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Thin desires are eating life

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: Thin desires are eating life

#31

Post by robinhood »

keybored wrote: post #26

You are creating content[1] that is insightful. To everyone. Equally known. 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

Thanks. It's exactly what I thought, but written in a funny way. I'm so sick of this way of writing, which is actually tuned to appeal to the broadest audience possible and follow every guide on "how to write efficiently".

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#32

Post by keybored »

adim86 wrote: post #30

I think this article is really true, and I think a consequence is that people are really hungry for thick desires these days but they cannot put a finger on it. They notice themselves not growing, they get the dopamine hit they were looking for but it feel like empty calories. 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 ge…

Thick hustle.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#33

Post by rpdillon »

xpe wrote: post #17

> 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. [I added the brackets] The author, I think, would label the desire for sugary drinks as a thin desire. However, that desire tends towards…

The wording was very careful to say the pursuit of the desire changes you. That's very different than obtaining the desire changing you.

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.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#35

Post by renerick »

xpe wrote: post #17

> 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. [I added the brackets] The author, I think, would label the desire for sugary drinks as a thin desire. However, that desire tends towards…

You said it yourself - "sugary drinks... tend towards unfavorable consequences". The change happens as the outcome of the desire, not "in the process of the pursuing it".

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#36

Post by sans_souse »

Excellent piece, easy to read and I agree on most until this part:

     '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'
As much as it is true we are technologically more connected than ever, I would argue that much was taken away in parallel to what was given. The capabilities came to fruit but at the same time the governance and politics thinned out much of our desires at their core; ie now we're being told we want more and more because it's been determined we can't have certain things.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#37

Post by ewoodrich »

barfoure wrote: post #13
tomhow wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Sigh. I get it. I just don’t agree with it but fair point.

IMHO your comment would have been far more constructive if you actually explained what "copium factory" is supposed to mean in this context.

As it stands I literally have no idea what you are trying to say except for the broad dismissal of the post as pop psychology. (And yes I'm familiar with the word, it still just doesn't make any sense to me).

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#39

Post by apsurd »

impute wrote: post #34

Why is every sentence also a paragraph?

I find myself doing this for anything "work related" like slack. It's definitely a thing on Linkedin posts.

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.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#40

Post by skeeter2020 »

snarf21 wrote: post #19

I find it ironic that this perspective is being shared in such a "thin" way. 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 is…

>> And maintaining relationships is a lot of work

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.

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