alt Hacker NewsThin desires are eating life
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Get a motorcycle. Learn to ride it. Learn to fix it. Obtain joy.
> 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.
Imperfections aside, the article is hitting on something quite real. If only we had been studying the received wisdom of the ages instead of warping it into dismissible caricatures and smearing it with black legends, we would have learned about things like virtue and natural law. We would have understood the nature of sin and immorality, and conversely, the moral and the good life. We would have looked at the vacuous and empty temptations of "the world" with contempt and disdain, as vain things beneath human dignity.
Instead, we convinced ourselves that "morality" is a prison, that "freedom" is the ability to do whatever we please, that "happiness" is to be found in degrading and perverse gratification, worthless trivialities, and illusion. We laughed at the straw men that we erected of our forefathers to justify our depravity, calling them "prude" or "square". We embraced meaninglessness and gave it the veneer of intellectual respectability, because if life is meaningless, then what does it matter that I "get off" or how I do so? And when meaninglessness wore us down and left us empty and feeling like rubbish, we convinced ourselves that we are gods, that we can pull meaning out of a hat. "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven!" we declare. The stronger among us became practicing tyrants. "Submit to me and I will give you your meaning! I am your god now!" In overtly brutal regimes, those who didn't submit kept quiet or else perished making their refusal known.
So we consume and consume and consume. We consume to fill a void that consumption cannot fill. We consume, because we are small souls terrorized by the opinions of others in this race of material acquisition. We worship consumption, destroying all that is human and noble and good in the process. As the blog post notes, we are richer than ever. And yet, having children is now deemed "too expensive". Indeed, if consumption is your god - your ultimate imperative - then children are indeed "too expensive". They will always be "too expensive", as children eat into the resources that you could otherwise be using to consume. They are competitors eating into your advantage!
And careerism? The means. The middle classes suffer from this one the most, as the poor don't have careers and the rich don't need them. The careerist toils endlessly and fritters away his life so that he can consume, and consume, and consume...
And what about debt? Debt, especially at our scale, is the result of not being able to live within our means, of consumption taken up a notch. To "keep up", to "have" more than we can afford, we go into debt, and the usurers are more than happy to oblige. No one saves anymore, few really invest. We live in terror of losing our jobs, because without them, that monster of debt will get us. It will come for us, that is to say, it will come to collect those things that truly belong to it but in terms of which we have defined ourselves. We are lead back to careerism, to which debt chains us with relish and verve.
Everything is commercial. Everything is commoditized. Relationships are no exception; they are now commodities as well. Sex is transactional, a service, an infertile and sterile exchange of selfish gratification. When a spouse is now deemed useless, when the voracious hunger returns and torments us once again, demanding satisfaction, we reach for divorce, and a whole industry stands ready to assist us in expediting this process, for a price. People are disposable. People are things. People are up for auction.
And when we prideful, slothful, lustful, gluttonous, greedy creatures don't get what we want...envy and wrath rear their ugly heads to complete the magnificent seven. Our idolatry of consumption is finally crowned with hatred, fear, and despair.
Someone once asked: what is the difference between Christ and a vampire? The answer: Christ sacrifices his blood for your good. The vampire, on the other hand, sacrifices your blood for his good.
We are vampires.
Why the short paragraphs?
They are hard to read.
See: this post.
"The desire to master a craft, to read slowly, [...]"
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.
This is the concept of hungry ghost from buddhism: https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhism/hungry-ghosts/
Thin desires are just weak wills.
Philosophy is so 2024.
2.5/10
>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.
Terrific piece. Love her writing, recommend following her RSS.
There’s nothing especially novel in here but she says it beautifully and succinctly.
Coffee is for closers
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?
The irony is thick here. The author's railing against scalable thin desires... by writing a scalable viral essay that delivers the neurological reward of "deep insight".
> 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.
reads like an edgy high-schooler jerking off at how much better they are than everyone else.
Its like reading Rick Rubin from a loser whose opinions I don't value at all.
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:
- 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...
Thanks for this.
What the fuck is this LinkedIn tier garbage. God help us.
[dead]
This is the second time I'm finding out Joan's moved her RSS feed without announcing it...
> 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.
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.