Thin Desires Are Eating Life

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Did you read the article? its definitely not bs.

Everything new is old :)

Doesn’t “tanha” mean “by yourself” in Hindi?

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.

Interesting. Looked fornthe simple English version, alas.

[delayed]

What are some examples of thin desires you've removed?

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".

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.

I second this. Almost like I was under a spell.

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.

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.

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".

>> 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.

I feel like framing all problems as stemming from people being couch-sitting, pajama-wearing, lazy-asses is a bit of a thin perspective :).

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

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

Just thought this as i glanced your post. See you later!

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.

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".

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.

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.

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 work sentence, it somehow (sadly) makes sense.

when you write like this

people think it's more profound

than it really is

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).

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 might find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up%C4%81d%C4%81na and https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/bhavatanha

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

Im just learning this is a thing, tell me more, how long do you leave it in there? Any ratio's you use?

> 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 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.

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 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, tasting and with a 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.

It's basically the sort of rot writing that proliferates on linkedin

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.

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.

Also the ideas are just reframing the old maxim of "its not the destination, its the journey".

I think it makes sense to write like this if you're intended audience is already used to consuming "thin" desire media.

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.

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.

  The thick life doesn't scale.

  That's the whole point.

  So: bake bread.

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.

Still.... the message has value.

Your need to quip about the article's presentation instead of its meaning is a thin desire.

I quite like that this is a more unique writing style and in fact would encourage people to write "unusually".

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.

"Thin Paragraphs" could be a nice name for the style (I'm guilty of the same though, recently)

Possibly AI-generated?

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 almost like anti-poetry.

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.

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.

I immediately stopped reading after I saw the format. Absolutely hate this linkedin style 'everything is deep' posting. It's crap

>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.

It's like some kind of meta writing, the writing style is proving what it's talking about.

Is the message deep and important or was the article attempting to manipulate you into thinking it is?

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.