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drdaemanlast Tuesday at 10:06 PM1 replyview on HN

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.


Replies

phitoyesterday at 5:54 AM

I agree, I would define those *thin desires" as whatever I'm engaging in a lot automatically, but if I were to pause and ask myself "do I really want to do this? Is this beneficial to me or am I being exploited?", part of me would say no. My "thin desires" might not be someone else's. We each have to take the time to ask ourselves these questions in order to figure it out.