205 lines
6.8 KiB
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205 lines
6.8 KiB
Plaintext
[1] Westenberg.
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15 Dec 2025 4 min read
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Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
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Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life
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Photo by [15]Alexis Fauvet / [16]Unsplash
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The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger.
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We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.
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We're hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies.
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We're hungry and we don't have words to articulate why.
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We're hungry, and we're lacking and we're wanting.
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We are living with a near-universal thin desire: wanting something that cannot
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actually be gotten, that we can't define, from a source that has no interest in
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providing it.
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The distinction between thick and thin desires isn't original to me.
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Philosophers have been circling this territory for decades, from Charles
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Taylor's work on frameworks of meaning to Agnes Callard's more recent writing
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on aspiration.
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But the version I find most useful is simple:
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A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it.
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A thin desire is one that doesn't.
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The desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications
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are both real desires, and both produce (to a degree) real feelings of
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satisfaction when fulfilled.
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But the person who spends a year learning calculus becomes someone different,
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someone who can see patterns in the world that were previously invisible, who
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has expanded the range of things they're capable of caring about, who has Been
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Through It.
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The person who checks their notifications is, afterward, exactly the same
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person who wanted to check their notifications five minutes ago.
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The thin desire reproduces itself without remainder.
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The thick desire transforms its host.
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I want to be careful here because this is a claim that can easily slide into
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unfalsifiable grumpiness about Kids These Days.
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But there's a version of it that I think is both true and important.
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The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick
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desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then
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deliver that reward without the rest of the package.
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Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations
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of actual friendship.
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Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of
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partnership.
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Productivity apps give you the feeling of accomplishment without anything being
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accomplished.
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In each case, the thin version is easier to deliver at scale, easier to
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monetize, and easier to make addictive.
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The result is a diet of pure sensation.
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And none of it seems to be making anyone happier.
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The surveys all point the same direction: rising anxiety, rising depression,
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rising rates of loneliness even as we've never been more connected.
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How could this be, when we've gotten so good at giving people what they want?
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Maybe because we've gotten good at giving people what they want in a way that
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prevents them from wanting anything worth having.
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Thick desires are inconvenient.
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They take years to cultivate and can't be satisfied on demand.
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The desire to master a craft, to read slowly, to be embedded in a genuine
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community, to understand your place in some tradition larger than yourself:
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these desires are effortful to acquire and impossible to fully gratify.
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They embed you in webs of obligation and reciprocity.
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They make you dependent on specific people and places.
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From the perspective of a frictionless global marketplace, all of this is pure
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inefficiency.
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And so the infrastructure for thick desires has been gradually dismantled.
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The workshops closed, the congregations thinned, the apprenticeships
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disappeared, the front porches gave way to backyard decks and studio apartments
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and the coveted Micro Homes where you could be alone with your devices.
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Meanwhile the infrastructure for thin desires became essentially inescapable.
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It's in your pocket right now.
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Grand programs to Rebuild Community or Restore Meaning seem to founder on the
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same logic they're trying to escape.
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The thick life doesn't scale.
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That's the whole point.
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So: bake bread.
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The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.
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The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.
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You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing
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something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process
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you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been
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methodically stripping away.
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Write a letter, by hand, on paper.
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Send it through the mail.
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The letter will take days to arrive and you won't be able to unsend it or edit
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it or track whether it was opened.
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You're creating a communication that exists outside the logic of engagement
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metrics, a small artifact that refuses to be optimized.
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Code a tool for exactly one person.
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Solve your friend's specific problem with their specific workflow.
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Build something that will never scale, never be monetized, never attract users.
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The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to
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justify its existence.
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Making something for an audience of one is a beautiful heresy.
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None of this will reverse the great thinning.
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But I've started to suspect that the thick life might be worth pursuing anyway,
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on its own terms, without needing to become a movement.
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The person who bakes bread isn't trying to fix the world. They're not making
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any attempt to either dent or undent the universe.
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They're trying to spend a Sunday afternoon in a way that doesn't leave them
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feeling emptied out.
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They're remembering, one loaf at a time, what it feels like to want something
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that's actually worth wanting.
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[17]
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Published by:
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[18] JA Westenberg
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[19]
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Westenberg. © 2026
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References:
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[1] https://www.joanwestenberg.com/
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[18] https://www.joanwestenberg.com/author/jawestenberg/
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[19] https://www.joanwestenberg.com/uh-oh-the-infantilization-of-failure/
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