Thin desires are eating life

i have meaner names, but lets just call it nod along content

I'm not sure it makes sense to classify desires as "good" or "bad" desires, or "thick" and "thin" (or however we may want to label it). One can make such a binary distinction, but it could be just as much as harmful as it could be helpful. There's always a nuance, a hidden variable that makes the whole thing moot.

If there's anything meaningfully binary, I think it's only an internal conflict between one's self-perception (who-I-think-I-am) and one's ideal/goal self-image (who-I-want-to-be) past some arbitrary threshold. Not transforming and not changing is not an issue until there's a desire to transform and become someone else that one has, but that isn't happening (or they don't see it) and that desire is strong or goes for a while and causes some non-negligible grief or stress or something that is not in one's own best interests.

Sure, in stressful modern-day environments, we're especially biased towards more immediate gratification than postponed one. Especially if the postponed one may never happen - modern times are crazy unpredictable. But naively suggesting to dismiss "thin" desires and pursue "thick" ones is dismissive of rest. I mean, people go to beaches and spend literal week doing absolutely nothing. Or binge watch giant series. Or just play games for the sake of it, all day long. And no one has to hate themselves afterwards - all we really need to do is to periodically pause and ask "would it be best to do something else now?" and ponder over that question for a little bit rather than dismiss it with immediate "no I want more".

And there should be a realization brief 5-minute "rest" to check some feeds is unlikely to give any meaningful rest. A non-rest masquerading as resting may be a thing to watch out, but I doubt there's any criteria, except for doing a retrospective observation and questioning oneself "does it satisfy my goals/needs, or am I just wasting my time on this needlessly?".

YMMV, but if there's some meaningful conclusion to be taken out of the article it should be more along the lines of "budget your time mindfully of its value and your long-term goals" than some desire classification model. I'm afraid this "thin vs thick desire" concept unnecessarily obscures the core idea, possibly to the extent it can become sort of a red herring.

Whenever a letter is written on paper or only exists in a digital form shouldn't matter, after all. Neither should a format of resting matter, be it making bread or watching reels, as long as it actually provides rest.

Just my thoughts. I can be wrong about it all.

> We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.

I do not have more than I need. Very much the opposite - despite making a decent living, I cannot afford the bulk of my medical care that makes my life a lot more comfortable and extends my lifespan. making ends meet is sometimes difficult.

> We're hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies.

See above.

> We're hungry and we don't have words to articulate why.

I can articulate why, and a lot of it has to do with the protestant work ethic hell we've decided runs the entire world.

> We're hungry, and we're lacking and we're wanting.

Ok, finally I agree.

> We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot actually be gotten, that we can't define, from a source that has no interest in providing it.

I am pretty sure what I am wanting - security, healthcare, housing, food, reliable work/career can be defined, and can be gotten.

> The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.

Trivial counterexample and one that has happened to me - "Your father has had no pulse for 30 minutes, you need to get to the ER immediately." Definitely wasn't the same person 5 minutes after that. Or even, "Your role has been made redundant, please return your equipment to IT staff." Can probably think of many others.

This seems like fluffery that ultimately isn't saying much or anything at all really. Of course, in an economy full of thin fulfillment supply (such as the examples given in the writing here - porn, social media, etc.) and lacking in thick fulfillment (loneliness epidemic, bad economy if you're not on the tippy top of it, etc.), people will reach for thin ones. You can't wish or grind or hustle your way out of some of this, it is systemic, and in that, I agree with the conclusion here. I just don't believe it really accomplishes much of anything. There are those of us alive who aren't really even that old that remember the world when it was not this way.

I have bad news for you - you're not even just "checking" HN, you're simulating social interaction by writing comments for no one in particular.

This type of layout - short or 1 sentence paragraphs - has been around since the early days of the web.

An early proponent was the BBC news website, and you can see they still adopt this style.

The BBC found that breaking up text in this way made it easier to read on a web page.