking needs to be done.
Maybe the difference is that some actions provide certain emotional states while we're doing them: satisfaction, flow, meaning -- and this is what people mean by the first part ("doing the thing"). Maybe we can define consequences as the things that happen after we stop acting. Like the royalty checks that hypothetically will clog up my mailbox one day.
You said it yourself - "sugary drinks... tend towards unfavorable consequences". The change happens as the outcome of the desire, not "in the process of the pursuing it".
From "How to know what you really want" by Luke Burgis [1]:
> 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:
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.
I’ve noticed a lot of changes on the site recently, which I believe is powered by Ghost which makes messing around with feed links a more advanced (for lack of a better word) tweak than many platforms as you download/upload a routes file. I’m a 10+ year developer and have found myself chasing route changes in Ghost with trial and error.
> We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.
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.
I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires…
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.
Reading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read.
Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.
Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.
The prose is self-consciously different, makes the reader work a little harder. One can almost feel a literary water ripple or pebble garden, stillness and simplicity.
Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's the point."
A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions. If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter.
Consider the following excerpt of the post:
There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stops. I also don't know the author nearly well enough to consider pondering its meaning: To my eyes there is only a need to stop and ponder at most once. It is essentially just noise.There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author.
PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).
Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)
In what way were the sentences content heavy? It's quite repetitive, and often the meaning of a section of it will be split into individual fragments.
I get it.
One sentence pragraphs feel punchy.
It feels like you're writing copy for an Apple ad.
..but it only works when it's in another medium, in a shorter format. In this form, it's just exhausting.
It's not just you. I've read this person's stuff before. Every sentence comes off as if they are presenting the results of a major epiphany.
You can write things which sound pretty. It's the equivalent of wordy sugar. It's much harder to to write things you've learned from life experience or thought deeply about.
Subject your beliefs to the Socratic method. If they've survived your own criticism to the fullest extent and can be validated by your own lived experience, then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.
I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but not this:
> then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.
Ideas don't have to be infallible to be worth writing about. It's a slippery slope to not writing at all.
Robin Sloan has called this “ventilated prose”, a phrase I love. (I seem to recall “aerated prose” having also been deployed)
See, e.g., the end of https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/
Rarified prose…
Same reaction - I could immediately tell this person had learned to write on Twitter (or Linkedin), not real meaty writing. I had an English professor who wrote "FORM = CONTENT" on the chalkboard; this article would send him into a fury.
Your need to quip about the article's presentation instead of its meaning is a thin desire.
In my perspective, this is a style of writing that emphasizes the poetic side of speech. The thin paragraphs you see is a result of a rhythmic decision to make it short burst.
More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
This type of layout - short or 1 sentence paragraphs - has been around since the early days of the web.
An early proponent was the BBC news website, and you can see they still adopt this style.
The BBC found that breaking up text in this way made it easier to read on a web page.
News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition.
I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.
Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.
Interspersed single sentence and denser paragraphs, seem to get the most bang out of both.
My reply was prompted by both the substance and style of your comment. :)
Also the ideas are just reframing the old maxim of "its not the destination, its the journey".
It is that but more than that. There are companies trying to profit by selling instant gratificaton.
i have meaner names, but lets just call it nod along content
Yeah, this feels very much like one of those sites with random quotes that seem deep but aren't, like wisdom.spark.pink.
It sounds like a Ted Talk with unnecessarily long poses to let sentences sink in. For some reason I just can't digest this sort of writing.
I think it makes sense to write like this if you're intended audience is already used to consuming "thin" desire media.
I agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot.
But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.
Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.
I quite like that this is a more unique writing style and in fact would encourage people to write "unusually".
Is the message deep and important or was the article attempting to manipulate you into thinking it is?
I immediately stopped reading after I saw the format. Absolutely hate this linkedin style 'everything is deep' posting. It's crap
Still.... the message has value.
I really don’t like this new feeling of not knowing if what I’m reading is from a person or a machine but I can’t quantify why it bothers me. I wonder if it will be a temporary thing like in 5 years nobody will ever care again even though the chance of it being a machine might be higher.
When I was young my parents were scared that the MTV generation couldn't focus long enough to watch the "real news".
Not long ago I feared that twitters short form content was shortening peoples attention spans so much that they would stop being able to appreciate nuance at all... Then came TikTok.
I don't know what comes next, but I promise you it will be worse. Either way, it's a race to the bottom and we're not there yet.
Maybe it will be Max Headroom's blipverts?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk
It's basically the sort of rot writing that proliferates on linkedin
I disagree. I feel there is a genuine insight at the core of it.
I think that LinkedIn writing style is so infectious that people who do have something to say wind up getting sucked into it and wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
>wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
Pretty sure the first rule of writing on the internet is ignore the comments section
There’s the prolific curmudgeon with a tomato cannon backed by a whole tomato farm and then there’s what you get when people thought your blog post was written by A.I. Ignore the first.
Yeah me too. Lately LI is like:
CMSs are done!
Let that sink in!
Some dude trew away his CMS and vibe coded some markdown based static stuff that does the same.
No harddrive was wiped this particular time.
The world is different now, reply in comments if you agree. Reply “airhead” for my 3 slides which are even more insightful than this post.
A genuine insight turned into a cartoon self-help scam-artist LinkedIn inspirational quote cliche version of itself...
>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.
From the about page:
>Free subscribers get previews of these essays and occasional full posts. Paid subscribers get all essays, the most useful ideas, conversations, and community access.
So maybe you're right.
Didn't really come off as design-y or antithetical form and definitely not manipulating lol, maybe a little poetic or artsy fartsy. Agree that it's important and deep.
Same. It looks like the author is playing with poetry to me. They're clearly playing with the stanza with the similar lines and the contrasting lines. Yeah, it's amateur, but who cares? It tracks with the message.
If anything I think the GP's comment is an example of a thin desire. Being nitpicky/petty to justify internalizing and actually reading the post. There's no lines to read between here, it's plain as day. We are addicted to dismissing things because it's gratifying and easy. It's trivial to find errors or complaints about anything, but it's difficult to actually critique. I'd argue in our thin desires we've conflated the two. It's cargo cult intellectualism. Complaints look similar to critiques in form but they lack the substance, the depth.
It's almost like anti-poetry.
Possibly AI-generated?
This resonates. I work in web dev, and a little over 2 years ago I hit a wall. Everything was a screen. All day at work, at home, on the go. Everything felt hallow and unrewarding. I'm an introvert, so outside of my family, I didn't have many relationships. Of course, I was depressed. I began working on it by going to therapy and then one day I decided to try sculpting.
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.
I've taken somewhat of a parallel path.
I set foot in a shop for the first time at a hackerspace 11 or 12 years ago and eventually feel deep into machining. I spent huge swaths of my days there, and when I wasn't, I was reading about machining. Books, because there were few Youtubers doing it and the forums are thin. It's not a popular hobby and a lot of the professionals and hobbyists aren't computer savvy.
I focused on it to the detriment of other things. Friends commented last year on how absorbed I became and how much I was absorbing. Puttering around on a computer fell away, since it wasn't that relevant to the hobby. It wasn't necessary to use the aging laptop in my free time; I could read PDFs on my phone or old, used books.
But you're not looking at your phone often, because your hands are dirty. Or busy. Or there's a significant safety concern from lapsed attention. Or when doing related types of metal working, weld spatter might land on a face up phone and take chunks out of the glass. Or maybe a steel chip scratches the screen.
Eventually I drifted away from machining for another hobby, but I've come back to it now that I have space in my garage -- this time with more balance. I'm not out until after midnight on work nights. Instead, I'm up before dawn, working with my hands for an hour or two before work. After work, I spend time on learning things somewhat relevant to my career. On the weekends, I'll spend a few hours each day.
The machining isn't ever useful. I made a nylon washer on my lathe once for a dog harness -- I think that's the only item I've made that's not for the hobby itself. But it's tangible. The projects are incredibly slow, and no undo button means a small mistake can result in hours work thrown in the recycling. I spent maybe eight hours over the past four days making a tiny brass rod (as well as other, failed versions) to repair an older clockwork mechanism. A used replacement would've been relatively cheap on Ebay, but that's never the point.
Kudos on your evolution. But this gets me thinking, remember when computing didn't felt "thin" ? even screen had a different feel. I don't know if it's our brain getting used and losing a kind of magic filter.
Anyway, I should probably imitate you, every time I see some people crafting real things I have a little blip of envy.
It definitely felt different to me in the beginning years. I've been at the web thing for about 12 years now. In the beginning, while it was often very difficult, there was an excitement and freshness. It could have simply been because we were moving to web 2.0, CSS and all of its "magic".
While making stuff is only a side thing, it makes the grind during the week tolerable. I feel like I have something meaningful in my life (outside of my family) and it has given me purpose. I'm grateful for it. And it is so damn fun!
Very cool.
I started using my IT and data management skills on film sets to provide data security around the footage. It’s been a breath of fresh air to use advanced concepts in a field that’s very hands on and a big team effort. A lot of communication and working together. It’s been great.
> The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.
> 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.
> the bread is just as flavorful
“Thin bread.”
No sourdough enthusiast or artisanal bread baker would agree. You even get a different metabolic pathway active at higher temps.
Try the “low and slow” method, rise then let it sit a day in the fridge, see if it’s really the same taste.
I run a sourdough bakery with my partner, as it happens. Although I'm not a baker, coming from a mathematics background I'm the one most focused on process and quality control. We don't use any commercial yeast so I've picked a few things related to targeting different flavors using the same starter.
We use different temperature profiles during proofing for different products (we have fancy proofing fridges where we set temperature profiles over a 12 to 36 hour period depending on the product). Low and slow is good for certain types of bread, or pizza base. But not so much for a brioche or croissant dough.
I personally love slow fermented, heavy rye based sourdough, but lots of our customers don't and the bread we sell most is a classic white sourdough fermented comparatively quickly at higher temperature for a lighter and less sour taste. It's still very slow fermentation compared to commercial yeast, of course.
The proofing temperature profile for this bread isn't as simple as "start warm and gradually cool down" (i.e. the warm oven method), but that is a reasonable approximation for a home baker.
I found this trick for store bought pizza dough as well. Instead of leaving out for 20 minutes, a warm oven helps it start rising a bit and results in a much better final product!
Im just learning this is a thing, tell me more, how long do you leave it in there? Any ratio's you use?
Baking is weird. You first should start by following instructions to the letter. Then once you get it you'll be able to break all the rules.
The bread rises because of the yeast bacteria eats sugar and expels carbon dioxide. So ask yourself, what does yeast like? Probably not hard to guess that it's a warm, moist environment with plenty of sugar. Too cold and they're slow moving. Too hot and they burn up. But the goldilocks zone is that of most bacteria, a hot summer day in the tropics.
How long to rise? That's more a question of how fluffy you want the bread and how fast the bacteria eats the sugar.
Follow instructions while you're learning but think about things like this while practicing and you'll get your answers pretty quickly. The problem is no one can actually give you a direct answer because there's variance. Besides, the more important skill is to learn to generalize and get the intuition for it. So pay attention to how sticky the dough is, how fluffy, how it stretches, and all the other little things. Think about it during and after. If you do this I promise you'll get your answer very quickly
Yeast is fungus not bacteria. In lab setting it tends to be incubated at 30c, a little cooler compared to most bacteria at 37c.
Depends on the method/recipe. Most of the recipes I follow have at least two rising steps, following by another one after the dough is shaped into its final loaf (or whatever shape you want). Each one would be about an hour and half or so. It could be done with a single rise as well, but two rises tends to give more flavor. If you don't want it right away, a slow overnight rise in the fridge is also pretty good.
"No-knead" recipes usually involve 20-30 minute cadence of "fold-and-stretch" followed by a rise to allow the gluten to develop naturally without kneading. Usually about four times.
Yep, some ovens (like mine) even have a Proof setting that keeps it at 100 degrees F automatically, for as long as you want. We make a lot of bread is how I know this
How long to leave in depends on the dough, but you can get a quick rise in like less than an hour in the right temperature. Definitely don't leave it too long. I routinely forget and then it rises too much and eventually collapses when you go to bake it.
I use like 65% or maybe 70% hydration for bread, little more for whole wheat. Like 25:1 sugar (or less?), 100:1 salt, 100:1 yeast. High protein flour if you can.
For just basic bread, no sourdough, not a sandwich loaf, etc.
Even with thick desires, I sometimes find myself day-dreaming about the state when I have mastered a skill or understood a topic deeply. At the same time, I know from experience that the process never ends. Even when one does master a skill, one is deeply aware of what one doesn't know or understand or what one is not good at within that domain.
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).
You might find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up%C4%81d%C4%81na and https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/bhavatanha
Oh yeah decades in I still feel I know f-all about programming. Doesn't help the field keeps expanding expintentially. E.g. I look most things up. I am basicially a slow LLM!
You're kind of the opposite of a slow LLM. LLMs don't look anything up, they enthusiastically assert that they're correct. They have no desire to know anything.
If you didn't daydream like that would you have the motivation to pursue it? Are not those daydreams your kind encouraging you? "Look how great it'll be, this is why you'll put in the hard work now". You can get trapped in the dreams, of course, but they're useful too
My framing for this is "mass production of stimuli." Before industrialization, the number of things grabbing your attention at any given moment wasn't super high. But once you had mass production, and especially the innovation of extrinsic advertising (associating psychological properties not intrinsic to the product being advertised itself), we were all suddenly awash in stimulating signals. But like this article notes, those stimuli go mostly unfulfilled by the action we take (buying the thing, opening the app), and so we all have this low level background noise of frustration and dissatisfaction.
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.
I wrote this following a similar line of thought, but with the root problem being a collective action problem around community rather than an internal psychological tradeoff between short and long term. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-dead-weight-lo...
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.
This is a core concept of Buddhism, called tanha, and has been contemplated for a couple thousand years at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%E1%B9%87h%C4%81
This also sounds like one of the core themes of Augustinian philosophy. The idea of the "restless heart" in that we are never satisfied with earthly wants and desires.
Everything new is old :)
Interesting. Looked fornthe simple English version, alas.
Desires to consume (create) are thin (thick).
The cure for Dementors isn't chocolate, it's becoming a tiny god of creation. Meaning is in making.True to an extent. But why would you want to create (e.g.) a movie if you don't think watching movies is worthwhile in and of itself? You're putting effort into creating something that you don't think is truly valuable. To a person with this mindset, the desire to create is cynical—they're only making movies in pursuit of extrinsic rewards such as money, fame, or success. If watching movies is thin to them, then making movies is also thin.
Conversely, an authentic filmmaker is someone who values movies in and of themselves; therefore, the authentic desire to create a movie must be downstream of a passion for watching movies. I don't think you'll find many artistically inclined filmmakers who would denigrate the act of watching movies as "thin." It's the thickness they feel in the experience of watching movies which inspired them to devote themselves to making movies in the first place.
I'd argue that there's probably a disproportionate ratio of thin:thick, and that the majority of creators have to consume significantly more than they create to find their perspective, voice, purpose and inspiration for their creations. And those that created that which was consumed, consumed that which was created to feed their fire as well.
It's the whole thing about writers and comedians can't craft anything without having first lived, observed, contemplated and been confounded by orders of magnitude more than their output represents.
It's more like Thin is when the consumption is one directional. Like when you browse social media it is one directional. Social media goes towards you and you just experience it, everything is dumbed down into bites that require 0 effort or cognition to consume.
When you read a challenging book it is bi-directional. You will get out of it what you put in and it will be indecipherable if you just let it wash over you mindlessly. So I disagree about creation, I think the effort is what is important.
Yes, and… The thin is nowadays engineered to be addictive, so weaning off of it may be hard. Going cold turkey during a vacation or completely ditching devices for a while may help.
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.
Halfway the this post, I realized checking the HN front page was merely a thin desire – so I'm off to read a book. Farewell!
Like relationships I don't think it's either/or but rather prioritize. Make the book a priority, and make sure you do it, then go ahead and read/comment on HN. The extra knowledge/perspectives/experiences will make your contributions more valuable for everyone.
I have bad news for you - you're not even just "checking" HN, you're simulating social interaction by writing comments for no one in particular.
jokes on you I read this and am replying. But yeah it is an unhealthy way to scratch the itch.
I think this article is really true, and I think a consequence is that people are really hungry for thick desires these days but they cannot put a finger on it. They notice themselves not growing, they get the dopamine hit they were looking for but it feel like empty calories.
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
Thick hustle.
Ironically, consuming essays about “thin desires” often becomes a thin desire itself.
Very nicely written. I've been slowly removing thin desires from my life. It's hard to do at first, but what I've noticed is once I am free from them, I do not miss them at all. Almost like I was under a spell.
I'm not sure it makes sense to classify desires as "good" or "bad" desires, or "thick" and "thin" (or however we may want to label it). One can make such a binary distinction, but it could be just as much as harmful as it could be helpful. There's always a nuance, a hidden variable that makes the whole thing moot.
If there's anything meaningfully binary, I think it's only an internal conflict between one's self-perception (who-I-think-I-am) and one's ideal/goal self-image (who-I-want-to-be) past some arbitrary threshold. Not transforming and not changing is not an issue until there's a desire to transform and become someone else that one has, but that isn't happening (or they don't see it) and that desire is strong or goes for a while and causes some non-negligible grief or stress or something that is not in one's own best interests.
Sure, in stressful modern-day environments, we're especially biased towards more immediate gratification than postponed one. Especially if the postponed one may never happen - modern times are crazy unpredictable. But naively suggesting to dismiss "thin" desires and pursue "thick" ones is dismissive of rest. I mean, people go to beaches and spend literal week doing absolutely nothing. Or binge watch giant series. Or just play games for the sake of it, all day long. And no one has to hate themselves afterwards - all we really need to do is to periodically pause and ask "would it be best to do something else now?" and ponder over that question for a little bit rather than dismiss it with immediate "no I want more".
And there should be a realization brief 5-minute "rest" to check some feeds is unlikely to give any meaningful rest. A non-rest masquerading as resting may be a thing to watch out, but I doubt there's any criteria, except for doing a retrospective observation and questioning oneself "does it satisfy my goals/needs, or am I just wasting my time on this needlessly?".
YMMV, but if there's some meaningful conclusion to be taken out of the article it should be more along the lines of "budget your time mindfully of its value and your long-term goals" than some desire classification model. I'm afraid this "thin vs thick desire" concept unnecessarily obscures the core idea, possibly to the extent it can become sort of a red herring.
Whenever a letter is written on paper or only exists in a digital form shouldn't matter, after all. Neither should a format of resting matter, be it making bread or watching reels, as long as it actually provides rest.
Just my thoughts. I can be wrong about it all.
What are some examples of thin desires you've removed?
I've slowly pushed away the classic attention manipulating applications -- basically anything that will find new content to keep you engaged. Tiktok feels like the maximalist example, but other similar apps, social media text feeds, and parts of Youtube (though, I've so aggressively tuned Youtube that it has a very limited content base to show me.)
TV isn't for TV's sake; it's for relaxing a little with someone I care about.
I can read longer form news articles and not need to stay abreast of what's happening daily.
I've found that I'll eventually grow bored and annoyed with things meant to steal attention, at which point I'll excise them from my life. It just might take an unfortunate while to get there.
I would watch YouTube for an hour before bed. It got to the point where I needed it to fall asleep, usually with it playing in the background.
Replaced it with reading books and now I just read until I'm sleep enough, usually when I realize I have to reread sentences repeatedly.
After about a week I had no desire to scroll my YouTube feed for videos. I didn't block YouTube or anything, I still watch videos from creators I follow, but I no longer instinctively reach for it to pass time.
Thanks for sharing, that's something I can probably draw some inspiration from. I never really thought about how often I reach to youtube to kill time, including putting something on when heading to sleep.
I second this. Almost like I was under a spell.
This reminds me of the definiton by Lionel Robbins:
Or the simpler version I remember:Us software engineers assume value comes from serving more people, faster, with less friction. But many of the things that actually make life feel coherent such as learning a craft, maintaining friendships and building tools for one person, only work because they’re slow and specific.
Tech doesn't give us the wrong desires but the easier versions of the right ones, and those end up hollow.
Why is every sentence also a paragraph?
I find myself doing this for anything "work related" like slack. It's definitely a thing on Linkedin posts.
The idea is it's like TikTok for text. Short self-contained visual "things" that keep grabbing back your fading attention. I don't like it, but I like that I think about why it is and that, in a "professional" environment, it somehow (sadly) makes sense.
When I come across this sort of writing I skip it. If the writer can't be bothered to organise their ideas I won't do it for them. I find that writing style oddly grating.
In a post about how thin, superficial (and yes, lazy) things are destroying the value of your life, sigh...
Maybe it will reach the people most in need of it that way
I've only ever seen this style as a satire of hustle bros. So I assume it must be a real thing originally.
when you write like this
people think it's more profound
than it really is
the last haiku line
should be about nature, so:
flies are really gross.
for what it is worth
sometimes it does seem to work
your mileage may vary
“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” T.S. Eliot
I’ve heard of “Idiot wisdom” and “wise wisdom”.
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….
“Circling this territory for decades.” Try millennia. The world is filled with hungry ghosts. Ask a Buddhist.
I find it ironic that this perspective is being shared in such a "thin" way.
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.
>> And maintaining relationships is a lot of work
this is really true, and I'm hopeful that people will prioritize fewer, deeper relationships because it's so much work. I feels like networking in all the superficial ways has allowed people to (believe they) have way more relationships than is healthy or even possible. I don't know what the upper limit is (likely different for every individual) but it's way less than 500 professional connections on linkedin, or thousands of personal connections. For deep, meaningful, valuable - and rewarding! - relationships it's probably less than ten. If you're not prepared to let the rest just atrophy and even disappear, you're not going to be happy.
In my experience, it is mostly like 3-5 very close friends and about a dozen "good" friends. One thing I hear from so many people is the mindset of "well, they didn't call me back" and turn it into score keeping. Not all relationships are going to be equitable but they all require investment or they wither.
Completely agree! The moment after leaving an event/party/service I always feel a greater sense of purpose, contentness, or at the very least, less pessimistic about the state of the world
Excellent piece, easy to read and I agree on most until this part:
As much as it is true we are technologically more connected than ever, I would argue that much was taken away in parallel to what was given. The capabilities came to fruit but at the same time the governance and politics thinned out much of our desires at their core; ie now we're being told we want more and more because it's been determined we can't have certain things.I don't see governance and politics as being the primary movers in what I seek out.
My experience is more: I find myself spinning my tires watching yet another youtube video instead of calmly deciding on a worthy investment of a deep pursuit.
No government has forced that on me, that's mostly a corporate entity and platform making (automated, ML mediated) decisions on what I should consume. Of course governments are involved when deciding what I shouldn't be exposed to, but that's a different matter.
We all have a limited reserve of energy, of attention and willpower. When you spend it on shallow desires, you have expended it and tacitly made a choice to not invest in a more meaningful path. If I were to summarize the time I've spent sitting on my ass watching YouTube the last N years, it's really quite depressing (even if it does sometimes provide some very real value).
This post really resonated with me, and some lack of fulfilment I've been working through lately. It seems a lot of commenters felt the need to bikeshed it instead of just trying to understand the point being made.
> The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. > We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.
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."
Well written, this has given a concrete description to a vague notion that has been in my mind for a while
I send postcards when I travel. I love doing it.
https://findingfavorites.podbean.com/e/ry-jones-postcards/
I'm an Engineering Manager. I print out certificates for people on (and beyond) my teams, referencing something they accomplished (big or small), add one of the "boy scout badges" I bought in bulk from AliExpress (and then retroactively created & reference a set of values based on the iconography) and mail out "Engineering Merit Badges" to our remote employees. Maybe a few think it's dumb but the vast majority love it. The collector-types try to earn the entire set (I made one of the badges really hard to get because of this), while physically getting mail really seems to resonate with anyone under 35. A few people more distant from my teams (i.e. different departments) DID seems supsicious at first when I asked for their home address, and my boss wondered how I spent several hundred dollars in postage last year, but I try and send out at least a dozen a month while still keeping them meaningful. It's actually a bit of work (of course I wrote software to help manage and create everything) but I love it too.
Everything is about X, because I can redefine X to mean anything.
Great piece!
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!
Since the article mentioned enjoyment of calculus,
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.
Thin desires are mental snacking. Thick desires are a full meal.
I find it hard because thick desires require a lot more activation energy before it becomes pleasant.
What’s the point of this article — everyone knows desiring heroin is different from wanting to become an Olympic swimmer.
Why the short paragraphs?
They are hard to read.
See: this post.
Get a motorcycle. Learn to ride it. Learn to fix it. Obtain joy.
You are creating content[1] that is insightful. To everyone. Equally known.
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
Thanks. It's exactly what I thought, but written in a funny way. I'm so sick of this way of writing, which is actually tuned to appeal to the broadest audience possible and follow every guide on "how to write efficiently".
> Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.
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.
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.
The wording was very careful to say the pursuit of the desire changes you. That's very different than obtaining the desire changing you.
It's not a real remedy for your comment because we could probably come up with an example where the pursuit of the desire changes you in a bad way. For example, if you're a heroin addict and you're breaking into homes to steal things so that you can buy drugs. But I think it does help narrow the scope enough that the intent behind the statement becomes more clear.
I appreciate your clarity, thanks.
There is something really interesting about people (which I think I'm borrowing from Atomic Habits by James Clear): Every time you take an action in service of a goal, it helps prove to yourself, a little at a time, that part of your identity involves pursuing that goal. For example, each time I spew out a journal entry or cobble together a blog post, it reinforces the belief "I am a writer."
With this in mind, it suggests a theory: doing the thing itself changes you. After some suitable time delay, perhaps. (This is how exercise adaptation works at least.)
But connecting this together still feels muddled. What is the difference between doing the thing and the consequences of doing the thing? The difference feels ... undefined? Maybe even arbitrary? All of this triggers my "inconsistency detectors" suggesting more thinking needs to be done.
Maybe the difference is that some actions provide certain emotional states while we're doing them: satisfaction, flow, meaning -- and this is what people mean by the first part ("doing the thing"). Maybe we can define consequences as the things that happen after we stop acting. Like the royalty checks that hypothetically will clog up my mailbox one day.
You said it yourself - "sugary drinks... tend towards unfavorable consequences". The change happens as the outcome of the desire, not "in the process of the pursuing it".
This is the concept of hungry ghost from buddhism: https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhism/hungry-ghosts/
>A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.
>A thin desire is one that doesn't.
TL;DR
Thanks OP for enriching my thin vocabulary today, pun intended.
Coffee is for closers
There’s nothing especially novel in here but she says it beautifully and succinctly.
So hard drugs are a thick desire?
After all who says change is always a good thing? When you are doing well maybe it's better to stick to thin desires?
2.5/10
Thanks for this.
What the fuck is this LinkedIn tier garbage. God help us.
Reads like AI slop.
Everything is slop now.
From "How to know what you really want" by Luke Burgis [1]:
> 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:
This is complex!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/
This is the second time I'm finding out Joan's moved her RSS feed without announcing it...
I’ve noticed a lot of changes on the site recently, which I believe is powered by Ghost which makes messing around with feed links a more advanced (for lack of a better word) tweak than many platforms as you download/upload a routes file. I’m a 10+ year developer and have found myself chasing route changes in Ghost with trial and error.
> We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.
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.