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Thin desires are eating life

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: Thin desires are eating life

#111

Post by lionkor »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #47

I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires… 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,…

Yeah, this feels very much like one of those sites with random quotes that seem deep but aren't, like wisdom.spark.pink.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#112

Post by neuralkoi »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #47

I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires… 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,…

It's not just you. I've read this person's stuff before. Every sentence comes off as if they are presenting the results of a major epiphany.

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.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#113

Post by kevinsync »

delichon wrote: post #56

Desires to consume (create) are thin (thick). Thin: A desire to enjoy a book, video game, movie, musical performance, new technology, love, ... Thick: A desire to make any of the above. The cure for Dementors isn't chocolate, it's becoming a tiny god of creation. Meaning is in making.

I'd argue that there's probably a disproportionate ratio of thin:thick, and that the majority of creators have to consume significantly more than they create to find their perspective, voice, purpose and inspiration for their creations. And those that created that which was consumed, consumed that which was created to feed their fire as well.

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.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#115

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

tomhow wrote: post #10
barfoure wrote: post #6

[flagged]

Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. If you think a submission or comment is of low quality, just flag it, and if you really want to get the message across, email us – hn@ycombinator.com. Please don't respond to things you think make HN bad by posting comments that can only make it worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

It would nice if there were a way to downvote submissions to indicate they're of low quality that's separate from flagging. Flagging is rather heavy handed in that it can cause a submission to become [dead] since it seems to be mostly intended for marking submissions that break the guidelines.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#116

Post by coldtea »

throwaway_2494 wrote: post #61
micromacrofoot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically the sort of rot writing that proliferates on linkedin

I disagree. I feel there is a genuine insight at the core of it.

A genuine insight turned into a cartoon self-help scam-artist LinkedIn inspirational quote cliche version of itself...

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#120

Post by ericmcer »

delichon wrote: post #56

Desires to consume (create) are thin (thick). Thin: A desire to enjoy a book, video game, movie, musical performance, new technology, love, ... Thick: A desire to make any of the above. The cure for Dementors isn't chocolate, it's becoming a tiny god of creation. Meaning is in making.

It's more like Thin is when the consumption is one directional. Like when you browse social media it is one directional. Social media goes towards you and you just experience it, everything is dumbed down into bites that require 0 effort or cognition to consume.

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.

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