I bake bread. I have spent a good deal of time optimizing the recipe for deliciousness but also for time efficiency. Proving in a warm oven is a great tip. Also baking two loaves at a time!
All this nit picking about writing style is disappointing. I like that this person got their ideas out there. They are good ideas. Legible and easy to parse == good enough. I don't care about the writing style any more than that and you shouldn't either. It is a waste of everyone's time... yours especially.
It's very nice to hear about someone else who is interested in doing hard things/real things. Seems like there ought to be a meet up or a get together opportunity for people working on stuff like that. Perhaps a get-together where everyone gives a 2-5 minute talk about something they are working on then we all hang out for another hour or two. Seems like alcohol might help get the wheels spinning?
I fully appreciate the need for a catchy headline with a hook (it got me!) but I wonder if these ideas would be more powerful/useful if expressed in positive language rather than doom speak? I guess doom speak is the fashion these days and we all have to conform to the dominant paradigm... at least a little around the edges.
Generally... Bravo. Nice piece. Nice ideas.
It reminds me of the Epicurean hierarchy of desires, the genius Epicurus had it figured out more then a couple of millenia ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
The thing about "apps for one" actually resonated with me quite a bit.
The last year I've struggled finding freelance work and I've found myself with more time (and less money) that I would like. I feel guilty, because one side of me feels like I should have spent this time to learn ML or to make an app that makes passive income. The thing is: I have no interest in making "apps" to make money. I wouldn't even know what app to make, because there is no quotidian problem for which I think an app would make my life easier. On the contrary, I don't have a smartphone and apps are making my life harder, as we move towards a world where apps are expected for everything. But instead, I have made a couple of games for my girlfriend's birthdays, and I also made her web portfolio, all forms, I guess, of "apps for one" made for love. Other than that, perhaps, I enjoy tuning my Linux system (recently migrated from Xmonad to Hyprland), a form of making, perhaps, an app for one, in the only tech device that still feels like I can control instead of it trying to control myself. Other than that, I use my time to go to the gym and sometimes to paint or DJ or just party, even though I often spend on Hacker News, Youtube, Wikipedia and other media way more time that I would like to.
So all in all, I find it difficult to write code these days with the joy of when I was younger, and it is hard to motivate myself if there's no money involved, with the exception of those gestures of love. It saddens me, because I believe it is such a powerful and beautiful skill. But I just find the current state of world and how "technology" is used to extract capital out of all human relationships rather depressing. The current wave of "AI" only makes the problem worse, and adds an dark sense of impending doom...
A defining experience of our age is a paradoxical hunger: we crave more even when we have an excess, and we crave less while more accumulates around us. It is a vague hunger we often can’t articulate, a deep sense of wanting something fundamental. This is the essence of "thin desire": a craving for something undefinable and ultimately unattainable, from a source with no interest in providing it.
The distinction between "thick" and "thin" desires is simple: a thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it, while a thin desire does not. Consider the desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications. The desire to learn calculus is thick; it transforms the learner, revealing new patterns in the world and expanding their capacity to care about new things. The desire to check notifications is thin; afterward, you are the same person you were five minutes before. A thick desire transforms its host; a thin desire merely reproduces itself.
The business model of most modern consumer technology is to exploit this distinction. It identifies a thick human desire, isolates the part that produces a neurological reward, and then delivers that sensation without the enriching substance. Social media offers the feeling of connection without the obligations of friendship. Pornography provides sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership. Productivity apps can give a sense of accomplishment without anything of substance being accomplished.
This thin version of desire is easier to deliver at scale, easier to monetize, and far easier to make addictive, resulting in a cultural diet of pure sensation. Yet, despite getting what we want with such efficiency, we are not happier. Surveys consistently show rising anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Perhaps we have become so proficient at giving people what they want that we have prevented them from wanting anything truly worthwhile.
Thick desires are inherently inconvenient. They cannot be satisfied on demand and often take years to cultivate. Mastering a craft, reading a book slowly, or becoming part of a genuine community requires sustained effort. These pursuits embed us in webs of obligation and make us dependent on specific people and places—all of which is pure inefficiency from the perspective of a frictionless global marketplace.
As a result, the infrastructure for thick desires—workshops, apprenticeships, local congregations, front porches—has been gradually dismantled. In its place, the infrastructure for thin desires has become inescapable, residing in the pocket of nearly every person. Grand programs to "rebuild community" often fail because they try to apply the same logic of scale they hope to escape. The thick life, however, doesn't scale. That is the entire point.
The antidote, therefore, may not lie in large-scale movements but in small, deliberate, and beautifully inefficient acts. Bake bread; the yeast is indifferent to your schedule, and the process teaches a patience that the attention economy has stripped away. Write a physical letter and send it through the mail; it creates a connection that exists outside the logic of engagement metrics. Code a software tool for just one person; building something that will never be monetized is a beautiful heresy against the assumption that all creations must serve millions.
These individual acts will not reverse the great thinning of our culture. But the thick life is worth pursuing anyway, on its own terms. The person who bakes bread isn't trying to fix the world; they are simply trying to spend an afternoon in a way that doesn’t leave them feeling emptied out. They are remembering, one small act at a time, what it feels like to want something that is actually worth wanting.
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.
Bit of a tangent: I don't really subscribe to the introvert/extrovert divide personally, but do eventually hit a wall with socializing, and am happy to explicitly isolate myself in my own world or with a smaller group for extended periods of recharge. Unfortunately, I've committed to attending my good friend's costume NYE party, and have betrayed myself somewhat because... I'm just tired of costumes, he's a very theatrical film person and I'm... a web dev, who's just never really had an affinity for dressing up in that way—even less so since it's been a socially packed autumn. I'm considering bailing, but I feel like that would be a bit of a fail.
I think as a nerd, I'd need to make it a challenge and a small hobby like you have, but I also am trying to quit YouTube. Can you picture yourself in my situation? Any tips on finding a seed of interest?
For me, I'd often have these ideas of things I wanted to try, or do, or challenge myself with, and then for some inexplicable reason I'd never do them. In this instance, I told myself to get off my ass and just give it a try. It may have helped that I was in therapy at the time and making efforts to address a lifetime of issues. It has lent a certain proactiveness to my being. For me, addressing my mental health is a driving factor in having made any of this possible.
Finding a seed of interest: if you mean directly with making a costume, I don't know. If you're not interested in costumes, I don't think it is something you can force. Overall though I think anything that causes that itch, that pull, maybe even a sense of yearning "to do" is enough to get you going on a path. I had a feeling when watching the video that reminded me of what I felt when I was a kid and I would see something and I'd get excited to do the same.
I don't know that any of this would have come together for me had I not been on a journey to improve my mental health, and making efforts to find something that connected with me. Something outside of a screen. But in the end, what I connected with was surprising. It looks like it makes sense in hindsight, but at that time, it felt like it came out of left field.
Hopefully there are some tips somewhere in this mess of words. If not, my apologies for wasting your time.
Anyway, I should probably imitate you, every time I see some people crafting real things I have a little blip of envy.
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!
Computing was a thing by geeks, for geeks. It was revolutionary. It was fun. Now it's the lowest common denominator. Instagram.
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.
So, I started small, and then built from there. I only bought materials and tools when my journey necessitated them so I could refrain from getting ahead of myself. I think this is valuable, as it is easy for me to get carried away in the beginning of anything new, and go whole-hog only to find later that my interest lay elsewhere. I wanted to prove to myself that my purchases were for a reason and meaningful to where I was at, at that moment.
I have kept a blog of my learning experiences, trying to give back as I can. I don't want to break the forum rules, but if you want I can send you links to my site. It has my work and the blog has outlines of what I have done, steps, resources, etc. I hope it is helpful to someone out there going along this path.
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.
I actually play instruments, as well, but this feels totally different and almost stimulates a different part of my brain. I was much more relaxed doing pottery and I saw instant results that I could track whether I was doing something right or wrong (even though the "right" and "wrong" was driven by my own personal idea of them).
Do you think you'll end up sharing any of your pieces to the public?
I lived exactly the same thing also two years ago.
What changed everything to me was, impulsively, enrolling myself to a rollerblading course in a skate park. I was 34, overweight (still am) and never did anything like this (I never did barely any sport at all tbh). Oh boy was this transformative.
I'm still in the course every week and like you, it feels good because it's tangible : not in the material way like sculpting but rather by doing things with my body (and my brain) I would'nt believe I could do at all even when I was younger. That's an amazing feeling after decades of watching things on screens (yes, I know how that sounds pathetic, but that's my story).
Random stranger on Reddit mentioned - *The art of frugal hedonism* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216874949
This book is indeed eye opener. Though I am too deep to turn around quickly without crashing I am well on may way and there is many more miles to go. Hoping to take few of my friends with me too.
> 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.
But I think optimising yourself, or the world, hopefully in a positive way, is one of the thickest things you can do.
“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.
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.
Like: The oven light. It's an incandescent bulb, which is also to say that it's waaaay better at being a heater than it is at being a source of light.
I found that leaving the light switched on in the oven, and the oven door closed, kept the temperature right around 100F. It varied a bit depending on ambient, but never by more than a few degrees.
---
[1]: It was an old Frigidaire-built electric range that someone gave me for free. It worked, until one day when I switched it on at a sensible temperature setting and put a frozen pizza in there. The temperature control then failed, and it failed stuck in the on position. The pizza was very badly burned and looked pretty crispy when I came back to it a short time later.
And when I tried to retrieve the pizza, the hotpad in my hand was converted directly from fabric into smoke as soon as it touched the pan.
While I lamented about the lost pizza and the expense of buying new replacement parts for an old freebie oven, a friend suggested using a PID controller and an SSR instead.
So I did exactly that: I bought the parts (including ceramic wire nuts and fiberglass-insulated wire), cut a square hole in the panel with a grinder and a deathwheel for the new controls, mounted an SSR in a recess on the back with an enormous heatsink, and it all went together splendidly. I put the new bits in series with the old bits, so it was never any less-safe than it had become on its own accord.
I miss that oven sometimes. It was actually kind of fun learning how to tune the PID, and to be able to reliably get a consistent temperature from it.
The oven-light discovery was just an accident; if I actually wanted 100F for some reason, I'd have just set the PID box to that temperature.
I discovered later that the length of time it spends rising matters. Room temperature (15-19 degrees Celsius) is optimal and will take a couple of hours for the first rise and less than an hour for the second. It is of course necessary to keep the dough away from any drafts. I keep it wrapped in a blanket or towel.
35 degrees Celsius is far too warm and won't give it enough time to develop the flavour and texture of good bread.
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
"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.
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.
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).
Says someone who lectures on how LLMs worked two years ago.
Interestingly he recently discussed how using LLMs tends to remove this desirable difficulty: https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/a-risk-of-cognitive-conv...
This means that the results (both of the task and of the learning by the student) are lower if the student uses an LLM first, but slightly improves if they use it second
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.
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.
Consider the following excerpt of the post:
The thick life doesn't scale.
That's the whole point.
So: bake bread.
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).
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."
I've never baked a loaf of bread.
I've never baked anything more complex than a pre-packaged cornbread mix, or a frozen pizza.
Baking has always been someone else's problem.
But having now skimmed through this bit of weirdly-formatted writing, I might give it a shot.
(Oh, and of that formatting: It reminds me a bit of what suck.com looked like in the mid-late 1990s. I still have the sticker they sent me stuck to a thing ~30 years later, but the suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom they sent with it got mangled pretty bad in the mail.)
So a bag of what in the UK is called 'strong white flour' (i.e. protein around 12%, I think it is 'all purpose' in US) and a sachet of instant yeast and some salt. Followed the instructions on the bread bag and it worked sort of, a bit solid but edible and it toasted nice.
Then you just iterate. Lots of stuff out on the Web. I use supermarket flour and the dried active yeast and the ingredients are 10x cheaper than even a basic bought loaf. And mixing and baking is fun. Sourdough is OK but you then have a pet to look after...
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.
Could you clarify, are you comparing the parent comment to the article?
Maybe you like being restricted to reading in the ad-copy register, in which case go ahead and make virtue of vice, but otherwise: this lack is well within your power to remedy.
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.
> 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.
#strawmanning
See, e.g., the end of https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/
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.
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.
My reply was prompted by both the substance and style of your comment. :)
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.
More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
Often, when I'm communicating with someone who is either dyslexic, or uses English as a second (or even third or fourth) language, then I make an effort to shorten sentences, and almost make bullet points of them.
It's actually a good exercise for the person writing too. Less can indeed be more.
Pretty sure the first rule of writing on the internet is ignore the comments section
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.
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.
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?
I don't mind that.
It's a vibe.
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.
I expected the author to have language learning as an example, but they did not include it. I wonder where Duolingo fits in this, I see a new language learning app every week.
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.
My point is that desire is something that is deeply explored in all three major schools of Buddhism. In the Vajrayana to the point that we take the most difficult of our base desires as paths of practice, like seen in karmamudra.
It looks like the Hindi tanha comes from Classical Persian [1], whereas the Pali tanha comes from Sanskrit [2]
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%B9%E...
> Maybe because we've gotten good at giving people what they want in a way that prevents them from wanting anything worth having.
This has a political interpretation too. Have you noticed that online "petitions" have mostly disappeared lately ? Maybe this disappearance is based on now-widespread recognition that the way to get the attention and concern of the political establishment is to get out on the streets and make some noise.
Online activity can _motivate_ protest, but it cannot really express protest in a way that "matters". It's busy work. Keep the monkeys at their typewriters.
Online is the equivalent of hanging a sign in your window; it does not tell you whether your opinion is shared by most of your fellow citizens. Thousands of likes versus the knowledge that social media keeps each of us in our bubble, feeding us more.
But a monster rally in your city and elsewhere can tell you precisely that your opinion is shared by most (or "sufficiently many") of your fellow citizens. Pithy placards to the fore!
Honestly I'm not even convinced this works so well anymore. (Not saying it never does, but I think it's effectiveness has dropped.) To me, it seems the main way to achieve political change is with money. More money than I have, unfortunately.
I'm always wanting more, anything I haven't got Everything I want it all, and I just can't stop Planning all my days away but never finding ways to stay Or ever feel enough today, tomorrow must be more Drink, more dreams, more bed, more drugs More lust, more lies, more head, more love Fear more fun, more pain, more flesh More stars, more smiles, more colors, more sex
But however hard I want I know deep down inside I'll never really get more hope Or any more time Any more time Any more time
I want the sun to fall in, I want lightning and thunder Blood instead of rain, I want the world to make me wonder I want to walk on water, take a trip to the moon Give me all this, give me it soon More drink, more dreams, more drugs More lust, more lies, more love
But however hard I want I know deep down inside I'll never really get more hope Or any more time Any more time Any more time Any more time
His destiny was just too big to spend / So he broke it into smaller bills and change
By the time he'd try to buy the things he needed / He had spent it all on loosies and weed and
He had spent it all on chips and Coca-Cola / He had spent it all on chocolate and vanilla
He had spent it all and didn't even feel it / He had spent it all and didn't even feel it
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.
Thin: A desire to enjoy a book, video game, movie, musical performance, new technology, love, ...
Thick: A desire to make any of the above.
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.
This definition is compatible with watching some films and not others. I think Alan Watts said something like that his job was that you no longer needed him. This implies that consuming his work would be thick until it wouldn't.
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.
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.
The first mode of consumption is understandably popular given the amount of noise in the world that distracts us. So many people are trapped in dopamine holes. It's mental withdrawal to try to attempt a sudden switch to thick consumption. They are so opposite of each other.
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
Tech doesn't give us the wrong desires but the easier versions of the right ones, and those end up hollow.
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.
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.
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.
Idiot wisdom - is generic platitudes that sound nice, but aren’t actionable.
Wise wisdom- might not always sound nice, but is actionable.
My ego likes this article, if I believe that I pursue thick desires.
But some part of me thinks (and perhaps due to the written style ). That this is idiot wisdom.
Another commenter mentioned it ties to Tanha in Buddhism.
I don’t know. But- off to read some Shunryu Suzuki….
There are some insightful observations but the whole thick/thin perspective just doesn't resonate with me. As an old man (shakes fist at clouds), we have stopped prioritizing people. It is all about building and maintaining relationships and we've gotten lazy. And maintaining relationships is a lot of work and without it we do feel more isolated. So we try to fill that void with things that don't require effort like buying crap we don't need on Amazon and chasing likes on social media. We aren't happy so we try to be busy so we don't notice so much.
We saw a bit of a teeny correction during covid when people starting going outdoors and baking bread and cooking home cooked meals. But now everyone is back to working from home in their pajamas and tell themselves how happy they are with all the time they save not driving but skip over the lack of adult interaction (both good and bad).
But the problem is easily solved for each of us by things as simple as hobbies and volunteering and organizations (church, civic, etc.) Personally, I design board games and have friends over to test them and go to board game conferences. We've built a group that still test and communicate online but are happiest when we get to hang out and play games and go for dinner. There is no shortage of these opportunities but you have to get off the couch and join in. It is a place where you will make new friends and find happiness but you have to decide it is worth it.
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.
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."
See also gift boxes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21uGljlJVoI
This other post on the infantilization of failure is very well-put:
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/uh-oh-the-infantilization-of-...
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.
people think it's more profound
than it really is
should be about nature, so:
flies are really gross.
sometimes it does seem to work
your mileage may vary
> Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.
> Economics is about allocating limited natural resources to unlimited human desire.I find it hard because thick desires require a lot more activation energy before it becomes pleasant.
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.
"The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to justify its existence."
Maybe she points to /tech industry/ and not /software/
'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'
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).
If i would have money tomorrow, i would know immediadly what i would do: Slowly and steadily renovate a old house, building a park/garden, having greenhouses and doing pottery.
Having a workshop and doing everything thick.
I hope i can achieve this before i'm 45 because i have the slight worry, that either AI will take over and my dreams break or i'm to old/fragile/broken to enjoy that.
Made me reflect on my own persuasion of thin desires and my struggle to control them.
It also made me see that my hobbies and my career are actually about following my thick desires. I'm in tech, yes. But I chose, among all the possibilities, to be an analog circuit designer. The analog part is what makes it a long hard skill to master, and my day job feels like constant learning from my interactions woth the world. I can't imagine doing anything which isn't interacting with the actual physical world!
We all cheer. We know this. Then we move on.
A catchy title. A novel enough term. That will hook them.
We all read. We all smile. The daily grind.
This insight is not original to me.
[1] It’s just content now
Not essays
Not music
Content
And.
Its worded,
Like This.
#Deep
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.
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.
Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.
It feels weird how after a very good explanation of why thick desires are in the end more rewarding, she focuses on the (ostensible) negatives here, like some sort of obligatory tax or payment that you're evading by focusing on "thin" desire.
Formulated like this, the obvious retort would be "yeah, so what? - why should I bother with obligation and vulnerability if I can have the same rewards without them?"
Of course everyone who has 100 online friends but no one to go to a party with knows why this is bullshit - but it's not following from this paragraph.
Maybe a better way would be to explain that the "negatives" are in fact positives: e.g. The obligation is what lets one build upon a friendship - both for you and your friends - but you do have to explain it, you can't just take it for granted.
They are hard to read.
See: this post.
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.
>A thin desire is one that doesn't.
TL;DR
Thanks OP for enriching my thin vocabulary today, pun intended.
After all who says change is always a good thing? When you are doing well maybe it's better to stick to thin desires?
> 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.
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.
Its like reading Rick Rubin from a loser whose opinions I don't value at all.
> There are two kinds of desire, thin and thick. Thick desires are like layers of rock that have been built up throughout the course of our lives. These are desires that can be shaped and cultivated through models like our parents and people that we admire as children. But at some level, they’re related to the core of who we are. They can be related to perennial human truths: beauty, goodness, human dignity.
> Thin desires are highly mimetic (imitative) and ephemeral desires. They’re the things that can be here today, gone tomorrow. Thin desires are subject to the winds of mimetic change, because they’re not rooted in a layer of ourselves that’s been built up over time. They are like a layer of leaves that’s sitting on top of layers of rock. Those thin desires are blown away with a light gust of wind. A new model comes into our life; the old desires are gone. All of a sudden we want something else.
Comparing the above conceptualizations with the ones offered by Westenberg (OP) could consume hundreds or thousands of words -- more than I want to spend at the moment -- but I will say this: both sets feel wrong, by which I mean they trigger my early warning detectors.
I'm not asking anyone else to trust my intuition. But you should trust yours. Intuition is usually a good starting point, at least.
With intuition alone -- without writing a full analysis -- we can see the above quoted explanations/definitions are highly complected. [2] Also, in my view, the offered metaphors don't carve reality at the joints. [3]
When I put ~20 minutes of concentrated thinking into the problem, here are some of the constituent parts of "desire" that I can unpack. (These are only fleetingly glossed over in the article.) In no particular order, to what degree are desires:
- conscious?
- intentional?
- intentionally trained and reinforced?
- authentic?
- ones we want to have?
- situational?
- pattern-matched responses?
- evolutionarily-selected?
- socially constructed? (imitative, mimetic)
- moral? (positive, neutral, negative)
- permanent, durable, lasting?
- self-reinforcing?
Over-simplication can be a disservice. Adding another metaphor reminds me of the "N+1 standards" problem. [4] Maybe the new metaphor helps, maybe not. Either way, now we have more to sift through.
[1]: https://bigthink.com/series/explain-it-like-im-smart/mimetic...
[2]: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
[3]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-t...
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.