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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

#61

Post by karaterobot »

prewett wrote: post #45

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 th…

About that ending:

At first I thought the article was merely vague and perfunctory, but the advertisement for his $1500 course at the end recast him in the light of a self-help guru. The thing is, he made what I feel could be some good points, but now I wonder whether it's just so non-specific that I'm reading my own anxieties and hopes for meaning into them, like a classic rube. The implication that I need to pay him money to really understand what the hell he's saying makes me wonder if his philosophy might be a little "thin".

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

#62

Post by AniseAbyss »

brimble wrote: post #59
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If healthcare cost 80% of GDP, would you still not understand?

If that 80% kept you alive? No.

But when you are twenty I suppose one sees health differently. When you are 60 and take a bunch of pills to keep yourself from dying it suddenly all makes sense...

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

#63

Post by AniseAbyss »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #49
refurb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#64

Post by KaiserPro »

lkrubner wrote: post #22
KaiserPro wrote: post #2

I don't think that the author has fully outlined the case for cultural anorexia. If I was going to try and prove the premise: that people are now shedding a wide cultural "diet" for one consisting of a few mass produced, single sourced things. But I don't see evidence of that. If anything its the reverse. What I will concede is that locality of the cultural "sources" have gone. You're not going to find your next life…

"for one consisting of a few mass produced, single sourced things." Clay Shirky made the point that something like the Internet expands the total number of offerings available to one person while decreasing the total number of offerings available overall. He hints at this in his essay on powerlaws: https://web.archive.org/web/20060208093032/http://www.shirky... He went into greater detail in a later essay, but that l…

> Internet expands the total number of offerings available to one person while decreasing the total number of offerings available overall.

This argument makes much more sense to me, and I like that the author has actual plotted their idea using some sort of data, which is much more convincing than hand waving.

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

#65

Post by somewhereoutth »

throwaway-m3232 wrote: post #30

When I see someone mention human nature in some blog, I stop reading... Human nature is our species ability to transform nature. A cat, for example, is only doing hunting for immediate consumption. A pet cat is even more limited, just a furrring biological shell, he does not hunt. So when a human is limited in all his potentials, thinking, planning, building, etc to something like a tool on the market, optimized for…

Indeed. A rather curious difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Latin work ethic (and of course I'm painting a picture here, this blunt generalisation is meant only to propose an argument), is that: For the former, your job is who you are - the second question out of anyone's mouth in the UK is 'what do you do?'. Whereas, for the latter, who you are in society determines your job.

Hopefully we can reach beyond both these erroneous socialisations.

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

#66

Post by MandieD »

MattGaiser wrote: post #52
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #50

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 t…

> If anything, they’ve never been commonly acquired; only the wealthy ever had the space for passion in their lives. It is how people look back at the past and think that their life would be better in past times. They assume that either the lives of the well off were fairly normal or that they would be one of the well off.

A lot of that might be due to books and other media from or set in the past being about (relatively) rich people.

I love reading novels written in the late 18th/early 19th century; I give thanks that I was born in the late 20th century, because life as a middle class woman with an IT job now is far superior to life as a relatively wealthy woman then, to say nothing of life as a woman who actually did have to work outside her home (those were not fun, personally-fulfilling jobs).

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

#67

Post by presentation »

prewett wrote: post #45

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 th…

He talks about it in his book, Wanting

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

#68

Post by clejack »

clejack wrote: post #37
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…

We communicate with the most detail using words, but body language, facial expressions, touch and other scrubs act as girls of communication as well. All of these things have a common foundation in pattern. What we call art is the manipulation of these common patterns. When it's most successful, it often regurgitates patterns that have proven successful. When it's most meaningful it modifies the old pattern to make n…

I didn't have a stroke earlier, but I did type with my phone. I'm not sure how I missed the auto correct issue.

The first sentence should read:

"We communicate with the most detail using words, but body language, facial expressions, touch and other [actions] act as [forms] of communication as well."

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

#69

Post by exo-pla-net »

prewett wrote: post #45

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 th…

Examples of thin desires: our desire to spectate on petty rivalries + hot takes.

>> petty rivalries dominate politics and Hot Take Artists sit in their cages, hungrier than ever while inducing hunger in others.

Another thin desire: porn.

>> Readers will know by now that I believe pornography is one of the primary scourges on our culture, particularly our youth.

Example of thick desire: searching for glory (?)

>> NATO is an institution that does not, for instance, seem able to withstand the thick desires of Vladimir Putin

More thick desire: strength + honor

>> "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function."

I stopped reading at this point, since it seems to be a reactionary rant. The author appears to want a return to our days of glory, when we laid down our lives for our country, and we righteously murdered all those we deemed wicked or too effete to withstand us, allowing us to take their wives and their daughters as our own, etc.

This is a common authoritarian sentiment, and it's the polar opposite of the ideas developed during the Enlightenment (espousing science, humanism, etc.). Steven Pinker talks about it in Enlightenment Now, an excellent book.

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

#70

Post by refurb »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #53
refurb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> So you could your 40 hour work week back to 4 hours, that would just pay for healthcare, and healthcare only. Sure! I like modern healthcare! And then 4 more hours to pay for the rest of a 1920 standard of living. And 4 more for extra disposable income. Let's say that's two days a week for 6 hours each. Sounds pretty good.

What’s stopping you?
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