Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life — Joan Westenberg

The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger. 

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

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

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

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

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.

The distinction between thick and thin desires isn't original to me.

Philosophers have been circling this territory for decades, from Charles Taylor's work on frameworks of meaning to Agnes Callard's more recent writing on aspiration.

But the version I find most useful is simple:

A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.

A thin desire is one that doesn't.

The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of satisfaction when fulfilled.

But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different, someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been Through It.

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

The thin desire reproduces itself without remainder.

The thick desire transforms its host.

I want to be careful here because this is a claim that can easily slide into unfalsifiable grumpiness about Kids These Days.

But there's a version of it that I think is both true and important.

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.

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.

Productivity apps give you the feeling of accomplishment without anything being accomplished.

In each case, the thin version is easier to deliver at scale, easier to monetize, and easier to make addictive.

The result is a diet of pure sensation.

And none of it seems to be making anyone happier.

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.

Thick desires are inconvenient.

They take years to cultivate and can't be satisfied on demand.

The desire to master a craft, to read slowly, to be embedded in a genuine community, to understand your place in some tradition larger than yourself: these desires are effortful to acquire and impossible to fully gratify.

They embed you in webs of obligation and reciprocity.

They make you dependent on specific people and places.

From the perspective of a frictionless global marketplace, all of this is pure inefficiency.

And so the infrastructure for thick desires has been gradually dismantled.

The workshops closed, the congregations thinned, the apprenticeships disappeared, the front porches gave way to backyard decks and studio apartments and the coveted Micro Homes where you could be alone with your devices.

Meanwhile the infrastructure for thin desires became essentially inescapable.

It's in your pocket right now.

Grand programs to Rebuild Community or Restore Meaning seem to founder on the same logic they're trying to escape.

The thick life doesn't scale.

That's the whole point.

So: bake bread.

The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.

The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.

You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away.

Write a letter, by hand, on paper.

Send it through the mail.

The letter will take days to arrive and you won't be able to unsend it or edit it or track whether it was opened.

You're creating a communication that exists outside the logic of engagement metrics, a small artifact that refuses to be optimized.

Code a tool for exactly one person.

Solve your friend's specific problem with their specific workflow.

Build something that will never scale, never be monetized, never attract users.

The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to justify its existence.

Making something for an audience of one is a beautiful heresy.

None of this will reverse the great thinning.

But I've started to suspect that the thick life might be worth pursuing anyway, on its own terms, without needing to become a movement.

The person who bakes bread isn't trying to fix the world. They're not making any attempt to either dent or undent the universe.

They're trying to spend a Sunday afternoon in a way that doesn't leave them feeling emptied out.

They're remembering, one loaf at a time, what it feels like to want something that's actually worth wanting.

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More from Joan Westenberg here.

[Photo at top by Alexis Fauvet]