I bake bread. I have spent a good deal of time optimizing the recipe for deliciousness but also for time efficiency. Proving in a warm oven is a great tip. Also baking two loaves at a time!
All this nit picking about writing style is disappointing. I like that this person got their ideas out there. They are good ideas. Legible and easy to parse == good enough. I don't care about the writing style any more than that and you shouldn't either. It is a waste of everyone's time... yours especially.
It's very nice to hear about someone else who is interested in doing hard things/real things. Seems like there ought to be a meet up or a get together opportunity for people working on stuff like that. Perhaps a get-together where everyone gives a 2-5 minute talk about something they are working on then we all hang out for another hour or two. Seems like alcohol might help get the wheels spinning?
I fully appreciate the need for a catchy headline with a hook (it got me!) but I wonder if these ideas would be more powerful/useful if expressed in positive language rather than doom speak? I guess doom speak is the fashion these days and we all have to conform to the dominant paradigm... at least a little around the edges.
I really enjoyed the piece also, in spite of the off-putting writing style.
It reminds me of the Epicurean hierarchy of desires, the genius Epicurus had it figured out more then a couple of millenia ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
The thing about "apps for one" actually resonated with me quite a bit.
The last year I've struggled finding freelance work and I've found myself with more time (and less money) that I would like. I feel guilty, because one side of me feels like I should have spent this time to learn ML or to make an app that makes passive income. The thing is: I have no interest in making "apps" to make money. I wouldn't even know what app to make, because there is no quotidian problem for which I think an app would make my life easier. On the contrary, I don't have a smartphone and apps are making my life harder, as we move towards a world where apps are expected for everything. But instead, I have made a couple of games for my girlfriend's birthdays, and I also made her web portfolio, all forms, I guess, of "apps for one" made for love. Other than that, perhaps, I enjoy tuning my Linux system (recently migrated from Xmonad to Hyprland), a form of making, perhaps, an app for one, in the only tech device that still feels like I can control instead of it trying to control myself. Other than that, I use my time to go to the gym and sometimes to paint or DJ or just party, even though I often spend on Hacker News, Youtube, Wikipedia and other media way more time that I would like to.
So all in all, I find it difficult to write code these days with the joy of when I was younger, and it is hard to motivate myself if there's no money involved, with the exception of those gestures of love. It saddens me, because I believe it is such a powerful and beautiful skill. But I just find the current state of world and how "technology" is used to extract capital out of all human relationships rather depressing. The current wave of "AI" only makes the problem worse, and adds an dark sense of impending doom...
It’s not just like that to be spaced out visually. It suggests slowing down, taking your time, digesting each sentence. Not just racing to the end so you can drop a thin take and keep scrolling.
there are waves of people like us. it's the zeitgeist of the era for a sub-category of coders/hackers.
i, too, started baking sourdough bread. and DIY, electronics, music for myself.
i suspect a double digit percentage of that subcategory also dabbles in lisp/clojure/emacs and another double digit subsection abandoned AAA for indie gaming. and a single digit percentage might have enjoyed ruby in the old times.
I asked my agent to rewrite this in a more traditional style, if it's helpful to anyone:
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.
To put it politely, nobody gives two shits about what "your agent" said, in case you were wondering why this was downvoted to hell. This reply adds nothing to the conversation, and it also doesn't take a mastermind to figure they, too, can paste the post in ChatGPT and get a summary out of it. Also, reading a summary instead of the sources butchers the post entirely.
Hopefully you'll spare us the spam next time. Have a good day!
This resonates. I work in web dev, and a little over 2 years ago I hit a wall. Everything was a screen. All day at work, at home, on the go. Everything felt hallow and unrewarding. I'm an introvert, so outside of my family, I didn't have many relationships. Of course, I was depressed. I began working on it by going to therapy and then one day I decided to try sculpting.
This changed everything. I found I was pretty good at it. It felt good because it was tangible, and it required me to learn and probe and practice. I kept at it. This grew in ways I couldn't imagine.
Now, I make collectible resin maquettes and busts and I even started making latex halloween masks. It's been a crazy journey to where I am now, with so much more ahead. I've met people and interact with people in ways I didn't just a short time ago. It's changed my life. It's thick. All of it.
Kudos on your evolution. But this gets me thinking, remember when computing didn't felt "thin" ? even screen had a different feel. I don't know if it's our brain getting used and losing a kind of magic filter.
Anyway, I should probably imitate you, every time I see some people crafting real things I have a little blip of envy.
I still get that feeling sometimes, even after 25 years with computers at home. But it is so dependent on what I do. I get this feeling when I create stuff on my own terms, like making a game or a website. I also get this feeling when discovering other people’s personal creations online.
It definitely felt different to me in the beginning years. I've been at the web thing for about 12 years now. In the beginning, while it was often very difficult, there was an excitement and freshness. It could have simply been because we were moving to web 2.0, CSS and all of its "magic".
While making stuff is only a side thing, it makes the grind during the week tolerable. I feel like I have something meaningful in my life (outside of my family) and it has given me purpose. I'm grateful for it. And it is so damn fun!
the small culture aspect is something i think about too, it was the outcome of a certain group of people liking a similar idea and way of doing things. now it's diluted in all of the social issues (privacy, fame, short term attention)
I set foot in a shop for the first time at a hackerspace 11 or 12 years ago and eventually feel deep into machining. I spent huge swaths of my days there, and when I wasn't, I was reading about machining. Books, because there were few Youtubers doing it and the forums are thin. It's not a popular hobby and a lot of the professionals and hobbyists aren't computer savvy.
I focused on it to the detriment of other things. Friends commented last year on how absorbed I became and how much I was absorbing. Puttering around on a computer fell away, since it wasn't that relevant to the hobby. It wasn't necessary to use the aging laptop in my free time; I could read PDFs on my phone or old, used books.
But you're not looking at your phone often, because your hands are dirty. Or busy. Or there's a significant safety concern from lapsed attention. Or when doing related types of metal working, weld spatter might land on a face up phone and take chunks out of the glass. Or maybe a steel chip scratches the screen.
Eventually I drifted away from machining for another hobby, but I've come back to it now that I have space in my garage -- this time with more balance. I'm not out until after midnight on work nights. Instead, I'm up before dawn, working with my hands for an hour or two before work. After work, I spend time on learning things somewhat relevant to my career. On the weekends, I'll spend a few hours each day.
The machining isn't ever useful. I made a nylon washer on my lathe once for a dog harness -- I think that's the only item I've made that's not for the hobby itself. But it's tangible. The projects are incredibly slow, and no undo button means a small mistake can result in hours work thrown in the recycling. I spent maybe eight hours over the past four days making a tiny brass rod (as well as other, failed versions) to repair an older clockwork mechanism. A used replacement would've been relatively cheap on Ebay, but that's never the point.
If (and I mean only if it would be interesting to you, no other reason and no implied 'ought') you wanted, I'm pretty sure that there are people out there who would like to return things like telescope mountings, old focusers, mechanical devices of all kinds to a working state. Over here in the UK, people volunteer at steam engine workshops and even in jewellery workshops to restore things. And they get a supply of interesting items to make...
I don't know if that's a thing here in the states, but I'll keep it in mind! It probably wouldn't be hard to advertise via the local (different) hackerspace.
But I'll probably have to get through my backlog of current tasks and projects before I wanted to take on other peoples'. And I may have literally set up a wiki to track those projects...
Bit of a tangent: I don't really subscribe to the introvert/extrovert divide personally, but do eventually hit a wall with socializing, and am happy to explicitly isolate myself in my own world or with a smaller group for extended periods of recharge. Unfortunately, I've committed to attending my good friend's costume NYE party, and have betrayed myself somewhat because... I'm just tired of costumes, he's a very theatrical film person and I'm... a web dev, who's just never really had an affinity for dressing up in that way—even less so since it's been a socially packed autumn. I'm considering bailing, but I feel like that would be a bit of a fail.
I think as a nerd, I'd need to make it a challenge and a small hobby like you have, but I also am trying to quit YouTube. Can you picture yourself in my situation? Any tips on finding a seed of interest?
This is a bit longwinded, so apologies: I tried sculpting because I saw a video on YouTube where this guy, I think he goes by Craftyart, or Craftyarts - he had a speed video where he sculpted, cast, and painted a version of the Joker, but it was Willem DaFoe. It was incredible, and it just gave me an itch. I watched it and wanted to do that, to make that.
For me, I'd often have these ideas of things I wanted to try, or do, or challenge myself with, and then for some inexplicable reason I'd never do them. In this instance, I told myself to get off my ass and just give it a try. It may have helped that I was in therapy at the time and making efforts to address a lifetime of issues. It has lent a certain proactiveness to my being. For me, addressing my mental health is a driving factor in having made any of this possible.
Finding a seed of interest: if you mean directly with making a costume, I don't know. If you're not interested in costumes, I don't think it is something you can force. Overall though I think anything that causes that itch, that pull, maybe even a sense of yearning "to do" is enough to get you going on a path. I had a feeling when watching the video that reminded me of what I felt when I was a kid and I would see something and I'd get excited to do the same.
I don't know that any of this would have come together for me had I not been on a journey to improve my mental health, and making efforts to find something that connected with me. Something outside of a screen. But in the end, what I connected with was surprising. It looks like it makes sense in hindsight, but at that time, it felt like it came out of left field.
Hopefully there are some tips somewhere in this mess of words. If not, my apologies for wasting your time.
> For me, I'd often have these ideas of things I wanted to try, or do, or challenge myself with, and then for some inexplicable reason I'd never do them.
I think without a mentor or point of reference for why or how you'd go about doing something like that, it's just a completely abstract domain, much like software is to anyone who hasn't spent a lifetime coding or figuring out how computers work. The mental health work and the video by Craftyarts seem like the perfect timely combination to allow for peeling back those layers, literally and figuratively, further allowing curiosity to be actionable.
I've been doing that a bit with electronics, and a recent example that seems similarly daunting for me would be watching the end to end process of building a custom keyboard pcb. At first it seems like an immense rabbit hole, but dedicating a bit of money and time incrementally is insanely rewarding in aggregate, moreso the further away from your mainline discipline it is. I tend to avoid these until I have a specific challenge in mind.
The seed of interest question was framed poorly, but it was related specifically to the latex mask subject, and I guess I was just curious if there were any adjacent ideas that might be worth exploring, since you do seem to have an interest in vaguely related areas
Adjacent ideas: 3d printing - I think it is cool but I'm not into it myself because it would require more time for me in front of a screen and working with digital tools. But, there are a lot of things to be explored here. One idea is digitally scanning a analog sculpture and then 3D printing the mold for it. This would be huge as you could make very complex molds and they'd be essentially perfect. And then when your mold broke down you could just print another one. No need to work from a master sculpt.
I have a friend who made me 3D printed keychains for swag at events. He embedded NFC chips in the keychain and this links to a linktree on my website. Coming up with cool swag like this could be something to explore. People found them really cool and it was a relatively simple thing to do. I'm sure there are some wild things 3D printing could be applied to for things like this.
1. If you have that urge to go, it is probably for a good reason, agreed :) Wouldn't call it a fail though if you didn't end up going. We all require balance.
2. Parties are for getting together, costumes are just a dress code. They'd love your company even if you didn't dress up -- that's why they invited you after all. So don't stress over it. You can come in something silly or minimal fuss.
> They'd love your company even if you didn't dress up
This is generally true and reassuring, and but in this case I have to put at least something reasonable together since I half-assed it last time lol. I'll probably just try and attend every third costume party in the future
I started using my IT and data management skills on film sets to provide data security around the footage. It’s been a breath of fresh air to use advanced concepts in a field that’s very hands on and a big team effort. A lot of communication and working together. It’s been great.
I can totally relate—I’m also a web dev and spend all day in front of screens. Lately I’ve been feeling really stuck and weighed down, and honestly I’m not sure how to start changing things. Reading your story gives me a little hope, though.
I lived exactly the same thing also two years ago.
What changed everything to me was, impulsively, enrolling myself to a rollerblading course in a skate park. I was 34, overweight (still am) and never did anything like this (I never did barely any sport at all tbh). Oh boy was this transformative.
I'm still in the course every week and like you, it feels good because it's tangible : not in the material way like sculpting but rather by doing things with my body (and my brain) I would'nt believe I could do at all even when I was younger. That's an amazing feeling after decades of watching things on screens (yes, I know how that sounds pathetic, but that's my story).
Any tips or resources on how to get started? I drew a lot of comics as a kid/teen, and I've done 3d modeling as a hobbyist. But using physical media for sculpting has always seemed daunting.
I started by buying some Sculpey clay, some armature wire, and a 6-inch wooden base. This and an assortment of tools. Then I found an online 3d model I could turn in all directions. And then, I just tried to sculpt it. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. From there I looked for video instruction on YouTube. There are a ton of sculpting videos out there. Books: there is a great book by the Shiflett Brothers that was very helpful to me (Clay Sculpting with the Shiflett Brothers). They also have a great sculpting forum on Facebook. Eventually I signed up for the Stan Winston School of Character Arts. This has been incredibly helpful for the direction I am going.
So, I started small, and then built from there. I only bought materials and tools when my journey necessitated them so I could refrain from getting ahead of myself. I think this is valuable, as it is easy for me to get carried away in the beginning of anything new, and go whole-hog only to find later that my interest lay elsewhere. I wanted to prove to myself that my purchases were for a reason and meaningful to where I was at, at that moment.
I have kept a blog of my learning experiences, trying to give back as I can. I don't want to break the forum rules, but if you want I can send you links to my site. It has my work and the blog has outlines of what I have done, steps, resources, etc. I hope it is helpful to someone out there going along this path.
I can relate! Someone who is very dear to me suggested we go to a one-day pottery class and the idea had never entered my mind. I actually ended up loving it. We're both introverts, as well, and she enjoys doing things that don't require other people (she likes to surf, as well). There's something about doing something physical by yourself (that isn't exercising) that's creative that I really like, but before the class, I hadn't realized it.
I actually play instruments, as well, but this feels totally different and almost stimulates a different part of my brain. I was much more relaxed doing pottery and I saw instant results that I could track whether I was doing something right or wrong (even though the "right" and "wrong" was driven by my own personal idea of them).
Do you think you'll end up sharing any of your pieces to the public?
That's awesome, and I can understand what you are saying. The immediacy of the medium is very satisfying in a way that digital immediacy for me is not. Mind/body connection or something like that.
Yes, I have shared my pieces! On social media of course (instagram/facebook/youtube), personal website, and at events. One part of this journey was a kind of audacious idea - I decided one day, after about a year and half into this, to make an LLC. I figured I could try and get this hobby to pay for itself as it isn't exactly cheap when you start getting into molding and casting the pieces. That and I was getting great responses from people. A part of me just went with a feeling ("I bet I could do that") and this whole thing has taken on a life of its own. I've just started going to local events recently (a punk flea market, a comic-con, and a Krampus Con) and I've sold some of my work, have connected with new people, and made some good connections. It's a wonderful feeling and the response from people has been nothing but soul fuel.
> The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.
Joke's on them! I run my oven until the temperature inside is ~100F - about a minute or so. Then I turn it off and set the dough in there along with some water (for humidity). It rises super fast compared to my kitchen which is ~65F in the winter and the bread is just as flavorful. Definitely not indifferent to my optimization.
I run a sourdough bakery with my partner, as it happens. Although I'm not a baker, coming from a mathematics background I'm the one most focused on process and quality control. We don't use any commercial yeast so I've picked a few things related to targeting different flavors using the same starter.
We use different temperature profiles during proofing for different products (we have fancy proofing fridges where we set temperature profiles over a 12 to 36 hour period depending on the product). Low and slow is good for certain types of bread, or pizza base. But not so much for a brioche or croissant dough.
I personally love slow fermented, heavy rye based sourdough, but lots of our customers don't and the bread we sell most is a classic white sourdough fermented comparatively quickly at higher temperature for a lighter and less sour taste. It's still very slow fermentation compared to commercial yeast, of course.
The proofing temperature profile for this bread isn't as simple as "start warm and gradually cool down" (i.e. the warm oven method), but that is a reasonable approximation for a home baker.
i started trying to make sourdough bread 2 weeks ago (and baking/cooking at all).
is there 1 definitive book/youtube channel/other kind of resource you would recommend to put mut on a solid path for a few months/years?
i just want to make sourdough bread daily in order to have healthy stable carbs at home. (stone milled complete grain flour and wild yeast). with the price of rice currently in japan it doesnt even look to be significantly more expensive.
I'm sorry to say I don't have any answers for you, at least nothing better than you'd get from searching on to r/sourdough or r/baking.
Like I said, I'm not a baker. My partner is. My focus is on other parts of the business, I was just sharing what I have picked up (via osmosis mostly) about different temperature profiles for different products.
Maybe it depends on the yeast? I use commercial yeast and not a sourdough culture. The one I have ("Red Star Yeast") rises just fine with the method and the result tastes great!
I don't bake, but I once installed an off-the-shelf PID controller into my kitchen oven[1] and this gave me some insights on things that are normally kind of inconvenient to observe (what, with the bright always-on LED display glaring at me at all times while I was in the kitchen with a constant report of what temperature in there was).
Like: The oven light. It's an incandescent bulb, which is also to say that it's waaaay better at being a heater than it is at being a source of light.
I found that leaving the light switched on in the oven, and the oven door closed, kept the temperature right around 100F. It varied a bit depending on ambient, but never by more than a few degrees.
---
[1]: It was an old Frigidaire-built electric range that someone gave me for free. It worked, until one day when I switched it on at a sensible temperature setting and put a frozen pizza in there. The temperature control then failed, and it failed stuck in the on position. The pizza was very badly burned and looked pretty crispy when I came back to it a short time later.
And when I tried to retrieve the pizza, the hotpad in my hand was converted directly from fabric into smoke as soon as it touched the pan.
While I lamented about the lost pizza and the expense of buying new replacement parts for an old freebie oven, a friend suggested using a PID controller and an SSR instead.
So I did exactly that: I bought the parts (including ceramic wire nuts and fiberglass-insulated wire), cut a square hole in the panel with a grinder and a deathwheel for the new controls, mounted an SSR in a recess on the back with an enormous heatsink, and it all went together splendidly. I put the new bits in series with the old bits, so it was never any less-safe than it had become on its own accord.
I miss that oven sometimes. It was actually kind of fun learning how to tune the PID, and to be able to reliably get a consistent temperature from it.
The oven-light discovery was just an accident; if I actually wanted 100F for some reason, I'd have just set the PID box to that temperature.
I found this trick for store bought pizza dough as well. Instead of leaving out for 20 minutes, a warm oven helps it start rising a bit and results in a much better final product!
My mother used to put the dough in a warm place. When I tried making bread I did the same. The bread was always disappointing, having a taste and texture more like "baked dough" than something I'd consider worth eating.
I discovered later that the length of time it spends rising matters. Room temperature (15-19 degrees Celsius) is optimal and will take a couple of hours for the first rise and less than an hour for the second. It is of course necessary to keep the dough away from any drafts. I keep it wrapped in a blanket or towel.
35 degrees Celsius is far too warm and won't give it enough time to develop the flavour and texture of good bread.
Baking is weird. You first should start by following instructions to the letter. Then once you get it you'll be able to break all the rules.
The bread rises because of the yeast bacteria eats sugar and expels carbon dioxide. So ask yourself, what does yeast like? Probably not hard to guess that it's a warm, moist environment with plenty of sugar. Too cold and they're slow moving. Too hot and they burn up. But the goldilocks zone is that of most bacteria, a hot summer day in the tropics.
How long to rise? That's more a question of how fluffy you want the bread and how fast the bacteria eats the sugar.
Follow instructions while you're learning but think about things like this while practicing and you'll get your answers pretty quickly. The problem is no one can actually give you a direct answer because there's variance. Besides, the more important skill is to learn to generalize and get the intuition for it. So pay attention to how sticky the dough is, how fluffy, how it stretches, and all the other little things. Think about it during and after. If you do this I promise you'll get your answer very quickly
Depends on the method/recipe. Most of the recipes I follow have at least two rising steps, following by another one after the dough is shaped into its final loaf (or whatever shape you want). Each one would be about an hour and half or so. It could be done with a single rise as well, but two rises tends to give more flavor. If you don't want it right away, a slow overnight rise in the fridge is also pretty good.
"No-knead" recipes usually involve 20-30 minute cadence of "fold-and-stretch" followed by a rise to allow the gluten to develop naturally without kneading. Usually about four times.
How long to leave in depends on the dough, but you can get a quick rise in like less than an hour in the right temperature. Definitely don't leave it too long. I routinely forget and then it rises too much and eventually collapses when you go to bake it.
I use like 65% or maybe 70% hydration for bread, little more for whole wheat. Like 25:1 sugar (or less?), 100:1 salt, 100:1 yeast. High protein flour if you can.
For just basic bread, no sourdough, not a sandwich loaf, etc.
Yep, some ovens (like mine) even have a Proof setting that keeps it at 100 degrees F automatically, for as long as you want. We make a lot of bread is how I know this
Even with thick desires, I sometimes find myself day-dreaming about the state when I have mastered a skill or understood a topic deeply. At the same time, I know from experience that the process never ends. Even when one does master a skill, one is deeply aware of what one doesn't know or understand or what one is not good at within that domain.
What helps me is to focus on today. If I can spend even an hour on a topic and get lost in it or even get frustrated by it, it is time well-spent. I was going to say "it is progress" instead of "time well-spent" but even that's a trap. Progress implies moving forward in a preferred direction. While I can't say I don't want to make progress, I am training myself to care less about it. It is really the time spent engaging that's most valuable (at least to me).
Oh yeah decades in I still feel I know f-all about programming. Doesn't help the field keeps expanding expintentially. E.g. I look most things up. I am basicially a slow LLM!
You're kind of the opposite of a slow LLM. LLMs don't look anything up, they enthusiastically assert that they're correct. They have no desire to know anything.
according to openai, the least likely model to hallucinate is gpt-5-thinking-mini, and it hallucinates 26% of the time. Seems to me the problems of LLMs boldly producing lies are far from solved. But sure, they lied years ago too.
according to openai, the least likely model to hallucinate is gpt-5-thinking-mini, and it hallucinates 26% of the time.
You're not so bad at hallucinating, yourself. We find
that gpt-5-main has a hallucination rate (i.e., percentage of factual claims that contain minor or major errors) 26% smaller than GPT-4o ...
That's the only reference to "26%" that I see in the model card.
If you didn't daydream like that would you have the motivation to pursue it? Are not those daydreams your kind encouraging you? "Look how great it'll be, this is why you'll put in the hard work now". You can get trapped in the dreams, of course, but they're useful too
This means that the results (both of the task and of the learning by the student) are lower if the student uses an LLM first, but slightly improves if they use it second
Wow, this seems like a lot of folks first encounter with a lyrical essay. I won't hold that against anyone. I have heard many things about the American school system.
Writing like this is meant to be felt as much as evaluated. The argument matters, but the cadence and emotional momentum matter just as much. The author give you are chance to think about each point that is being said. Our dopamine addicted brains can't deal with this well anymore unfortunatly. Which is I guess why people feel uncomfortable, and don't know why.
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, since the larger arc of each point is constantly being interrupted.
Why choose such an antithetical form, to what is otherwise an important and deep message?
The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.
Reading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read.
Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.
Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.
A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions.
If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter.
Consider the following excerpt of the post:
The thick life doesn't scale.
That's the whole point.
So: bake bread.
There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stops. I also don't know the author nearly well enough to consider pondering its meaning: To my eyes there is only a need to stop and ponder at most once. It is essentially just noise.
There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author.
PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).
Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)
The prose is self-consciously different, makes the reader work a little harder. One can almost feel a literary water ripple or pebble garden, stillness and simplicity.
Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's the point."
I've never baked anything more complex than a pre-packaged cornbread mix, or a frozen pizza.
Baking has always been someone else's problem.
But having now skimmed through this bit of weirdly-formatted writing, I might give it a shot.
(Oh, and of that formatting: It reminds me a bit of what suck.com looked like in the mid-late 1990s. I still have the sticker they sent me stuck to a thing ~30 years later, but the suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom they sent with it got mangled pretty bad in the mail.)
I started baking bread because I had a bag of plain flour (i.e. not bread flour, only 9% protein) sitting in the cupboard and approaching its sell-by date. So I made 'ships biscuits', and one thing led to another.
So a bag of what in the UK is called 'strong white flour' (i.e. protein around 12%, I think it is 'all purpose' in US) and a sachet of instant yeast and some salt. Followed the instructions on the bread bag and it worked sort of, a bit solid but edible and it toasted nice.
Then you just iterate. Lots of stuff out on the Web. I use supermarket flour and the dried active yeast and the ingredients are 10x cheaper than even a basic bought loaf. And mixing and baking is fun.
Sourdough is OK but you then have a pet to look after...
Maybe you like being restricted to reading in the ad-copy register, in which case go ahead and make virtue of vice, but otherwise: this lack is well within your power to remedy.
Same reaction - I could immediately tell this person had learned to write on Twitter (or Linkedin), not real meaty writing. I had an English professor who wrote "FORM = CONTENT" on the chalkboard; this article would send him into a fury.
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.
News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition.
I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.
Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.
I agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot.
But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.
Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.
Hah, that’s a good point. It’s always interesting to see somebody find a clever little bit of redemption for a widely disliked aspect in an article—nice.
>The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.
From the about page:
>Free subscribers get previews of these essays and occasional full posts. Paid subscribers get all essays, the most useful ideas, conversations, and community access.
I really don’t like this new feeling of not knowing if what I’m reading is from a person or a machine but I can’t quantify why it bothers me. I wonder if it will be a temporary thing like in 5 years nobody will ever care again even though the chance of it being a machine might be higher.
When I was young my parents were scared that the MTV generation couldn't focus long enough to watch the "real news".
Not long ago I feared that twitters short form content was shortening peoples attention spans so much that they would stop being able to appreciate nuance at all... Then came TikTok.
I don't know what comes next, but I promise you it will be worse. Either way, it's a race to the bottom and we're not there yet.
I think that LinkedIn writing style is so infectious that people who do have something to say wind up getting sucked into it and wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
There’s the prolific curmudgeon with a tomato cannon backed by a whole tomato farm and then there’s what you get when people thought your blog post was written by A.I. Ignore the first.
In my perspective, this is a style of writing that emphasizes the poetic side of speech. The thin paragraphs you see is a result of a rhythmic decision to make it short burst.
More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
Didn't really come off as design-y or antithetical form and definitely not manipulating lol, maybe a little poetic or artsy fartsy. Agree that it's important and deep.
Same. It looks like the author is playing with poetry to me. They're clearly playing with the stanza with the similar lines and the contrasting lines. Yeah, it's amateur, but who cares? It tracks with the message.
If anything I think the GP's comment is an example of a thin desire. Being nitpicky/petty to justify internalizing and actually reading the post. There's no lines to read between here, it's plain as day. We are addicted to dismissing things because it's gratifying and easy. It's trivial to find errors or complaints about anything, but it's difficult to actually critique. I'd argue in our thin desires we've conflated the two. It's cargo cult intellectualism. Complaints look similar to critiques in form but they lack the substance, the depth.
That's not always the intention behind that style of writing.
Often, when I'm communicating with someone who is either dyslexic, or uses English as a second (or even third or fourth) language, then I make an effort to shorten sentences, and almost make bullet points of them.
It's actually a good exercise for the person writing too. Less can indeed be more.
My framing for this is "mass production of stimuli." Before industrialization, the number of things grabbing your attention at any given moment wasn't super high. But once you had mass production, and especially the innovation of extrinsic advertising (associating psychological properties not intrinsic to the product being advertised itself), we were all suddenly awash in stimulating signals. But like this article notes, those stimuli go mostly unfulfilled by the action we take (buying the thing, opening the app), and so we all have this low level background noise of frustration and dissatisfaction.
EDIT: Some later posts mentioned it, but philosophers and religions have contemplated this stuff for centuries. Nevertheless I do think it's an exacerbated problem in the modern world due to technology and scale.
This book is indeed eye opener. Though I am too deep to turn around quickly without crashing I am well on may way and there is many more miles to go. Hoping to take few of my friends with me too.
> 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.
This has a political interpretation too. Have you noticed that online "petitions" have mostly disappeared lately ? Maybe this disappearance is based on now-widespread recognition that the way to get the attention and concern of the political establishment is to get out on the streets and make some noise.
Online activity can _motivate_ protest, but it cannot really express protest in a way that "matters". It's busy work. Keep the monkeys at their typewriters.
Online is the equivalent of hanging a sign in your window; it does not tell you whether your opinion is shared by most of your fellow citizens. Thousands of likes versus the knowledge that social media keeps each of us in our bubble, feeding us more.
But a monster rally in your city and elsewhere can tell you precisely that your opinion is shared by most (or "sufficiently many") of your fellow citizens. Pithy placards to the fore!
> the way to get the attention and concern of the political establishment is to get out on the streets and make some noise.
Honestly I'm not even convinced this works so well anymore. (Not saying it never does, but I think it's effectiveness has dropped.) To me, it seems the main way to achieve political change is with money. More money than I have, unfortunately.
>The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.
I expected the author to have language learning as an example, but they did not include it. I wonder where Duolingo fits in this, I see a new language learning app every week.
Tanha is about wholesome and unwholesome desires, ie those that lead to or dont lead to liberation. Its not about desires that do or do not change you, as this article is categorizing it.
Do wholesome desires, like practicing the dharma, not change you? Do unwholesome desires, like staying stuck in your addictions, not trap you?
My point is that desire is something that is deeply explored in all three major schools of Buddhism. In the Vajrayana to the point that we take the most difficult of our base desires as paths of practice, like seen in karmamudra.
One could argue that staying in one place unchanged, in a space barred with thin desires, is akin to being imprisoned. And that following newly cultivated thick desires out of one’s thin prison sounds just like liberation to me.
This also sounds like one of the core themes of Augustinian philosophy. The idea of the "restless heart" in that we are never satisfied with earthly wants and desires.
True to an extent. But why would you want to create (e.g.) a movie if you don't think watching movies is worthwhile in and of itself? You're putting effort into creating something that you don't think is truly valuable. To a person with this mindset, the desire to create is cynical—they're only making movies in pursuit of extrinsic rewards such as money, fame, or success. If watching movies is thin to them, then making movies is also thin.
Conversely, an authentic filmmaker is someone who values movies in and of themselves; therefore, the authentic desire to create a movie must be downstream of a passion for watching movies. I don't think you'll find many artistically inclined filmmakers who would denigrate the act of watching movies as "thin." It's the thickness they feel in the experience of watching movies which inspired them to devote themselves to making movies in the first place.
The article's definition: "A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it."
This definition is compatible with watching some films and not others.
I think Alan Watts said something like that his job was that you no longer needed him. This implies that consuming his work would be thick until it wouldn't.
I think, perhaps because the creation is the goal in itself, not the consumption by others. Because it is the change/improvement that the author mentions that we seek.
I think that leans toward a mistaken veneration of productivity. You don't have to make something to enrich your life. It's also valuable to connect with the things other people make, or with the world around you.
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.
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.
I think there's thin consumption and thick. Reality TV and YouTube/Tik-tok shorts being thin. Slow cinema or a documentary being thick. One is primarily entertainment that is easy to digest and acts more as a way to fill the time and quiet thoughts. The other requires deep engagement and confrontation with new ideas and a build up of contemplation through deep prolonged focus.
The first mode of consumption is understandably popular given the amount of noise in the world that distracts us. So many people are trapped in dopamine holes. It's mental withdrawal to try to attempt a sudden switch to thick consumption. They are so opposite of each other.
I wrote this following a similar line of thought, but with the root problem being a collective action problem around community rather than an internal psychological tradeoff between short and long term. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-dead-weight-lo...
I certainly think hijacking our short term rewards is a big part of it, but in addition, that hijacking prevents people from putting in the effort that make collective alternatives competitive.
Like relationships I don't think it's either/or but rather prioritize. Make the book a priority, and make sure you do it, then go ahead and read/comment on HN. The extra knowledge/perspectives/experiences will make your contributions more valuable for everyone.
Very nicely written. I've been slowly removing thin desires from my life. It's hard to do at first, but what I've noticed is once I am free from them, I do not miss them at all. Almost like I was under a spell.
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.
I agree, I would define those *thin desires" as whatever I'm engaging in a lot automatically, but if I were to pause and ask myself "do I really want to do this? Is this beneficial to me or am I being exploited?", part of me would say no. My "thin desires" might not be someone else's. We each have to take the time to ask ourselves these questions in order to figure it out.
I would watch YouTube for an hour before bed. It got to the point where I needed it to fall asleep, usually with it playing in the background.
Replaced it with reading books and now I just read until I'm sleep enough, usually when I realize I have to reread sentences repeatedly.
After about a week I had no desire to scroll my YouTube feed for videos. I didn't block YouTube or anything, I still watch videos from creators I follow, but I no longer instinctively reach for it to pass time.
Thanks for sharing, that's something I can probably draw some inspiration from. I never really thought about how often I reach to youtube to kill time, including putting something on when heading to sleep.
I've slowly pushed away the classic attention manipulating applications -- basically anything that will find new content to keep you engaged. Tiktok feels like the maximalist example, but other similar apps, social media text feeds, and parts of Youtube (though, I've so aggressively tuned Youtube that it has a very limited content base to show me.)
TV isn't for TV's sake; it's for relaxing a little with someone I care about.
I can read longer form news articles and not need to stay abreast of what's happening daily.
I've found that I'll eventually grow bored and annoyed with things meant to steal attention, at which point I'll excise them from my life. It just might take an unfortunate while to get there.
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 getting at either, but I just knew I hadd to add wholesome activities that were not part of my life into my life and I kinda built this app for myself (initially for a hackathon) and just shared it with friends.
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".
Us software engineers assume value comes from serving more people, faster, with less friction. But many of the things that actually make life feel coherent such as learning a craft, maintaining friendships and building tools for one person, only work because they’re slow and specific.
Tech doesn't give us the wrong desires but the easier versions of the right ones, and those end up hollow.
Most definitely idiot wisdom. All the comments here lauding it, are pointing out first how they feel good about the text. That it resonates, that they like it. The importance of the content was that they felt good reading, not that they learned something.
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 isolated. So we try to fill that void with things that don't require effort like buying crap we don't need on Amazon and chasing likes on social media. We aren't happy so we try to be busy so we don't notice so much.
We saw a bit of a teeny correction during covid when people starting going outdoors and baking bread and cooking home cooked meals. But now everyone is back to working from home in their pajamas and tell themselves how happy they are with all the time they save not driving but skip over the lack of adult interaction (both good and bad).
But the problem is easily solved for each of us by things as simple as hobbies and volunteering and organizations (church, civic, etc.) Personally, I design board games and have friends over to test them and go to board game conferences. We've built a group that still test and communicate online but are happiest when we get to hang out and play games and go for dinner. There is no shortage of these opportunities but you have to get off the couch and join in. It is a place where you will make new friends and find happiness but you have to decide it is worth it.
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.
In my experience, it is mostly like 3-5 very close friends and about a dozen "good" friends. One thing I hear from so many people is the mindset of "well, they didn't call me back" and turn it into score keeping. Not all relationships are going to be equitable but they all require investment or they wither.
Completely agree!
The moment after leaving an event/party/service I always feel a greater sense of purpose, contentness, or at the very least, less pessimistic about the state of the world
Thin Desires, Shallow work, Chasing Glitter, Mindless optimization on result, Non virtuous, Dopamine chasing. All are but the same. Burnout is our body's response to it. Philosophers have said this for thousands of years that they all lead to anything but happiness.
I've always liked this song from the Cure, we're hedonists on a treadmill:
I'm always wanting more, anything I haven't got
Everything I want it all, and I just can't stop
Planning all my days away but never finding ways to stay
Or ever feel enough today, tomorrow must be more
Drink, more dreams, more bed, more drugs
More lust, more lies, more head, more love
Fear more fun, more pain, more flesh
More stars, more smiles, more colors, more sex
But however hard I want
I know deep down inside
I'll never really get more hope
Or any more time
Any more time
Any more time
I want the sun to fall in, I want lightning and thunder
Blood instead of rain, I want the world to make me wonder
I want to walk on water, take a trip to the moon
Give me all this, give me it soon
More drink, more dreams, more drugs
More lust, more lies, more love
But however hard I want
I know deep down inside
I'll never really get more hope
Or any more time
Any more time
Any more time
Any more time
This post really resonated with me, and some lack of fulfilment I've been working through lately. It seems a lot of commenters felt the need to bikeshed it instead of just trying to understand the point being made.
I'm an Engineering Manager. I print out certificates for people on (and beyond) my teams, referencing something they accomplished (big or small), add one of the "boy scout badges" I bought in bulk from AliExpress (and then retroactively created & reference a set of values based on the iconography) and mail out "Engineering Merit Badges" to our remote employees. Maybe a few think it's dumb but the vast majority love it. The collector-types try to earn the entire set (I made one of the badges really hard to get because of this), while physically getting mail really seems to resonate with anyone under 35. A few people more distant from my teams (i.e. different departments) DID seems supsicious at first when I asked for their home address, and my boss wondered how I spent several hundred dollars in postage last year, but I try and send out at least a dozen a month while still keeping them meaningful. It's actually a bit of work (of course I wrote software to help manage and create everything) but I love it too.
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.
When I come across this sort of writing I skip it. If the writer can't be bothered to organise their ideas I won't do it for them. I find that writing style oddly grating.
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.
I don't see governance and politics as being the primary movers in what I seek out.
My experience is more: I find myself spinning my tires watching yet another youtube video instead of calmly deciding on a worthy investment of a deep pursuit.
No government has forced that on me, that's mostly a corporate entity and platform making (automated, ML mediated) decisions on what I should consume. Of course governments are involved when deciding what I shouldn't be exposed to, but that's a different matter.
We all have a limited reserve of energy, of attention and willpower. When you spend it on shallow desires, you have expended it and tacitly made a choice to not invest in a more meaningful path. If I were to summarize the time I've spent sitting on my ass watching YouTube the last N years, it's really quite depressing (even if it does sometimes provide some very real value).
Yes, and…
The thin is nowadays engineered to be addictive, so weaning off of it may be hard. Going cold turkey during a vacation or completely ditching devices for a while may help.
Yes, but… The call to hipsterdom (doing something precisely because it doesn’t scale) may not be necessary - if a person has successfully weened themselves of the pacifier of cheap dopamine they should use all of that spare brain power to create things other people who are still addicted can use to get out of the quicksand of social media. Or to make things that will help the world - scaling is up to the creator. No merit to sealing off away from the world. Improve the world.
> 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 unfavorable consequences: mood swings, poor dental hygiene, weight gain. Thus it undermines one's body. This "changes you" -- for the worse, yielding a contradiction. If the preceding logical analysis is sound, the article's terms or argument are flawed.
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.
There is something really interesting about people (which I think I'm borrowing from Atomic Habits by James Clear): Every time you take an action in service of a goal, it helps prove to yourself, a little at a time, that part of your identity involves pursuing that goal. For example, each time I spew out a journal entry or cobble together a blog post, it reinforces the belief "I am a writer."
With this in mind, it suggests a theory: doing the thing itself changes you. After some suitable time delay, perhaps. (This is how exercise adaptation works at least.)
But connecting this together still feels muddled. What is the difference between doing the thing and the consequences of doing the thing? The difference feels ... undefined? Maybe even arbitrary? All of this triggers my "inconsistency detectors" suggesting more thinking needs to be done.
Maybe the difference is that some actions provide certain emotional states while we're doing them: satisfaction, flow, meaning -- and this is what people mean by the first part ("doing the thing"). Maybe we can define consequences as the things that happen after we stop acting. Like the royalty checks that hypothetically will clog up my mailbox one day.
There's the motivation, the pursuit, and the achievement, and the consequences of each. I think it's fairly easy to tease apart the motivation and the pursuit, but you're focusing on a much more nuanced aspect of the action and its consequences. These really are tied strongly, but worth addressing individually.
As you point out, some actions are motivated and pursued because of the consequences of the achievement (writing a book or song, founding a company, being elected president). But others are intrinsically rewarding, which is usually shorter term.
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".
My thick desire is unfortunate a 40h grind to pay bills.
If i would have money tomorrow, i would know immediadly what i would do: Slowly and steadily renovate a old house, building a park/garden, having greenhouses and doing pottery.
Having a workshop and doing everything thick.
I hope i can achieve this before i'm 45 because i have the slight worry, that either AI will take over and my dreams break or i'm to old/fragile/broken to enjoy that.
A useful angle: does doing this thing make me more able to enjoy it over time (eg by increasing the subtlety and dimensionality of perception), or less able to enjoy it over time (eg by desensitization)?
This is the practical reason to favor “thick desires” over thin ones: they slope upward over time.
Made me reflect on my own persuasion of thin desires and my struggle to control them.
It also made me see that my hobbies and my career are actually about following my thick desires. I'm in tech, yes. But I chose, among all the possibilities, to be an analog circuit designer. The analog part is what makes it a long hard skill to master, and my day job feels like constant learning from my interactions woth the world. I can't imagine doing anything which isn't interacting with the actual physical world!
Nice to see that some people still feel the difference. I’m not sure whether the next generations will experience it as strongly, having grown up with much thinner lives. In my experience, deeper desires tend to emerge outside the comfort zone — a place fewer and fewer people seem willing to enter today.
Thick and thin in both cases, without purpose, is still hedonistic.
Learning calculus sounds more magnanimous than checking notifications, but what's the purpose? She says you're better off after a year, but in what way?
What if the person checking notifications is waiting on a delivery for a soup kitchen. and the person learning calculus just wants to brag about it or talk down to others because of their credentials?
The purpose matters more. You have to have a purpose. Both "thin" and "thick" desires can be very meaningful with purpose. Even desiring a donut with a lonely neighbor can be better than a year learning calculus -- with the right purpose.
The issue with her approach is it assumes virtue in collecting diplomas (or activities that lead to them) : learning math, languages , getting a masters. It's still feeding the ego using this thick/thin framework.
But if you don't have a purpose, that's just as vain as showing off your car or your watch. It's just another embellishment.
Reminds me of what Frithjof Bergmann called our "poverty of desire" in his (excellent) book: New Work New Culture: Work We Want and a Culture that Strengthens Us
> Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.
Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.
It feels weird how after a very good explanation of why thick desires are in the end more rewarding, she focuses on the (ostensible) negatives here, like some sort of obligatory tax or payment that you're evading by focusing on "thin" desire.
Formulated like this, the obvious retort would be "yeah, so what? - why should I bother with obligation and vulnerability if I can have the same rewards without them?"
Of course everyone who has 100 online friends but no one to go to a party with knows why this is bullshit - but it's not following from this paragraph.
Maybe a better way would be to explain that the "negatives" are in fact positives: e.g. The obligation is what lets one build upon a friendship - both for you and your friends - but you do have to explain it, you can't just take it for granted.
This is an interesting piece, and it resonates with me. I remember when Guitar Hero came out and I shook my head at all the kids spending hours mastering it instead of just picking up a guitar and practicing.
But maybe our dissatisfaction isn't about thin vs. thick desires, maybe it's that we're exposed to a world (via the internet/social media) in which everyone is more successful than us. Even/especially on Hacker News, we're hit over the head with all the YC companies raising money, hiring A-players, releasing world-changing products.
When the world makes you feel like a slacker, it's no wonder we value thick desires. They become the lifeline to get out of our hole. If only I knew calculus, I could work for SpaceX and launch rockets. If only I understood gradient-descent, I could get hired by an AI company. If only I took the time to bake my own bread, maybe I wouldn't feel like such a loser.
This is a relatively new phenomenon, I think. Growing up in the 80s, before the internet, we could only compare ourselves to our friends and classmates. With such a small pool of people, we could always stand out at something. Maybe we were in the top three at basketball, or maybe we always got As in history, or maybe we were good at making girls laugh. And even if there was nothing special about us, it didn't matter: there was nothing special about anyone! We were happy to pursue thin desires because we didn't need to be more than we were. If we worked hard, it was to earn more money. If we practiced an instrument, it was because we enjoyed it. No one ever worried about "what it all means". There's a reason we called such philosophical musings "sophomoric".
And if you think about it, there's nothing special about "thick desires" either. Yes, learning how to play piano changes us. But so what? Why do want to be different? Is it to stand out? Is it to impress others? Is it to be able to say, "I can play piano"? Maybe they are all thin desires. Maybe it's all just a way to pass the time. Is learning about all the Impressionists really any different than memorizing the fire-type Pokemons?
I think having kids fundamentally changed my brain. Once you have kids and get exposed to the firehose of emotions they elicit, everything else becomes shallow. There is no 3 Michelin Star meal, no trek through the rainforest, no mastery of unusual skills that brings me as much pleasure as making my daughter laugh.
We used to know that. We used to know what it meant to live a good life. But now it's a mystery.
This article feels judgmental, off-putting, and condescending to me.
It is especially so because it chooses real examples to put down.
Why is the author’s philosophy the arbiter of what we are allowed to enjoy? Why is basic shallow pleasure in life looked down upon?
It even feels condescending to people who have actual serious needs like hunger and disease who may turn to some of these “vices” for an escape. Meanwhile, thick desires are available for those privileged with free time, energy, and money.
By the end of the article I almost felt like the author was trying to evangelize a religion to me, in a really icky way.
Has no one considered the possibility that those with the intent of learning new things still do learn, many times because of technology? Sure, there are millions who doomscroll pointlessly, but the solution to that is simple: put down the phone and read a book.
Moreover, the fact that I now have access to international publications & journals, as well as the ability to learn foreign languages literally at my fingertips, does not somehow deplete my human needs, any more than reading a newspaper depleted the need to read long-form books did a century ago.
Imperfections aside, the article is hitting on something quite real. If only we had been studying the received wisdom of the ages instead of warping it into dismissible caricatures and smearing it with black legends, we would have learned about things like virtue and natural law. We would have understood the nature of sin and immorality, and conversely, the moral and the good life. We would have looked at the vacuous and empty temptations of "the world" with contempt and disdain, as vain things beneath human dignity.
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.
From "How to know what you really want" by Luke Burgis [1]:
> There are two kinds of desire, thin and thick. Thick desires are like layers of rock that have been built up throughout the course of our lives. These are desires that can be shaped and cultivated through models like our parents and people that we admire as children. But at some level, they’re related to the core of who we are. They can be related to perennial human truths: beauty, goodness, human dignity.
> Thin desires are highly mimetic (imitative) and ephemeral desires. They’re the things that can be here today, gone tomorrow. Thin desires are subject to the winds of mimetic change, because they’re not rooted in a layer of ourselves that’s been built up over time. They are like a layer of leaves that’s sitting on top of layers of rock. Those thin desires are blown away with a light gust of wind. A new model comes into our life; the old desires are gone. All of a sudden we want something else.
Comparing the above conceptualizations with the ones offered by Westenberg (OP) could consume hundreds or thousands of words -- more than I want to spend at the moment -- but I will say this: both sets feel wrong, by which I mean they trigger my early warning detectors.
I'm not asking anyone else to trust my intuition. But you should trust yours. Intuition is usually a good starting point, at least.
With intuition alone -- without writing a full analysis -- we can see the above quoted explanations/definitions are highly complected. [2] Also, in my view, the offered metaphors don't carve reality at the joints. [3]
When I put ~20 minutes of concentrated thinking into the problem, here are some of the constituent parts of "desire" that I can unpack. (These are only fleetingly glossed over in the article.) In no particular order, to what degree are desires:
Over-simplication can be a disservice. Adding another metaphor reminds me of the "N+1 standards" problem. [4] Maybe the new metaphor helps, maybe not. Either way, now we have more to sift through.
The irony is thick here. The author's railing against scalable thin desires... by writing a scalable viral essay that delivers the neurological reward of "deep insight".
I’ve noticed a lot of changes on the site recently, which I believe is powered by Ghost which makes messing around with feed links a more advanced (for lack of a better word) tweak than many platforms as you download/upload a routes file. I’m a 10+ year developer and have found myself chasing route changes in Ghost with trial and error.
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.
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.
I think after nearly 19 years it’s pretty well settled that downvoting of stories won’t be happening :)
The principle is that we don’t want a battle between upvotes and downvotes to determine rank, because that would set the wrong incentives (e.g coordinated downvoting of stories to help a particular story move up the rankings).
The guidelines include what is on-topic/off-topic, and the most significant criterion is whether a story gratifies intellectual curiosity.
If you earnestly feel that it doesn’t, then it’s fine to flag it as being off-topic. Otherwise it’s just not to your taste, in which case hit “hide” and upvote stories you do like.
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).
> 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 really like this article.
I bake bread. I have spent a good deal of time optimizing the recipe for deliciousness but also for time efficiency. Proving in a warm oven is a great tip. Also baking two loaves at a time!
All this nit picking about writing style is disappointing. I like that this person got their ideas out there. They are good ideas. Legible and easy to parse == good enough. I don't care about the writing style any more than that and you shouldn't either. It is a waste of everyone's time... yours especially.
It's very nice to hear about someone else who is interested in doing hard things/real things. Seems like there ought to be a meet up or a get together opportunity for people working on stuff like that. Perhaps a get-together where everyone gives a 2-5 minute talk about something they are working on then we all hang out for another hour or two. Seems like alcohol might help get the wheels spinning?
I fully appreciate the need for a catchy headline with a hook (it got me!) but I wonder if these ideas would be more powerful/useful if expressed in positive language rather than doom speak? I guess doom speak is the fashion these days and we all have to conform to the dominant paradigm... at least a little around the edges.
Generally... Bravo. Nice piece. Nice ideas.
I really enjoyed the piece also, in spite of the off-putting writing style.
It reminds me of the Epicurean hierarchy of desires, the genius Epicurus had it figured out more then a couple of millenia ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
The thing about "apps for one" actually resonated with me quite a bit.
The last year I've struggled finding freelance work and I've found myself with more time (and less money) that I would like. I feel guilty, because one side of me feels like I should have spent this time to learn ML or to make an app that makes passive income. The thing is: I have no interest in making "apps" to make money. I wouldn't even know what app to make, because there is no quotidian problem for which I think an app would make my life easier. On the contrary, I don't have a smartphone and apps are making my life harder, as we move towards a world where apps are expected for everything. But instead, I have made a couple of games for my girlfriend's birthdays, and I also made her web portfolio, all forms, I guess, of "apps for one" made for love. Other than that, perhaps, I enjoy tuning my Linux system (recently migrated from Xmonad to Hyprland), a form of making, perhaps, an app for one, in the only tech device that still feels like I can control instead of it trying to control myself. Other than that, I use my time to go to the gym and sometimes to paint or DJ or just party, even though I often spend on Hacker News, Youtube, Wikipedia and other media way more time that I would like to.
So all in all, I find it difficult to write code these days with the joy of when I was younger, and it is hard to motivate myself if there's no money involved, with the exception of those gestures of love. It saddens me, because I believe it is such a powerful and beautiful skill. But I just find the current state of world and how "technology" is used to extract capital out of all human relationships rather depressing. The current wave of "AI" only makes the problem worse, and adds an dark sense of impending doom...
The writing style is perfect.
It’s not just like that to be spaced out visually. It suggests slowing down, taking your time, digesting each sentence. Not just racing to the end so you can drop a thin take and keep scrolling.
It is a THICK PIECE.
Consume it that way. :)
there are waves of people like us. it's the zeitgeist of the era for a sub-category of coders/hackers.
i, too, started baking sourdough bread. and DIY, electronics, music for myself.
i suspect a double digit percentage of that subcategory also dabbles in lisp/clojure/emacs and another double digit subsection abandoned AAA for indie gaming. and a single digit percentage might have enjoyed ruby in the old times.
It reminds of reading Tao Te Ching.
I asked my agent to rewrite this in a more traditional style, if it's helpful to anyone:
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.
To put it politely, nobody gives two shits about what "your agent" said, in case you were wondering why this was downvoted to hell. This reply adds nothing to the conversation, and it also doesn't take a mastermind to figure they, too, can paste the post in ChatGPT and get a summary out of it. Also, reading a summary instead of the sources butchers the post entirely.
Hopefully you'll spare us the spam next time. Have a good day!
Did you even read this yourself? You've turned something succinct and readable into a tedious, impenetrable blob.
I read both of them. Different strokes I guess
This resonates. I work in web dev, and a little over 2 years ago I hit a wall. Everything was a screen. All day at work, at home, on the go. Everything felt hallow and unrewarding. I'm an introvert, so outside of my family, I didn't have many relationships. Of course, I was depressed. I began working on it by going to therapy and then one day I decided to try sculpting.
This changed everything. I found I was pretty good at it. It felt good because it was tangible, and it required me to learn and probe and practice. I kept at it. This grew in ways I couldn't imagine.
Now, I make collectible resin maquettes and busts and I even started making latex halloween masks. It's been a crazy journey to where I am now, with so much more ahead. I've met people and interact with people in ways I didn't just a short time ago. It's changed my life. It's thick. All of it.
Kudos on your evolution. But this gets me thinking, remember when computing didn't felt "thin" ? even screen had a different feel. I don't know if it's our brain getting used and losing a kind of magic filter.
Anyway, I should probably imitate you, every time I see some people crafting real things I have a little blip of envy.
I still get that feeling sometimes, even after 25 years with computers at home. But it is so dependent on what I do. I get this feeling when I create stuff on my own terms, like making a game or a website. I also get this feeling when discovering other people’s personal creations online.
It definitely felt different to me in the beginning years. I've been at the web thing for about 12 years now. In the beginning, while it was often very difficult, there was an excitement and freshness. It could have simply been because we were moving to web 2.0, CSS and all of its "magic".
While making stuff is only a side thing, it makes the grind during the week tolerable. I feel like I have something meaningful in my life (outside of my family) and it has given me purpose. I'm grateful for it. And it is so damn fun!
It was before the invasion of late stage capitalism in computing, creating the attention economy.
Computing was a thing by geeks, for geeks. It was revolutionary. It was fun. Now it's the lowest common denominator. Instagram.
the small culture aspect is something i think about too, it was the outcome of a certain group of people liking a similar idea and way of doing things. now it's diluted in all of the social issues (privacy, fame, short term attention)
I've taken somewhat of a parallel path.
I set foot in a shop for the first time at a hackerspace 11 or 12 years ago and eventually feel deep into machining. I spent huge swaths of my days there, and when I wasn't, I was reading about machining. Books, because there were few Youtubers doing it and the forums are thin. It's not a popular hobby and a lot of the professionals and hobbyists aren't computer savvy.
I focused on it to the detriment of other things. Friends commented last year on how absorbed I became and how much I was absorbing. Puttering around on a computer fell away, since it wasn't that relevant to the hobby. It wasn't necessary to use the aging laptop in my free time; I could read PDFs on my phone or old, used books.
But you're not looking at your phone often, because your hands are dirty. Or busy. Or there's a significant safety concern from lapsed attention. Or when doing related types of metal working, weld spatter might land on a face up phone and take chunks out of the glass. Or maybe a steel chip scratches the screen.
Eventually I drifted away from machining for another hobby, but I've come back to it now that I have space in my garage -- this time with more balance. I'm not out until after midnight on work nights. Instead, I'm up before dawn, working with my hands for an hour or two before work. After work, I spend time on learning things somewhat relevant to my career. On the weekends, I'll spend a few hours each day.
The machining isn't ever useful. I made a nylon washer on my lathe once for a dog harness -- I think that's the only item I've made that's not for the hobby itself. But it's tangible. The projects are incredibly slow, and no undo button means a small mistake can result in hours work thrown in the recycling. I spent maybe eight hours over the past four days making a tiny brass rod (as well as other, failed versions) to repair an older clockwork mechanism. A used replacement would've been relatively cheap on Ebay, but that's never the point.
If (and I mean only if it would be interesting to you, no other reason and no implied 'ought') you wanted, I'm pretty sure that there are people out there who would like to return things like telescope mountings, old focusers, mechanical devices of all kinds to a working state. Over here in the UK, people volunteer at steam engine workshops and even in jewellery workshops to restore things. And they get a supply of interesting items to make...
I don't know if that's a thing here in the states, but I'll keep it in mind! It probably wouldn't be hard to advertise via the local (different) hackerspace.
But I'll probably have to get through my backlog of current tasks and projects before I wanted to take on other peoples'. And I may have literally set up a wiki to track those projects...
What is the other hobby?
It was climbing, but that one I've fully walked away from.
> I even started making latex halloween masks.
Bit of a tangent: I don't really subscribe to the introvert/extrovert divide personally, but do eventually hit a wall with socializing, and am happy to explicitly isolate myself in my own world or with a smaller group for extended periods of recharge. Unfortunately, I've committed to attending my good friend's costume NYE party, and have betrayed myself somewhat because... I'm just tired of costumes, he's a very theatrical film person and I'm... a web dev, who's just never really had an affinity for dressing up in that way—even less so since it's been a socially packed autumn. I'm considering bailing, but I feel like that would be a bit of a fail.
I think as a nerd, I'd need to make it a challenge and a small hobby like you have, but I also am trying to quit YouTube. Can you picture yourself in my situation? Any tips on finding a seed of interest?
This is a bit longwinded, so apologies: I tried sculpting because I saw a video on YouTube where this guy, I think he goes by Craftyart, or Craftyarts - he had a speed video where he sculpted, cast, and painted a version of the Joker, but it was Willem DaFoe. It was incredible, and it just gave me an itch. I watched it and wanted to do that, to make that.
For me, I'd often have these ideas of things I wanted to try, or do, or challenge myself with, and then for some inexplicable reason I'd never do them. In this instance, I told myself to get off my ass and just give it a try. It may have helped that I was in therapy at the time and making efforts to address a lifetime of issues. It has lent a certain proactiveness to my being. For me, addressing my mental health is a driving factor in having made any of this possible.
Finding a seed of interest: if you mean directly with making a costume, I don't know. If you're not interested in costumes, I don't think it is something you can force. Overall though I think anything that causes that itch, that pull, maybe even a sense of yearning "to do" is enough to get you going on a path. I had a feeling when watching the video that reminded me of what I felt when I was a kid and I would see something and I'd get excited to do the same.
I don't know that any of this would have come together for me had I not been on a journey to improve my mental health, and making efforts to find something that connected with me. Something outside of a screen. But in the end, what I connected with was surprising. It looks like it makes sense in hindsight, but at that time, it felt like it came out of left field.
Hopefully there are some tips somewhere in this mess of words. If not, my apologies for wasting your time.
> For me, I'd often have these ideas of things I wanted to try, or do, or challenge myself with, and then for some inexplicable reason I'd never do them.
I think without a mentor or point of reference for why or how you'd go about doing something like that, it's just a completely abstract domain, much like software is to anyone who hasn't spent a lifetime coding or figuring out how computers work. The mental health work and the video by Craftyarts seem like the perfect timely combination to allow for peeling back those layers, literally and figuratively, further allowing curiosity to be actionable.
I've been doing that a bit with electronics, and a recent example that seems similarly daunting for me would be watching the end to end process of building a custom keyboard pcb. At first it seems like an immense rabbit hole, but dedicating a bit of money and time incrementally is insanely rewarding in aggregate, moreso the further away from your mainline discipline it is. I tend to avoid these until I have a specific challenge in mind.
The seed of interest question was framed poorly, but it was related specifically to the latex mask subject, and I guess I was just curious if there were any adjacent ideas that might be worth exploring, since you do seem to have an interest in vaguely related areas
Adjacent ideas: 3d printing - I think it is cool but I'm not into it myself because it would require more time for me in front of a screen and working with digital tools. But, there are a lot of things to be explored here. One idea is digitally scanning a analog sculpture and then 3D printing the mold for it. This would be huge as you could make very complex molds and they'd be essentially perfect. And then when your mold broke down you could just print another one. No need to work from a master sculpt.
I have a friend who made me 3D printed keychains for swag at events. He embedded NFC chips in the keychain and this links to a linktree on my website. Coming up with cool swag like this could be something to explore. People found them really cool and it was a relatively simple thing to do. I'm sure there are some wild things 3D printing could be applied to for things like this.
1. If you have that urge to go, it is probably for a good reason, agreed :) Wouldn't call it a fail though if you didn't end up going. We all require balance.
2. Parties are for getting together, costumes are just a dress code. They'd love your company even if you didn't dress up -- that's why they invited you after all. So don't stress over it. You can come in something silly or minimal fuss.
> They'd love your company even if you didn't dress up
This is generally true and reassuring, and but in this case I have to put at least something reasonable together since I half-assed it last time lol. I'll probably just try and attend every third costume party in the future
Very cool.
I started using my IT and data management skills on film sets to provide data security around the footage. It’s been a breath of fresh air to use advanced concepts in a field that’s very hands on and a big team effort. A lot of communication and working together. It’s been great.
I can totally relate—I’m also a web dev and spend all day in front of screens. Lately I’ve been feeling really stuck and weighed down, and honestly I’m not sure how to start changing things. Reading your story gives me a little hope, though.
Oh that's cool ! Bravo !
I lived exactly the same thing also two years ago.
What changed everything to me was, impulsively, enrolling myself to a rollerblading course in a skate park. I was 34, overweight (still am) and never did anything like this (I never did barely any sport at all tbh). Oh boy was this transformative.
I'm still in the course every week and like you, it feels good because it's tangible : not in the material way like sculpting but rather by doing things with my body (and my brain) I would'nt believe I could do at all even when I was younger. That's an amazing feeling after decades of watching things on screens (yes, I know how that sounds pathetic, but that's my story).
Any tips or resources on how to get started? I drew a lot of comics as a kid/teen, and I've done 3d modeling as a hobbyist. But using physical media for sculpting has always seemed daunting.
I started by buying some Sculpey clay, some armature wire, and a 6-inch wooden base. This and an assortment of tools. Then I found an online 3d model I could turn in all directions. And then, I just tried to sculpt it. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. From there I looked for video instruction on YouTube. There are a ton of sculpting videos out there. Books: there is a great book by the Shiflett Brothers that was very helpful to me (Clay Sculpting with the Shiflett Brothers). They also have a great sculpting forum on Facebook. Eventually I signed up for the Stan Winston School of Character Arts. This has been incredibly helpful for the direction I am going.
So, I started small, and then built from there. I only bought materials and tools when my journey necessitated them so I could refrain from getting ahead of myself. I think this is valuable, as it is easy for me to get carried away in the beginning of anything new, and go whole-hog only to find later that my interest lay elsewhere. I wanted to prove to myself that my purchases were for a reason and meaningful to where I was at, at that moment.
I have kept a blog of my learning experiences, trying to give back as I can. I don't want to break the forum rules, but if you want I can send you links to my site. It has my work and the blog has outlines of what I have done, steps, resources, etc. I hope it is helpful to someone out there going along this path.
I can relate! Someone who is very dear to me suggested we go to a one-day pottery class and the idea had never entered my mind. I actually ended up loving it. We're both introverts, as well, and she enjoys doing things that don't require other people (she likes to surf, as well). There's something about doing something physical by yourself (that isn't exercising) that's creative that I really like, but before the class, I hadn't realized it.
I actually play instruments, as well, but this feels totally different and almost stimulates a different part of my brain. I was much more relaxed doing pottery and I saw instant results that I could track whether I was doing something right or wrong (even though the "right" and "wrong" was driven by my own personal idea of them).
Do you think you'll end up sharing any of your pieces to the public?
That's awesome, and I can understand what you are saying. The immediacy of the medium is very satisfying in a way that digital immediacy for me is not. Mind/body connection or something like that.
Yes, I have shared my pieces! On social media of course (instagram/facebook/youtube), personal website, and at events. One part of this journey was a kind of audacious idea - I decided one day, after about a year and half into this, to make an LLC. I figured I could try and get this hobby to pay for itself as it isn't exactly cheap when you start getting into molding and casting the pieces. That and I was getting great responses from people. A part of me just went with a feeling ("I bet I could do that") and this whole thing has taken on a life of its own. I've just started going to local events recently (a punk flea market, a comic-con, and a Krampus Con) and I've sold some of my work, have connected with new people, and made some good connections. It's a wonderful feeling and the response from people has been nothing but soul fuel.
> The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.
> The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.
Joke's on them! I run my oven until the temperature inside is ~100F - about a minute or so. Then I turn it off and set the dough in there along with some water (for humidity). It rises super fast compared to my kitchen which is ~65F in the winter and the bread is just as flavorful. Definitely not indifferent to my optimization.
> the bread is just as flavorful
“Thin bread.”
No sourdough enthusiast or artisanal bread baker would agree. You even get a different metabolic pathway active at higher temps.
Try the “low and slow” method, rise then let it sit a day in the fridge, see if it’s really the same taste.
I run a sourdough bakery with my partner, as it happens. Although I'm not a baker, coming from a mathematics background I'm the one most focused on process and quality control. We don't use any commercial yeast so I've picked a few things related to targeting different flavors using the same starter.
We use different temperature profiles during proofing for different products (we have fancy proofing fridges where we set temperature profiles over a 12 to 36 hour period depending on the product). Low and slow is good for certain types of bread, or pizza base. But not so much for a brioche or croissant dough.
I personally love slow fermented, heavy rye based sourdough, but lots of our customers don't and the bread we sell most is a classic white sourdough fermented comparatively quickly at higher temperature for a lighter and less sour taste. It's still very slow fermentation compared to commercial yeast, of course.
The proofing temperature profile for this bread isn't as simple as "start warm and gradually cool down" (i.e. the warm oven method), but that is a reasonable approximation for a home baker.
sorry to ask but this is a rare occasion...
i started trying to make sourdough bread 2 weeks ago (and baking/cooking at all).
is there 1 definitive book/youtube channel/other kind of resource you would recommend to put mut on a solid path for a few months/years?
i just want to make sourdough bread daily in order to have healthy stable carbs at home. (stone milled complete grain flour and wild yeast). with the price of rice currently in japan it doesnt even look to be significantly more expensive.
I'm sorry to say I don't have any answers for you, at least nothing better than you'd get from searching on to r/sourdough or r/baking.
Like I said, I'm not a baker. My partner is. My focus is on other parts of the business, I was just sharing what I have picked up (via osmosis mostly) about different temperature profiles for different products.
Maybe it depends on the yeast? I use commercial yeast and not a sourdough culture. The one I have ("Red Star Yeast") rises just fine with the method and the result tastes great!
People tend to assume optimization means thin. Probably because you are usually optimised, by others, into thin-ness. To be optimized is passive.
But I think optimising yourself, or the world, hopefully in a positive way, is one of the thickest things you can do.
I don't bake, but I once installed an off-the-shelf PID controller into my kitchen oven[1] and this gave me some insights on things that are normally kind of inconvenient to observe (what, with the bright always-on LED display glaring at me at all times while I was in the kitchen with a constant report of what temperature in there was).
Like: The oven light. It's an incandescent bulb, which is also to say that it's waaaay better at being a heater than it is at being a source of light.
I found that leaving the light switched on in the oven, and the oven door closed, kept the temperature right around 100F. It varied a bit depending on ambient, but never by more than a few degrees.
---
[1]: It was an old Frigidaire-built electric range that someone gave me for free. It worked, until one day when I switched it on at a sensible temperature setting and put a frozen pizza in there. The temperature control then failed, and it failed stuck in the on position. The pizza was very badly burned and looked pretty crispy when I came back to it a short time later.
And when I tried to retrieve the pizza, the hotpad in my hand was converted directly from fabric into smoke as soon as it touched the pan.
While I lamented about the lost pizza and the expense of buying new replacement parts for an old freebie oven, a friend suggested using a PID controller and an SSR instead.
So I did exactly that: I bought the parts (including ceramic wire nuts and fiberglass-insulated wire), cut a square hole in the panel with a grinder and a deathwheel for the new controls, mounted an SSR in a recess on the back with an enormous heatsink, and it all went together splendidly. I put the new bits in series with the old bits, so it was never any less-safe than it had become on its own accord.
I miss that oven sometimes. It was actually kind of fun learning how to tune the PID, and to be able to reliably get a consistent temperature from it.
The oven-light discovery was just an accident; if I actually wanted 100F for some reason, I'd have just set the PID box to that temperature.
I found this trick for store bought pizza dough as well. Instead of leaving out for 20 minutes, a warm oven helps it start rising a bit and results in a much better final product!
My mother used to put the dough in a warm place. When I tried making bread I did the same. The bread was always disappointing, having a taste and texture more like "baked dough" than something I'd consider worth eating.
I discovered later that the length of time it spends rising matters. Room temperature (15-19 degrees Celsius) is optimal and will take a couple of hours for the first rise and less than an hour for the second. It is of course necessary to keep the dough away from any drafts. I keep it wrapped in a blanket or towel.
35 degrees Celsius is far too warm and won't give it enough time to develop the flavour and texture of good bread.
Im just learning this is a thing, tell me more, how long do you leave it in there? Any ratio's you use?
Baking is weird. You first should start by following instructions to the letter. Then once you get it you'll be able to break all the rules.
The bread rises because of the yeast bacteria eats sugar and expels carbon dioxide. So ask yourself, what does yeast like? Probably not hard to guess that it's a warm, moist environment with plenty of sugar. Too cold and they're slow moving. Too hot and they burn up. But the goldilocks zone is that of most bacteria, a hot summer day in the tropics.
How long to rise? That's more a question of how fluffy you want the bread and how fast the bacteria eats the sugar.
Follow instructions while you're learning but think about things like this while practicing and you'll get your answers pretty quickly. The problem is no one can actually give you a direct answer because there's variance. Besides, the more important skill is to learn to generalize and get the intuition for it. So pay attention to how sticky the dough is, how fluffy, how it stretches, and all the other little things. Think about it during and after. If you do this I promise you'll get your answer very quickly
Yeast is fungus not bacteria. In lab setting it tends to be incubated at 30c, a little cooler compared to most bacteria at 37c.
Depends on the method/recipe. Most of the recipes I follow have at least two rising steps, following by another one after the dough is shaped into its final loaf (or whatever shape you want). Each one would be about an hour and half or so. It could be done with a single rise as well, but two rises tends to give more flavor. If you don't want it right away, a slow overnight rise in the fridge is also pretty good.
"No-knead" recipes usually involve 20-30 minute cadence of "fold-and-stretch" followed by a rise to allow the gluten to develop naturally without kneading. Usually about four times.
How long to leave in depends on the dough, but you can get a quick rise in like less than an hour in the right temperature. Definitely don't leave it too long. I routinely forget and then it rises too much and eventually collapses when you go to bake it.
I use like 65% or maybe 70% hydration for bread, little more for whole wheat. Like 25:1 sugar (or less?), 100:1 salt, 100:1 yeast. High protein flour if you can.
For just basic bread, no sourdough, not a sandwich loaf, etc.
Yep, some ovens (like mine) even have a Proof setting that keeps it at 100 degrees F automatically, for as long as you want. We make a lot of bread is how I know this
Even with thick desires, I sometimes find myself day-dreaming about the state when I have mastered a skill or understood a topic deeply. At the same time, I know from experience that the process never ends. Even when one does master a skill, one is deeply aware of what one doesn't know or understand or what one is not good at within that domain.
What helps me is to focus on today. If I can spend even an hour on a topic and get lost in it or even get frustrated by it, it is time well-spent. I was going to say "it is progress" instead of "time well-spent" but even that's a trap. Progress implies moving forward in a preferred direction. While I can't say I don't want to make progress, I am training myself to care less about it. It is really the time spent engaging that's most valuable (at least to me).
You might find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up%C4%81d%C4%81na and https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/bhavatanha
Oh yeah decades in I still feel I know f-all about programming. Doesn't help the field keeps expanding expintentially. E.g. I look most things up. I am basicially a slow LLM!
You're kind of the opposite of a slow LLM. LLMs don't look anything up, they enthusiastically assert that they're correct. They have no desire to know anything.
LLMs don't look anything up, they enthusiastically assert that they're correct.
Says someone who lectures on how LLMs worked two years ago.
https://openai.com/index/why-language-models-hallucinate/ https://cdn.openai.com/gpt-5-system-card.pdf
according to openai, the least likely model to hallucinate is gpt-5-thinking-mini, and it hallucinates 26% of the time. Seems to me the problems of LLMs boldly producing lies are far from solved. But sure, they lied years ago too.
according to openai, the least likely model to hallucinate is gpt-5-thinking-mini, and it hallucinates 26% of the time.
You're not so bad at hallucinating, yourself. We find that gpt-5-main has a hallucination rate (i.e., percentage of factual claims that contain minor or major errors) 26% smaller than GPT-4o ...
That's the only reference to "26%" that I see in the model card.
If you didn't daydream like that would you have the motivation to pursue it? Are not those daydreams your kind encouraging you? "Look how great it'll be, this is why you'll put in the hard work now". You can get trapped in the dreams, of course, but they're useful too
David Epstein calls this "desirable difficulty" in the book Range.
Interestingly he recently discussed how using LLMs tends to remove this desirable difficulty: https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/a-risk-of-cognitive-conv...
This means that the results (both of the task and of the learning by the student) are lower if the student uses an LLM first, but slightly improves if they use it second
Wow, this seems like a lot of folks first encounter with a lyrical essay. I won't hold that against anyone. I have heard many things about the American school system. Writing like this is meant to be felt as much as evaluated. The argument matters, but the cadence and emotional momentum matter just as much. The author give you are chance to think about each point that is being said. Our dopamine addicted brains can't deal with this well anymore unfortunatly. Which is I guess why people feel uncomfortable, and don't know why.
It’s uncomfortable for some people to experience an idea they can’t fit in their head all at once
It also reflects how very little some people have read.
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, since the larger arc of each point is constantly being interrupted.
Why choose such an antithetical form, to what is otherwise an important and deep message?
The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.
Reading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read.
Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.
Edit: revisiting the article, I’ll allow that the author may have over-done it in some parts. But I think the bias was in the right direction.
A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions. If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter.
Consider the following excerpt of the post:
There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stops. I also don't know the author nearly well enough to consider pondering its meaning: To my eyes there is only a need to stop and ponder at most once. It is essentially just noise.There is something to be gained from the text, but it is overblown in size due to what appears to be a lack of time or skill of the author.
PS: If some context is missing in the excerpt: Well to bad that there is no natural marker signifying that a train of thought has concluded (or started).
Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)
No, I want to read it (or not) the way the writer intended.
Heck just skip the website and ask the AI to make some text for you to read
The prose is self-consciously different, makes the reader work a little harder. One can almost feel a literary water ripple or pebble garden, stillness and simplicity.
Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's the point."
ok, but there's nothing there. The point of this piece is empty calories.
I thought the point was about baking bread?
I've never baked a loaf of bread.
I've never baked anything more complex than a pre-packaged cornbread mix, or a frozen pizza.
Baking has always been someone else's problem.
But having now skimmed through this bit of weirdly-formatted writing, I might give it a shot.
(Oh, and of that formatting: It reminds me a bit of what suck.com looked like in the mid-late 1990s. I still have the sticker they sent me stuck to a thing ~30 years later, but the suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom they sent with it got mangled pretty bad in the mail.)
I started baking bread because I had a bag of plain flour (i.e. not bread flour, only 9% protein) sitting in the cupboard and approaching its sell-by date. So I made 'ships biscuits', and one thing led to another.
So a bag of what in the UK is called 'strong white flour' (i.e. protein around 12%, I think it is 'all purpose' in US) and a sachet of instant yeast and some salt. Followed the instructions on the bread bag and it worked sort of, a bit solid but edible and it toasted nice.
Then you just iterate. Lots of stuff out on the Web. I use supermarket flour and the dried active yeast and the ingredients are 10x cheaper than even a basic bought loaf. And mixing and baking is fun. Sourdough is OK but you then have a pet to look after...
I noticed last night that I have two bags of "all-purpose" flour taking up space.
Perhaps the time has come.
In what way were the sentences content heavy? It's quite repetitive, and often the meaning of a section of it will be split into individual fragments.
I get it.
One sentence pragraphs feel punchy.
It feels like you're writing copy for an Apple ad.
..but it only works when it's in another medium, in a shorter format. In this form, it's just exhausting.
> Reflect on the structure of your own comment
Could you clarify, are you comparing the parent comment to the article?
> "my attention span is shot"
Maybe you like being restricted to reading in the ad-copy register, in which case go ahead and make virtue of vice, but otherwise: this lack is well within your power to remedy.
Same reaction - I could immediately tell this person had learned to write on Twitter (or Linkedin), not real meaty writing. I had an English professor who wrote "FORM = CONTENT" on the chalkboard; this article would send him into a fury.
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.
I agree with the general sentiment of your comment, but not this:
> then maybe they've got an inkling of truth and they're worth writing about.
Ideas don't have to be infallible to be worth writing about. It's a slippery slope to not writing at all.
"inkling of truth" != "infallible"
#strawmanning
Robin Sloan has called this “ventilated prose”, a phrase I love. (I seem to recall “aerated prose” having also been deployed)
See, e.g., the end of https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/
Rarified prose…
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.
News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition.
I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.
Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.
Interspersed single sentence and denser paragraphs, seem to get the most bang out of both.
My reply was prompted by both the substance and style of your comment. :)
I think it makes sense to write like this if you're intended audience is already used to consuming "thin" desire media.
I agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot.
But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.
Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.
Hah, that’s a good point. It’s always interesting to see somebody find a clever little bit of redemption for a widely disliked aspect in an article—nice.
>The only answer that comes to mind is that the author's livelihood, or at least their internal gauge of success, is tied to manipulating readers' thin desires.
From the about page:
>Free subscribers get previews of these essays and occasional full posts. Paid subscribers get all essays, the most useful ideas, conversations, and community access.
So maybe you're right.
Also the ideas are just reframing the old maxim of "its not the destination, its the journey".
It is that but more than that. There are companies trying to profit by selling instant gratificaton.
i have meaner names, but lets just call it nod along content
I really don’t like this new feeling of not knowing if what I’m reading is from a person or a machine but I can’t quantify why it bothers me. I wonder if it will be a temporary thing like in 5 years nobody will ever care again even though the chance of it being a machine might be higher.
When I was young my parents were scared that the MTV generation couldn't focus long enough to watch the "real news".
Not long ago I feared that twitters short form content was shortening peoples attention spans so much that they would stop being able to appreciate nuance at all... Then came TikTok.
I don't know what comes next, but I promise you it will be worse. Either way, it's a race to the bottom and we're not there yet.
Maybe it will be Max Headroom's blipverts?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk
It sounds like a Ted Talk with unnecessarily long poses to let sentences sink in. For some reason I just can't digest this sort of writing.
Yeah, this feels very much like one of those sites with random quotes that seem deep but aren't, like wisdom.spark.pink.
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.
I think that LinkedIn writing style is so infectious that people who do have something to say wind up getting sucked into it and wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
>wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
Pretty sure the first rule of writing on the internet is ignore the comments section
There’s the prolific curmudgeon with a tomato cannon backed by a whole tomato farm and then there’s what you get when people thought your blog post was written by A.I. Ignore the first.
Yeah me too. Lately LI is like:
CMSs are done!
Let that sink in!
Some dude trew away his CMS and vibe coded some markdown based static stuff that does the same.
No harddrive was wiped this particular time.
The world is different now, reply in comments if you agree. Reply “airhead” for my 3 slides which are even more insightful than this post.
A genuine insight turned into a cartoon self-help scam-artist LinkedIn inspirational quote cliche version of itself...
Is the message deep and important or was the article attempting to manipulate you into thinking it is?
Your need to quip about the article's presentation instead of its meaning is a thin desire.
Presentation and context are important to understand the meaning of a text.
So that the people with the most rotted brains -- those caught fully in the thick of thin things! -- stand a chance of reading it.
Source: I talk to zoomers. (Some of them couldn't make it through an article of this length...)
I quite like that this is a more unique writing style and in fact would encourage people to write "unusually".
I immediately stopped reading after I saw the format. Absolutely hate this linkedin style 'everything is deep' posting. It's crap
In my perspective, this is a style of writing that emphasizes the poetic side of speech. The thin paragraphs you see is a result of a rhythmic decision to make it short burst.
More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
Didn't really come off as design-y or antithetical form and definitely not manipulating lol, maybe a little poetic or artsy fartsy. Agree that it's important and deep.
Same. It looks like the author is playing with poetry to me. They're clearly playing with the stanza with the similar lines and the contrasting lines. Yeah, it's amateur, but who cares? It tracks with the message.
If anything I think the GP's comment is an example of a thin desire. Being nitpicky/petty to justify internalizing and actually reading the post. There's no lines to read between here, it's plain as day. We are addicted to dismissing things because it's gratifying and easy. It's trivial to find errors or complaints about anything, but it's difficult to actually critique. I'd argue in our thin desires we've conflated the two. It's cargo cult intellectualism. Complaints look similar to critiques in form but they lack the substance, the depth.
That's not always the intention behind that style of writing.
Often, when I'm communicating with someone who is either dyslexic, or uses English as a second (or even third or fourth) language, then I make an effort to shorten sentences, and almost make bullet points of them.
It's actually a good exercise for the person writing too. Less can indeed be more.
It's like some kind of meta writing, the writing style is proving what it's talking about.
Still.... the message has value.
Not really.
It matches the way she speaks in the videos.
I don't mind that.
It's a vibe.
Sure, but can you at least appreciate the underlying meaning (soul) of the text?
It's almost like anti-poetry.
"Thin Paragraphs"
Possibly AI-generated?
My framing for this is "mass production of stimuli." Before industrialization, the number of things grabbing your attention at any given moment wasn't super high. But once you had mass production, and especially the innovation of extrinsic advertising (associating psychological properties not intrinsic to the product being advertised itself), we were all suddenly awash in stimulating signals. But like this article notes, those stimuli go mostly unfulfilled by the action we take (buying the thing, opening the app), and so we all have this low level background noise of frustration and dissatisfaction.
EDIT: Some later posts mentioned it, but philosophers and religions have contemplated this stuff for centuries. Nevertheless I do think it's an exacerbated problem in the modern world due to technology and scale.
Resonates well with me. I was thinking same lately as many other comments.
Random stranger on Reddit mentioned - *The art of frugal hedonism* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216874949
This book is indeed eye opener. Though I am too deep to turn around quickly without crashing I am well on may way and there is many more miles to go. Hoping to take few of my friends with me too.
> 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.
This has a political interpretation too. Have you noticed that online "petitions" have mostly disappeared lately ? Maybe this disappearance is based on now-widespread recognition that the way to get the attention and concern of the political establishment is to get out on the streets and make some noise.
Online activity can _motivate_ protest, but it cannot really express protest in a way that "matters". It's busy work. Keep the monkeys at their typewriters.
Online is the equivalent of hanging a sign in your window; it does not tell you whether your opinion is shared by most of your fellow citizens. Thousands of likes versus the knowledge that social media keeps each of us in our bubble, feeding us more.
But a monster rally in your city and elsewhere can tell you precisely that your opinion is shared by most (or "sufficiently many") of your fellow citizens. Pithy placards to the fore!
> the way to get the attention and concern of the political establishment is to get out on the streets and make some noise.
Honestly I'm not even convinced this works so well anymore. (Not saying it never does, but I think it's effectiveness has dropped.) To me, it seems the main way to achieve political change is with money. More money than I have, unfortunately.
Looking at all the anti immigration protests, I kind of wish these people only had thin desires.
>The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.
I expected the author to have language learning as an example, but they did not include it. I wonder where Duolingo fits in this, I see a new language learning app every week.
It feels like someone trying to kick the starter on a bike, but it won’t start.
This is a core concept of Buddhism, called tanha, and has been contemplated for a couple thousand years at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%E1%B9%87h%C4%81
Tanha is about wholesome and unwholesome desires, ie those that lead to or dont lead to liberation. Its not about desires that do or do not change you, as this article is categorizing it.
Do wholesome desires, like practicing the dharma, not change you? Do unwholesome desires, like staying stuck in your addictions, not trap you?
My point is that desire is something that is deeply explored in all three major schools of Buddhism. In the Vajrayana to the point that we take the most difficult of our base desires as paths of practice, like seen in karmamudra.
One could argue that staying in one place unchanged, in a space barred with thin desires, is akin to being imprisoned. And that following newly cultivated thick desires out of one’s thin prison sounds just like liberation to me.
This also sounds like one of the core themes of Augustinian philosophy. The idea of the "restless heart" in that we are never satisfied with earthly wants and desires.
Everything new is old :)
Try having an original thought after 110 billion humans have already lived entire lives thinking.
Doesn’t “tanha” mean “by yourself” in Hindi?
I don't speak Hindi unfortunately, but it's definitely on my list of languages to study (after Bangla)!
It looks like the Hindi tanha comes from Classical Persian [1], whereas the Pali tanha comes from Sanskrit [2]
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%B9%E...
[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ta%E1%B9%87h%C4%81
Interesting. Looked fornthe simple English version, alas.
Desires to consume (create) are thin (thick).
The cure for Dementors isn't chocolate, it's becoming a tiny god of creation. Meaning is in making.True to an extent. But why would you want to create (e.g.) a movie if you don't think watching movies is worthwhile in and of itself? You're putting effort into creating something that you don't think is truly valuable. To a person with this mindset, the desire to create is cynical—they're only making movies in pursuit of extrinsic rewards such as money, fame, or success. If watching movies is thin to them, then making movies is also thin.
Conversely, an authentic filmmaker is someone who values movies in and of themselves; therefore, the authentic desire to create a movie must be downstream of a passion for watching movies. I don't think you'll find many artistically inclined filmmakers who would denigrate the act of watching movies as "thin." It's the thickness they feel in the experience of watching movies which inspired them to devote themselves to making movies in the first place.
The article's definition: "A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it."
This definition is compatible with watching some films and not others. I think Alan Watts said something like that his job was that you no longer needed him. This implies that consuming his work would be thick until it wouldn't.
I think, perhaps because the creation is the goal in itself, not the consumption by others. Because it is the change/improvement that the author mentions that we seek.
I think that leans toward a mistaken veneration of productivity. You don't have to make something to enrich your life. It's also valuable to connect with the things other people make, or with the world around you.
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.
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.
I think there's thin consumption and thick. Reality TV and YouTube/Tik-tok shorts being thin. Slow cinema or a documentary being thick. One is primarily entertainment that is easy to digest and acts more as a way to fill the time and quiet thoughts. The other requires deep engagement and confrontation with new ideas and a build up of contemplation through deep prolonged focus.
The first mode of consumption is understandably popular given the amount of noise in the world that distracts us. So many people are trapped in dopamine holes. It's mental withdrawal to try to attempt a sudden switch to thick consumption. They are so opposite of each other.
I can attest that it helps, if I couldn't be creative on a daily basis I'd be completely depressed instead of just moody and melancholic.
I wrote this following a similar line of thought, but with the root problem being a collective action problem around community rather than an internal psychological tradeoff between short and long term. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-dead-weight-lo...
I certainly think hijacking our short term rewards is a big part of it, but in addition, that hijacking prevents people from putting in the effort that make collective alternatives competitive.
Halfway the this post, I realized checking the HN front page was merely a thin desire – so I'm off to read a book. Farewell!
Like relationships I don't think it's either/or but rather prioritize. Make the book a priority, and make sure you do it, then go ahead and read/comment on HN. The extra knowledge/perspectives/experiences will make your contributions more valuable for everyone.
Just thought this as i glanced your post. See you later!
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.
jokes on you I read this and am replying. But yeah it is an unhealthy way to scratch the itch.
Very nicely written. I've been slowly removing thin desires from my life. It's hard to do at first, but what I've noticed is once I am free from them, I do not miss them at all. Almost like I was under a spell.
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.
I agree, I would define those *thin desires" as whatever I'm engaging in a lot automatically, but if I were to pause and ask myself "do I really want to do this? Is this beneficial to me or am I being exploited?", part of me would say no. My "thin desires" might not be someone else's. We each have to take the time to ask ourselves these questions in order to figure it out.
What are some examples of thin desires you've removed?
I would watch YouTube for an hour before bed. It got to the point where I needed it to fall asleep, usually with it playing in the background.
Replaced it with reading books and now I just read until I'm sleep enough, usually when I realize I have to reread sentences repeatedly.
After about a week I had no desire to scroll my YouTube feed for videos. I didn't block YouTube or anything, I still watch videos from creators I follow, but I no longer instinctively reach for it to pass time.
Thanks for sharing, that's something I can probably draw some inspiration from. I never really thought about how often I reach to youtube to kill time, including putting something on when heading to sleep.
I've slowly pushed away the classic attention manipulating applications -- basically anything that will find new content to keep you engaged. Tiktok feels like the maximalist example, but other similar apps, social media text feeds, and parts of Youtube (though, I've so aggressively tuned Youtube that it has a very limited content base to show me.)
TV isn't for TV's sake; it's for relaxing a little with someone I care about.
I can read longer form news articles and not need to stay abreast of what's happening daily.
I've found that I'll eventually grow bored and annoyed with things meant to steal attention, at which point I'll excise them from my life. It just might take an unfortunate while to get there.
I second this. Almost like I was under a spell.
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 getting at either, but I just knew I hadd to add wholesome activities that were not part of my life into my life and I kinda built this app for myself (initially for a hackathon) and just shared it with friends.
Hopefully it's useful to someone else on here (nasty self promotion): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sidequests-hq/id6751321255
It bothered me that you called your self promotion nasty. Not sure why. You made something, i see no harm in sharing it.
Thick hustle.
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".
Us software engineers assume value comes from serving more people, faster, with less friction. But many of the things that actually make life feel coherent such as learning a craft, maintaining friendships and building tools for one person, only work because they’re slow and specific.
Tech doesn't give us the wrong desires but the easier versions of the right ones, and those end up hollow.
> The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. > We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.
You're describing consumer manipulation not an actual attribute of population.
> And so the infrastructure for thick desires has been gradually dismantled.
You're describing the consequences of inflation and manipulated market outcomes not actual desires of participants.
> The thick life doesn't scale.
This is almost entirely why we invented cities and society and put up with their consequences in our lives.
> So: bake bread.
So: stop making me pay taxes.
Maybe it's just me. I get easily irritated when I detect casual misanthropy dressed up as a "think piece."
This is the concept of hungry ghost from buddhism: https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhism/hungry-ghosts/
I’ve heard of “Idiot wisdom” and “wise wisdom”.
Idiot wisdom - is generic platitudes that sound nice, but aren’t actionable.
Wise wisdom- might not always sound nice, but is actionable.
My ego likes this article, if I believe that I pursue thick desires.
But some part of me thinks (and perhaps due to the written style ). That this is idiot wisdom.
Another commenter mentioned it ties to Tanha in Buddhism.
I don’t know. But- off to read some Shunryu Suzuki….
Most definitely idiot wisdom. All the comments here lauding it, are pointing out first how they feel good about the text. That it resonates, that they like it. The importance of the content was that they felt good reading, not that they learned something.
What would be an example of "Wise wisdom"?
I'm reminded of this video on the legal definition of chicken broth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar7zddMDwcI
>Noah has a good point. He says they're not making soup. They're making savory taste solutions.
Tastes like chicken, but has virtually no actual substance. Same idea.
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 isolated. So we try to fill that void with things that don't require effort like buying crap we don't need on Amazon and chasing likes on social media. We aren't happy so we try to be busy so we don't notice so much.
We saw a bit of a teeny correction during covid when people starting going outdoors and baking bread and cooking home cooked meals. But now everyone is back to working from home in their pajamas and tell themselves how happy they are with all the time they save not driving but skip over the lack of adult interaction (both good and bad).
But the problem is easily solved for each of us by things as simple as hobbies and volunteering and organizations (church, civic, etc.) Personally, I design board games and have friends over to test them and go to board game conferences. We've built a group that still test and communicate online but are happiest when we get to hang out and play games and go for dinner. There is no shortage of these opportunities but you have to get off the couch and join in. It is a place where you will make new friends and find happiness but you have to decide it is worth it.
>> 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.
In my experience, it is mostly like 3-5 very close friends and about a dozen "good" friends. One thing I hear from so many people is the mindset of "well, they didn't call me back" and turn it into score keeping. Not all relationships are going to be equitable but they all require investment or they wither.
Completely agree! The moment after leaving an event/party/service I always feel a greater sense of purpose, contentness, or at the very least, less pessimistic about the state of the world
Liked reading this piece.
Thin Desires, Shallow work, Chasing Glitter, Mindless optimization on result, Non virtuous, Dopamine chasing. All are but the same. Burnout is our body's response to it. Philosophers have said this for thousands of years that they all lead to anything but happiness.
“Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” T.S. Eliot
I've always liked this song from the Cure, we're hedonists on a treadmill:
I'm always wanting more, anything I haven't got Everything I want it all, and I just can't stop Planning all my days away but never finding ways to stay Or ever feel enough today, tomorrow must be more Drink, more dreams, more bed, more drugs More lust, more lies, more head, more love Fear more fun, more pain, more flesh More stars, more smiles, more colors, more sex
But however hard I want I know deep down inside I'll never really get more hope Or any more time Any more time Any more time
I want the sun to fall in, I want lightning and thunder Blood instead of rain, I want the world to make me wonder I want to walk on water, take a trip to the moon Give me all this, give me it soon More drink, more dreams, more drugs More lust, more lies, more love
But however hard I want I know deep down inside I'll never really get more hope Or any more time Any more time Any more time Any more time
I'm reminded of the song Small Bill$ by Regina Spektor:
His destiny was just too big to spend / So he broke it into smaller bills and change
By the time he'd try to buy the things he needed / He had spent it all on loosies and weed and
He had spent it all on chips and Coca-Cola / He had spent it all on chocolate and vanilla
He had spent it all and didn't even feel it / He had spent it all and didn't even feel it
This post really resonated with me, and some lack of fulfilment I've been working through lately. It seems a lot of commenters felt the need to bikeshed it instead of just trying to understand the point being made.
I send postcards when I travel. I love doing it.
https://findingfavorites.podbean.com/e/ry-jones-postcards/
I'm an Engineering Manager. I print out certificates for people on (and beyond) my teams, referencing something they accomplished (big or small), add one of the "boy scout badges" I bought in bulk from AliExpress (and then retroactively created & reference a set of values based on the iconography) and mail out "Engineering Merit Badges" to our remote employees. Maybe a few think it's dumb but the vast majority love it. The collector-types try to earn the entire set (I made one of the badges really hard to get because of this), while physically getting mail really seems to resonate with anyone under 35. A few people more distant from my teams (i.e. different departments) DID seems supsicious at first when I asked for their home address, and my boss wondered how I spent several hundred dollars in postage last year, but I try and send out at least a dozen a month while still keeping them meaningful. It's actually a bit of work (of course I wrote software to help manage and create everything) but I love it too.
One my convoys from Tallinn to Kyiv, I make little dog tags https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYSqxFiEeps and coins to hand out to drivers and staff. For work, I used to make poker chips: https://github.com/ryjones/recognition/blob/main/chips.md and coins: https://github.com/ryjones/recognition/blob/main/coins.md . When we did coins, I would custom engrave them for TSC/TOC/TAC members and people in the community I knew I would meet at events. https://youtu.be/0LXsauB5Qao
See also gift boxes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21uGljlJVoI
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.
When I come across this sort of writing I skip it. If the writer can't be bothered to organise their ideas I won't do it for them. I find that writing style oddly grating.
In a post about how thin, superficial (and yes, lazy) things are destroying the value of your life, sigh...
Maybe it will reach the people most in need of it that way
I've only ever seen this style as a satire of hustle bros. So I assume it must be a real thing originally.
when you write like this
people think it's more profound
than it really is
the last haiku line
should be about nature, so:
flies are really gross.
for what it is worth
sometimes it does seem to work
your mileage may vary
Thin desires are mental snacking. Thick desires are a full meal.
I find it hard because thick desires require a lot more activation energy before it becomes pleasant.
This reminds me of the definiton by Lionel Robbins:
Or the simpler version I remember:Excellent piece, easy to read and I agree on most until this part:
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.I don't see governance and politics as being the primary movers in what I seek out.
My experience is more: I find myself spinning my tires watching yet another youtube video instead of calmly deciding on a worthy investment of a deep pursuit.
No government has forced that on me, that's mostly a corporate entity and platform making (automated, ML mediated) decisions on what I should consume. Of course governments are involved when deciding what I shouldn't be exposed to, but that's a different matter.
We all have a limited reserve of energy, of attention and willpower. When you spend it on shallow desires, you have expended it and tacitly made a choice to not invest in a more meaningful path. If I were to summarize the time I've spent sitting on my ass watching YouTube the last N years, it's really quite depressing (even if it does sometimes provide some very real value).
Everything is about X, because I can redefine X to mean anything.
“Circling this territory for decades.” Try millennia. The world is filled with hungry ghosts. Ask a Buddhist.
Yes, and… The thin is nowadays engineered to be addictive, so weaning off of it may be hard. Going cold turkey during a vacation or completely ditching devices for a while may help.
Yes, but… The call to hipsterdom (doing something precisely because it doesn’t scale) may not be necessary - if a person has successfully weened themselves of the pacifier of cheap dopamine they should use all of that spare brain power to create things other people who are still addicted can use to get out of the quicksand of social media. Or to make things that will help the world - scaling is up to the creator. No merit to sealing off away from the world. Improve the world.
Well written, this has given a concrete description to a vague notion that has been in my mind for a while
The author, I think, would label the desire for sugary drinks as a thin desire. However, that desire tends towards unfavorable consequences: mood swings, poor dental hygiene, weight gain. Thus it undermines one's body. This "changes you" -- for the worse, yielding a contradiction. If the preceding logical analysis is sound, the article's terms or argument are flawed.
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.
I appreciate your clarity, thanks.
There is something really interesting about people (which I think I'm borrowing from Atomic Habits by James Clear): Every time you take an action in service of a goal, it helps prove to yourself, a little at a time, that part of your identity involves pursuing that goal. For example, each time I spew out a journal entry or cobble together a blog post, it reinforces the belief "I am a writer."
With this in mind, it suggests a theory: doing the thing itself changes you. After some suitable time delay, perhaps. (This is how exercise adaptation works at least.)
But connecting this together still feels muddled. What is the difference between doing the thing and the consequences of doing the thing? The difference feels ... undefined? Maybe even arbitrary? All of this triggers my "inconsistency detectors" suggesting more thinking needs to be done.
Maybe the difference is that some actions provide certain emotional states while we're doing them: satisfaction, flow, meaning -- and this is what people mean by the first part ("doing the thing"). Maybe we can define consequences as the things that happen after we stop acting. Like the royalty checks that hypothetically will clog up my mailbox one day.
I think there are several dimensions.
There's the motivation, the pursuit, and the achievement, and the consequences of each. I think it's fairly easy to tease apart the motivation and the pursuit, but you're focusing on a much more nuanced aspect of the action and its consequences. These really are tied strongly, but worth addressing individually.
As you point out, some actions are motivated and pursued because of the consequences of the achievement (writing a book or song, founding a company, being elected president). But others are intrinsically rewarding, which is usually shorter term.
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".
My thick desire is unfortunate a 40h grind to pay bills.
If i would have money tomorrow, i would know immediadly what i would do: Slowly and steadily renovate a old house, building a park/garden, having greenhouses and doing pottery.
Having a workshop and doing everything thick.
I hope i can achieve this before i'm 45 because i have the slight worry, that either AI will take over and my dreams break or i'm to old/fragile/broken to enjoy that.
A useful angle: does doing this thing make me more able to enjoy it over time (eg by increasing the subtlety and dimensionality of perception), or less able to enjoy it over time (eg by desensitization)?
This is the practical reason to favor “thick desires” over thin ones: they slope upward over time.
Great piece!
Made me reflect on my own persuasion of thin desires and my struggle to control them.
It also made me see that my hobbies and my career are actually about following my thick desires. I'm in tech, yes. But I chose, among all the possibilities, to be an analog circuit designer. The analog part is what makes it a long hard skill to master, and my day job feels like constant learning from my interactions woth the world. I can't imagine doing anything which isn't interacting with the actual physical world!
Nice to see that some people still feel the difference. I’m not sure whether the next generations will experience it as strongly, having grown up with much thinner lives. In my experience, deeper desires tend to emerge outside the comfort zone — a place fewer and fewer people seem willing to enter today.
Thick and thin in both cases, without purpose, is still hedonistic.
Learning calculus sounds more magnanimous than checking notifications, but what's the purpose? She says you're better off after a year, but in what way?
What if the person checking notifications is waiting on a delivery for a soup kitchen. and the person learning calculus just wants to brag about it or talk down to others because of their credentials?
The purpose matters more. You have to have a purpose. Both "thin" and "thick" desires can be very meaningful with purpose. Even desiring a donut with a lonely neighbor can be better than a year learning calculus -- with the right purpose.
The issue with her approach is it assumes virtue in collecting diplomas (or activities that lead to them) : learning math, languages , getting a masters. It's still feeding the ego using this thick/thin framework.
But if you don't have a purpose, that's just as vain as showing off your car or your watch. It's just another embellishment.
I appreciated the post, this is just not correct thought if you've heard about Open source.
"The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to justify its existence."
Maybe she points to /tech industry/ and not /software/
Where is this ”economy of software” which is not part of the ”tech industry”?
What’s the point of this article — everyone knows desiring heroin is different from wanting to become an Olympic swimmer.
Is reading HN a thick or thin desire? If you say thin: I say, what if today I find an article about thick and thin desires that changes me?
Ironically, consuming essays about “thin desires” often becomes a thin desire itself.
Reminds me of what Frithjof Bergmann called our "poverty of desire" in his (excellent) book: New Work New Culture: Work We Want and a Culture that Strengthens Us
I like this piece. Doing hard things for the simple reason that they're hard is good for the psyche. I truly believe that.
Since the article mentioned enjoyment of calculus,
Anyone got content suggestions or a syllabus I can use to learn to "enjoy" calculus?
I understand the basics, what it is for, chain rule, power rule, product rule... but still, no joy.
Get a motorcycle. Learn to ride it. Learn to fix it. Obtain joy.
Always fun when geeks discover basic philosphical concepts like it's a new thing and not something greeks nailed 2000 years ago.
But its on substack.. so its way different.
And.
Its worded,
Like This.
#Deep
> Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.
Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.
It feels weird how after a very good explanation of why thick desires are in the end more rewarding, she focuses on the (ostensible) negatives here, like some sort of obligatory tax or payment that you're evading by focusing on "thin" desire.
Formulated like this, the obvious retort would be "yeah, so what? - why should I bother with obligation and vulnerability if I can have the same rewards without them?"
Of course everyone who has 100 online friends but no one to go to a party with knows why this is bullshit - but it's not following from this paragraph.
Maybe a better way would be to explain that the "negatives" are in fact positives: e.g. The obligation is what lets one build upon a friendship - both for you and your friends - but you do have to explain it, you can't just take it for granted.
So hard drugs are a thick desire?
After all who says change is always a good thing? When you are doing well maybe it's better to stick to thin desires?
A post destined to be a self-help bestseller. I look forward to the If Books Could Kill episode.
It comes down to dopamine and if there was friction involved to get that dopamine.
"The desire to master a craft, to read slowly, [...]"
By the time I got to that part my reading had degraded to mere skimming -
a perfectly placed reminder :-)
Here's another angle on the issue: As humans, we evolved these useful litte machines of desire.
Desires to feed, mate, socialize attend and get attended to. All of those came about because they had some utility, a purpose.
Over time we found ways to exploit those machines using substitutes.
- Sweets are a substitute for nourishing food.
- Porn feeds on our desire to mate.
- Social media overloads the fine-tuned machine meant to orient us in the tribe.
I suspect a big part of capitalism is creating ever more efficient and subtle ways to highjack these aspects of our humanity on a grand scale.
Damn.
It was amusing to see a 'Sign Up' prompt right as the blog ended.
Why the short paragraphs?
They are hard to read.
See: this post.
reads like an edgy high-schooler jerking off at how much better they are than everyone else.
Its like reading Rick Rubin from a loser whose opinions I don't value at all.
>From the perspective of a frictionless global marketplace, all of this is pure inefficiency.
The frictionless traps you in an infinite web of bullshit. We need more friction at this point, not less.
A frictionless todo app affords cognitive bloat.
A frictionless communication medium affords noise.
Friction is natural and healthy and we heave deleted it.
Thin desires are just weak wills.
This is an interesting piece, and it resonates with me. I remember when Guitar Hero came out and I shook my head at all the kids spending hours mastering it instead of just picking up a guitar and practicing.
But maybe our dissatisfaction isn't about thin vs. thick desires, maybe it's that we're exposed to a world (via the internet/social media) in which everyone is more successful than us. Even/especially on Hacker News, we're hit over the head with all the YC companies raising money, hiring A-players, releasing world-changing products.
When the world makes you feel like a slacker, it's no wonder we value thick desires. They become the lifeline to get out of our hole. If only I knew calculus, I could work for SpaceX and launch rockets. If only I understood gradient-descent, I could get hired by an AI company. If only I took the time to bake my own bread, maybe I wouldn't feel like such a loser.
This is a relatively new phenomenon, I think. Growing up in the 80s, before the internet, we could only compare ourselves to our friends and classmates. With such a small pool of people, we could always stand out at something. Maybe we were in the top three at basketball, or maybe we always got As in history, or maybe we were good at making girls laugh. And even if there was nothing special about us, it didn't matter: there was nothing special about anyone! We were happy to pursue thin desires because we didn't need to be more than we were. If we worked hard, it was to earn more money. If we practiced an instrument, it was because we enjoyed it. No one ever worried about "what it all means". There's a reason we called such philosophical musings "sophomoric".
And if you think about it, there's nothing special about "thick desires" either. Yes, learning how to play piano changes us. But so what? Why do want to be different? Is it to stand out? Is it to impress others? Is it to be able to say, "I can play piano"? Maybe they are all thin desires. Maybe it's all just a way to pass the time. Is learning about all the Impressionists really any different than memorizing the fire-type Pokemons?
I think having kids fundamentally changed my brain. Once you have kids and get exposed to the firehose of emotions they elicit, everything else becomes shallow. There is no 3 Michelin Star meal, no trek through the rainforest, no mastery of unusual skills that brings me as much pleasure as making my daughter laugh.
We used to know that. We used to know what it meant to live a good life. But now it's a mystery.
I don't know who this Joan is, but this blog is a gold mine.
This other post on the infantilization of failure is very well-put:
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/uh-oh-the-infantilization-of-...
2.5/10
>A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.
>A thin desire is one that doesn't.
TL;DR
Thanks OP for enriching my thin vocabulary today, pun intended.
Philosophy is so 2024.
This article feels judgmental, off-putting, and condescending to me.
It is especially so because it chooses real examples to put down.
Why is the author’s philosophy the arbiter of what we are allowed to enjoy? Why is basic shallow pleasure in life looked down upon?
It even feels condescending to people who have actual serious needs like hunger and disease who may turn to some of these “vices” for an escape. Meanwhile, thick desires are available for those privileged with free time, energy, and money.
By the end of the article I almost felt like the author was trying to evangelize a religion to me, in a really icky way.
There’s nothing especially novel in here but she says it beautifully and succinctly.
Has no one considered the possibility that those with the intent of learning new things still do learn, many times because of technology? Sure, there are millions who doomscroll pointlessly, but the solution to that is simple: put down the phone and read a book.
Moreover, the fact that I now have access to international publications & journals, as well as the ability to learn foreign languages literally at my fingertips, does not somehow deplete my human needs, any more than reading a newspaper depleted the need to read long-form books did a century ago.
Coffee is for closers
Terrific piece. Love her writing, recommend following her RSS.
HN, why downvote that, you’re just fucking weird sometimes
Imperfections aside, the article is hitting on something quite real. If only we had been studying the received wisdom of the ages instead of warping it into dismissible caricatures and smearing it with black legends, we would have learned about things like virtue and natural law. We would have understood the nature of sin and immorality, and conversely, the moral and the good life. We would have looked at the vacuous and empty temptations of "the world" with contempt and disdain, as vain things beneath human dignity.
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.
What the fuck is this LinkedIn tier garbage. God help us.
From "How to know what you really want" by Luke Burgis [1]:
> There are two kinds of desire, thin and thick. Thick desires are like layers of rock that have been built up throughout the course of our lives. These are desires that can be shaped and cultivated through models like our parents and people that we admire as children. But at some level, they’re related to the core of who we are. They can be related to perennial human truths: beauty, goodness, human dignity.
> Thin desires are highly mimetic (imitative) and ephemeral desires. They’re the things that can be here today, gone tomorrow. Thin desires are subject to the winds of mimetic change, because they’re not rooted in a layer of ourselves that’s been built up over time. They are like a layer of leaves that’s sitting on top of layers of rock. Those thin desires are blown away with a light gust of wind. A new model comes into our life; the old desires are gone. All of a sudden we want something else.
Comparing the above conceptualizations with the ones offered by Westenberg (OP) could consume hundreds or thousands of words -- more than I want to spend at the moment -- but I will say this: both sets feel wrong, by which I mean they trigger my early warning detectors.
I'm not asking anyone else to trust my intuition. But you should trust yours. Intuition is usually a good starting point, at least.
With intuition alone -- without writing a full analysis -- we can see the above quoted explanations/definitions are highly complected. [2] Also, in my view, the offered metaphors don't carve reality at the joints. [3]
When I put ~20 minutes of concentrated thinking into the problem, here are some of the constituent parts of "desire" that I can unpack. (These are only fleetingly glossed over in the article.) In no particular order, to what degree are desires:
This is complex!Over-simplication can be a disservice. Adding another metaphor reminds me of the "N+1 standards" problem. [4] Maybe the new metaphor helps, maybe not. Either way, now we have more to sift through.
[1]: https://bigthink.com/series/explain-it-like-im-smart/mimetic...
[2]: https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
[3]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/303819/what-do-t...
[4]: https://xkcd.com/927/
The irony is thick here. The author's railing against scalable thin desires... by writing a scalable viral essay that delivers the neurological reward of "deep insight".
Thanks for this.
Reads like AI slop.
Everything is slop now.
This is the second time I'm finding out Joan's moved her RSS feed without announcing it...
I’ve noticed a lot of changes on the site recently, which I believe is powered by Ghost which makes messing around with feed links a more advanced (for lack of a better word) tweak than many platforms as you download/upload a routes file. I’m a 10+ year developer and have found myself chasing route changes in Ghost with trial and error.
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Did you read the article? its definitely not bs.
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.
I think after nearly 19 years it’s pretty well settled that downvoting of stories won’t be happening :)
The principle is that we don’t want a battle between upvotes and downvotes to determine rank, because that would set the wrong incentives (e.g coordinated downvoting of stories to help a particular story move up the rankings).
The guidelines include what is on-topic/off-topic, and the most significant criterion is whether a story gratifies intellectual curiosity.
If you earnestly feel that it doesn’t, then it’s fine to flag it as being off-topic. Otherwise it’s just not to your taste, in which case hit “hide” and upvote stories you do like.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373801
Sigh. I get it. I just don’t agree with it but fair point.
Sure. Remember I have to read this stuff all day ;)
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).
> 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.