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Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

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Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#41

Post by beaconstudios »

automatoney wrote: post #5

The piece overly relies on the metaphor to the point of almost being incomprehensible. From the title and opening example I assumed it had something to do with literal human bodies. But then the definition of a thick desire is vague to the point of uselessness - "enduring, sustainable, and ultimately fulfilling desires", especially because it calls Putin's desires thick - as if megalomania is sustainable and fulfilli…

I think he's trying to differentiate between intrinsic desires (creativity, passions) and compulsive desires (spiritual junk food of various flavours). I do think he goes too deep into purple prose though, forgetting that poetic language in philosophy is usually either referential or narrative, but this article is using purple prose in an explanatory fashion which often reads badly imo.

Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#42

Post by Dracophoenix »

ivoras wrote: post #14

I think the issue is more about the lack of true diversity. Look at music for example - to achieve global success, bands all over the world need to start using western rhytms and melodies, losing the very things that made them unique. Not that there's no innovation in niches, but those never reach the highlight. A friend of mine is a musician, and was fairly popular in his circles, but has almost a decade ago renounc…

Don't you think the issue begins with wanting to achieve global success? It seems like a Catch-22: To achieve professional success, one needs to be popular enough to capture a sufficiently large, paying audience while simultaneously be unique enough to push against the boundaries of mainstream taste. Few people listen to music to be "challenged" unless they're musicians. If anything, I'd say there's more diversity in music then there's ever been. So much so, that we develop complicated tools to find such music.

Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#43

Post by refurb »

beaconstudios wrote: post #40
refurb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can reduce work right now if you'd like. Live like the 1920's. No access to modern medicine, no automobile, no internet, no antibiotics. Grow your own food.

A small percentage of today's work goes towards these things (except the Internet, which is an endless sinkhole of mostly pointless labour).

The OECD average GDP spent on healthcare is 9.9% (US spends 17%). That mean 1 out of every 10 dollars of economic activity go to healthcare alone.

So you could your 40 hour work week back to 4 hours, that would just pay for healthcare, and healthcare only.

Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#44

Post by Tade0 »

The author strikes me as someone not really in touch with popular culture or even global politics.

> NATO is an institution that does not, for instance, seem able to withstand the thick desires of Vladimir Putin because it scarcely recognizes that he has any.

As a Polish citizen I have to say that the initial reaction to Putin's invasion, aside from shock, was a feeling that this could have been us hadn't we joined NATO over 20 years ago.

Still no guarantee that he won't do it(there was a major scare in 2014), but it's obvious that he's picking non-NATO members first.

----

On to another topic: Sex. That paragraph is the most out of touch in my view, because it's deeply rooted in the "war on drugs" mentality. I was of the impression that nowadays vices are seen as more of a symptom of a deeper problem than the problem itself. Or is it just my bubble?

Also pornography is not any more the pinnacle of degeneracy the author thinks it to be[0]. With the advent of curated content, platforms with safe, functional payments and performers increasingly securing their rights - especially to privacy, it has become somewhat of a mainstream thing. Case in point: OnlyFans is essentially a household name now.

[0] I suppose the author only wrote this because he's unaware of the existence of the furry fandom or anime waifus. Those two phenomenons went where traditional pornography can't and won't go.

----

As for art: most of modern art doesn't happen in galleries or closed meetings with expensive wine and other cartoonishly stereotypical attributes.

Modern art is chiefly memes produced and shared by the public for the public - anonymously at that. It even went through a series of trends, each spanning a few years, like the enigmatic, surreal "E" memes, with their characteristic "deep fried" art style. To this day it isn't clear how did this achieve mainstream adoption, what were they actually expressing and for what purpose. There probably wasn't any and people just collectively decided to make it so, which makes this the purest manifestation of art possible.

Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#45

Post by prewett »

I was hoping to find out what he thought “thick” and “thin” desires were, but he never bothers defining them. Maybe he talks about them in another essay? But without definitions, this piece is just a catalogue of all the ills of society, justified by some unseen value system. And the title is just wrong, it’s not about the pursuit of thicket desires (whatever those are), it’s about cataloguing society’s pursuit of thin desire (whatever those are). And an advertisement at the end.

Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#46

Post by recuter »

elsherbini wrote: post #33
recuter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is more about the lack of true diversity. Look at music for example - to achieve global success, bands all over the world need to start using western rhytms and melodies, losing the very things that made them unique. Yes, sure, everything is about a lack of diversity. You might want to look some more into musical theory and where those twelves notes, rhythms and melodies originate from in the first…

Off topic, but you seem like someone who might like these less popular music theory channels I really enjoy (all to do with harmony mostly) Metaharmony - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNKBF8Phj3M The Labyrinth of Limitations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86XSsHlJSrc Synthase / Midnight Oil Collective - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gWMW1Hkdik

Not off topic at all and very cool. Labyrinth dude seems legit to me, thanks for these.

If you haven't seen this Victor Wooten clip you should give it a glance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLCOwgbEO4o

Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#47

Post by MomoXenosaga »

refurb wrote: post #43
beaconstudios wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small percentage of today's work goes towards these things (except the Internet, which is an endless sinkhole of mostly pointless labour).

The OECD average GDP spent on healthcare is 9.9% (US spends 17%). That mean 1 out of every 10 dollars of economic activity go to healthcare alone. So you could your 40 hour work week back to 4 hours, that would just pay for healthcare, and healthcare only.

Considering health is quite literally the most important thing in your life (can't spend it when you're dead anyway unlike the Egyptian pharaohs) I do not understand why so many complain about the cost of healthcare.

Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#48

Post by Mezzie »

teekert wrote: post #24
ivoras wrote: post #14

I think the issue is more about the lack of true diversity. Look at music for example - to achieve global success, bands all over the world need to start using western rhytms and melodies, losing the very things that made them unique. Not that there's no innovation in niches, but those never reach the highlight. A friend of mine is a musician, and was fairly popular in his circles, but has almost a decade ago renounc…

"to achieve global success", it's unfortunate that that is often the goal indeed. Globalization kills a lot, look at Khao San Road in Bangkok, in 20 years it changed from small street stalls to big global chains. And the great homogenization will continue. In the first Ringworld, this process is also described, transport booths (in a flash you walk to any destination on earth) made every city the same. The internet a…

Reminds me of this article: https://nymag.com/urbanist/article/the-unbearable-sameness-o....

Also this one: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/08/why-e....

This phenomenon is why I ended up moving back to my hometown of ~100k after living in a couple of different countries + several different regions of the US/different big cities. They're all the same after a while. I missed a place that was unabashedly itself.

Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#49

Post by Schroedingersat »

refurb wrote: post #43
beaconstudios wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small percentage of today's work goes towards these things (except the Internet, which is an endless sinkhole of mostly pointless labour).

The OECD average GDP spent on healthcare is 9.9% (US spends 17%). That mean 1 out of every 10 dollars of economic activity go to healthcare alone. So you could your 40 hour work week back to 4 hours, that would just pay for healthcare, and healthcare only.

Except that's the healthcare industry including large swathes of money going to parasites like student loan providers and opiate pushers as a whole, not 'modern medicine' or 'antibiotics'.

Cuba's standard of healthcare is a reasonable compromise, and their total spending per capita is 2% of the USA's gdp per capita.

The internet as a tool for sharing information rather than an endless red queen's race of scammers is similarly cheap.

And yes please, let's get rid of the private automobile. Without it we can build dense enough that walking (or transit or bikes) will get you where you are going far faster than driving 5x as far at an average of 30km/h does now.

Re: Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

#50

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

I have some disagreements with the notion that deep, passionate hobbies and interests are increasingly difficult to acquire. If anything, they’ve never been commonly acquired; only the wealthy ever had the space for passion in their lives.

Additionally, how do you tell the difference between a hot take person on Twitter and someone who is deeply feeding their hobby? What if the hobby is spicy Twitter takes, because they are a YouTuber and so getting in on the controversy on one social media site gets you more audience for your platform on YouTube?

I have some concerns this essay is essentially dismissing other people as shallow out of the same influencer style posturing that it positions as shallow/thin. Doesn’t help that it ends with a $1500 thinking package, lol.

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