Thin desires are eating life

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.

Says someone who lectures on how LLMs worked two years ago.

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.