Thin Desires Are Eating Life
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The concept of "thin desires" is sparking a lively debate, with many commenters resonating with the idea that these fleeting, often unconscious longings can be all-consuming. Some are drawing parallels with Buddhist notions of "hungry ghosts," while others are pushing back against what they see as pop psychology jargon. As the discussion unfolds, it's clear that people are grappling with the nuances of desire and its impact on our lives, with some calling for more thoughtful critique and others simply expressing gratitude for the thought-provoking article. Amidst the varied reactions, a consensus emerges that the topic is worth exploring, even if the tone and language used by some commenters are sparking disagreement.
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Dec 15, 2025 at 7:50 PM EST
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
As it stands I have literally 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).
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 just hit “hide” and upvote stories you do like.
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373801
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
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 practices, like seen in karmamudra.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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 even this is rather vague. I can't sit down and write a blog post without also "getting the benefits" of doing that. They are deeply coupled. This coupling and ambiguity triggers my "BS detectors" making my think I am not using sensible, consistent language to make sense of this well.
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.
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.
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
https://findingfavorites.podbean.com/e/ry-jones-postcards/
See also gift boxes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21uGljlJVoI
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
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.
people think it's more profound
than it really is
should be about nature, so:
flies are really gross.
sometimes it does seem to work
your mileage may vary
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).
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).
Says someone who lectures on how LLMs worked two years ago.
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.
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 ...
Obviously a model that hallucinates 26% of the time on arbitrary queries would be of no interest to anyone outside a research environment, so regardless of where the real story is found, it's safe to say it's in there *somewhere. It's not my job to look for it.
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
> 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 is just as flavorful. Definitely not indifferent to my optimization.
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.
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.
"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.
“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 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.
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.
But I think optimising yourself, or the world, hopefully in a positive way, is one of the thickest things you can do.
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.
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.
Pretty sure the first rule of writing on the internet is ignore the comments section
CMSs are done!
Let that sink in!
Some dude trew away his CMS and vibe codes some markdown based static stuff that does the same.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
My reply was prompted by both the substance and style of your comment. :)
Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic.
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.
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."
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...
Perhaps the time has come.
Could you clarify, are you comparing the parent comment to the article?
It breaks up the flow, allowing each statement to be digested individually.
Common form for most comments these days.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
#strawmanning
See, e.g., the end of https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/
More than anything it seems to make sense to read it out loud in a theatrical performance.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
[1]: https://bigthink.com/series/explain-it-like-im-smart/mimetic...
Tech doesn't give us the wrong desires but the easier versions of the right ones, and those end up hollow.
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