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Cultural anorexia: The pursuit of thicker desires in a thinning world

73 points by vitabenes 5y ago

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
<< I often wonder what value there is in attending these things, and then I remember that red meat, properly cooked (medium rare) tastes really good. And that’s the strongest case for veganism I’ve ever heard. I chuckled. Then I hesitated. Is the author suggesting cultural veganism?
andrewclunn 5y ago
One of the often missed features of religions is that of cultural critic and cultivator. A group of people who find works of art that at least don't offend their sensibilities and which align with their didactic goals (child rearing, conversion, etc...) Having an explicit standard for judging art gives a means of determining what is that thick and thin: which pieces of entertainment are just that and which are meant to be shared, reenjoyed, and such. Not endorsing a specific religion or philosophy here, but how is one to aspire to something more meaningful and deeper when they cannot even distinguish what that is?
PaulHoule 5y ago
It’s a class thing isn’t it? Today poor people are fat but kids in rich families get anorexic because it is a way they can control the agenda. (Being ‘thin’ looks like it is mirroring the high-achieving attitude of the parents which makes them unresponsive for the children, but it ultimately creates a crisis which forces attention to be given.)
dwighttk 5y ago
I recommend C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image if this article resonates.
throwaway-m3232 5y ago
When I see someone mention human nature in some blog, I stop reading... Human nature is our species ability to transform nature. A cat, for example, is only doing hunting for immediate consumption. A pet cat is even more limited, just a furrring biological shell, he does not hunt. So when a human is limited in all his potentials, thinking, planning, building, etc to something like a tool on the market, optimized for some task, when human relations limited to objects of consumption... this will reduce human to just one sided being. May be this optimization was once necessary some time ago, since labor productivity was low and this high division of labor allowed optimized production, to feed everyone. At the moment, the labor productivity is so high, that only 10-20% working on something necessary for living. But all work is still done as this optimized instrumental labor, as life depends on it. This is not required anymore. The solution is obvious.. build more not as an optimized one sided "worker", but as an universal human being, as a free time activity. Which politically means that the work day should be reduced.. and this is not easy to implement. But if you really want a social change, this is the way to go.
- headsoup 5y ago
  Does that mean when I read 'human nature is' as the very next words you write I should stop reading your comment? Or are you saying you already understand it better than anyone else writing about it?
  - samtimalsina 5y ago
    I stopped reading as soon as I read ‘I stopped reading’ because generally that means that person has a strong opinion. Oh wait..
    - JackFr 5y ago
      I stopped.
- lettergram 5y ago
  Interesting perspective. Mines a bit different.. I agree specialization has allowed the expansion to other fields. Fields like microcontrollers, biological development, energy research, etc. This is why we see an exponential growth in development of new products and new science. If those same people were required to work in the fields to eat, we wouldn’t see the expansion. ... now ... how does this work In practice? How do we get these efficiency gains in agriculture and other necessary parts of life? Cheap and transportable energy. Fuel, gas, etc. if we want to reduce the work week we need exponentially cheaper energy OR research into new forms of energy production. The later is currently happening and needs to continue to happen. In the mean time, we also need cheap and transportable energy. For reference, I own a farm. I code professionally and as a hobby raise cattle and food. I can do that only because I have the fuel to run a tractor and the wireless internet provided from the satellites. To your point, in a 50-60 hour work week I can produce enough food for 20-30 families for the year AND be a highly skilled tech worker AND raise a family. All because of fuel. Now to my point, in my opinion, specialization has less to do with it. Cheap energy is what allows it. Anyone could raise cattle or grow food with minimal training. But without fuel you can’t produce food for more than a few families per year.
- refurb 5y ago
ianai 5y ago
“In order to break out of the mimetic cycle were going to need to find something worth hoping for. ” See now I think this wasn’t proofread. Not entirely sure this belongs on HN either. Maybe if it was written more coherently?
Tade0 5y ago
The author strikes me as someone not really in touch with popular culture or even global politics. > NATO is an institution that does not, for instance, seem able to withstand the thick desires of Vladimir Putin because it scarcely recognizes that he has any. As a Polish citizen I have to say that the initial reaction to Putin's invasion, aside from shock, was a feeling that this could have been us hadn't we joined NATO over 20 years ago. Still no guarantee that he won't do it(there was a major scare in 2014), but it's obvious that he's picking non-NATO members first. ---- On to another topic: Sex. That paragraph is the most out of touch in my view, because it's deeply rooted in the "war on drugs" mentality. I was of the impression that nowadays vices are seen as more of a symptom of a deeper problem than the problem itself. Or is it just my bubble? Also pornography is not any more the pinnacle of degeneracy the author thinks it to be[0]. With the advent of curated content, platforms with safe, functional payments and performers increasingly securing their rights - especially to privacy, it has become somewhat of a mainstream thing. Case in point: OnlyFans is essentially a household name now. [0] I suppose the author only wrote this because he's unaware of the existence of the furry fandom or anime waifus. Those two phenomenons went where traditional pornography can't and won't go. ---- As for art: most of modern art doesn't happen in galleries or closed meetings with expensive wine and other cartoonishly stereotypical attributes. Modern art is chiefly memes produced and shared by the public for the public - anonymously at that. It even went through a series of trends, each spanning a few years, like the enigmatic, surreal "E" memes, with their characteristic "deep fried" art style. To this day it isn't clear how did this achieve mainstream adoption, what were they actually expressing and for what purpose. There probably wasn't any and people just collectively decided to make it so, which makes this the purest manifestation of art possible.
prewett 5y ago
I was hoping to find out what he thought “thick” and “thin” desires were, but he never bothers defining them. Maybe he talks about them in another essay? But without definitions, this piece is just a catalogue of all the ills of society, justified by some unseen value system. And the title is just wrong, it’s not about the pursuit of thicket desires (whatever those are), it’s about cataloguing society’s pursuit of thin desire (whatever those are). And an advertisement at the end.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  About that ending: At first I thought the article was merely vague and perfunctory, but the advertisement for his $1500 course at the end recast him in the light of a self-help guru. The thing is, he made what I feel could be some good points, but now I wonder whether it's just so non-specific that I'm reading my own anxieties and hopes for meaning into them, like a classic rube. The implication that I need to pay him money to really understand what the hell he's saying makes me wonder if his philosophy might be a little "thin".
- presentation 4y ago
  He talks about it in his book, Wanting
- exo-pla-net 4y ago
  Examples of thin desires: our desire to spectate on petty rivalries + hot takes. >> petty rivalries dominate politics and Hot Take Artists sit in their cages, hungrier than ever while inducing hunger in others. Another thin desire: porn. >> Readers will know by now that I believe pornography is one of the primary scourges on our culture, particularly our youth. Example of thick desire: searching for glory (?) >> NATO is an institution that does not, for instance, seem able to withstand the thick desires of Vladimir Putin More thick desire: strength + honor >> "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function." I stopped reading at this point, since it seems to be a reactionary rant. The author appears to want a return to our days of glory, when we laid down our lives for our country, and we righteously murdered all those we deemed wicked or too effete to withstand us, allowing us to take their wives and their daughters as our own, etc. This is a common authoritarian sentiment, and it's the polar opposite of the ideas developed during the Enlightenment (espousing science, humanism, etc.). Steven Pinker talks about it in Enlightenment Now, an excellent book.
SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
I have some disagreements with the notion that deep, passionate hobbies and interests are increasingly difficult to acquire. If anything, they’ve never been commonly acquired; only the wealthy ever had the space for passion in their lives. Additionally, how do you tell the difference between a hot take person on Twitter and someone who is deeply feeding their hobby? What if the hobby is spicy Twitter takes, because they are a YouTuber and so getting in on the controversy on one social media site gets you more audience for your platform on YouTube? I have some concerns this essay is essentially dismissing other people as shallow out of the same influencer style posturing that it positions as shallow/thin. Doesn’t help that it ends with a $1500 thinking package, lol.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > If anything, they’ve never been commonly acquired; only the wealthy ever had the space for passion in their lives. It is how people look back at the past and think that their life would be better in past times. They assume that either the lives of the well off were fairly normal or that they would be one of the well off.
  - formerkrogemp 5y ago
    The target audience for this seems to be people like developers who can afford this form of distinction of desire. I don't see anyone in retail giving this article much of a second thought. We know what we want, and, largely, we can't afford it. It all comes down to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
  - trailmonster 5y ago
    I spent a solid percentage of my life thinking exactly along those lines, with a checklist of medical advances and modern appliances to back it up, but I don't think that any more. A combination of international (wayyy off the beaten path) travel and super long distance backpacking, coupled with a technologically focused career living in large US cities has convinced me that we've simply forgotten what made people in the past happy, or passionate, or content, and none of things had very much to do with wealth at all. Once basic survival needs are met, it really doesn't take much if you don't know you need it. Put another way, if I were an ascetic monk 500 years ago, I have no doubt that there would be a collection of people ready to tell me that only a fool would live in the woods when I could easily live in a village and have any type of straw mattress I wanted. We could discuss whether or not they had a worse life than us, but we don't really need to because they're just us, but earlier. 100 years from now some father will be explaining the exact life we live today to his daughter, and she'll never believe that we could be anything except miserable in our abject poverty because we what... didn't have a biobelt generated environment shield around us or something. For the same reasons that it took a lot of convincing for people to believe that the entire universe didn't revolve around the Earth, it's almost impossible to take ourselves our of the time we live in and put us the continuum of history where we actually exist. But if you walk away for a little bit to a place where life works the way it used to a few generations ago (but with modern medicine of course, and free food, in historic terms), it makes it very very difficult to understand how people today could ever be happy living anonymous, isolated lives with social interactions mediated by software. ps. I know that there are starving people somewhere, and of course their lives are actually miserable.
tdehnel 5y ago
For me, the article cast doubt on my day to day work and desires. That’s a good thing since it will help me examine and critique my life, which is the only way to make progress. If this article made you feel bad, perhaps you could examine why it makes you feel that way. Instead of thin criticism (e.g. grammar issues, non-obvious definition of thick/thin) maybe try going a little thicker.
redmen 5y ago
Funny. Maybe the desire for acceptance and popularity on social media incentivizes articles that defend social media to be written. I'm not sure how anyone can actually be in denial about how bad social media, and constant notifications are for the brain.
KaiserPro 5y ago
I don't think that the author has fully outlined the case for cultural anorexia. If I was going to try and prove the premise: that people are now shedding a wide cultural "diet" for one consisting of a few mass produced, single sourced things. But I don't see evidence of that. If anything its the reverse. What I will concede is that locality of the cultural "sources" have gone. You're not going to find your next life changing art exhibit at the local gallery, you'll find it online, and then seek it out in person.
- lkrubner 5y ago
  "for one consisting of a few mass produced, single sourced things." Clay Shirky made the point that something like the Internet expands the total number of offerings available to one person while decreasing the total number of offerings available overall. He hints at this in his essay on powerlaws: https://web.archive.org/web/20060208093032/http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060208093032/http://www.shirky... He went into greater detail in a later essay, but that later essay now seems to be offline.
  - KaiserPro 5y ago
    > Internet expands the total number of offerings available to one person while decreasing the total number of offerings available overall. This argument makes much more sense to me, and I like that the author has actual plotted their idea using some sort of data, which is much more convincing than hand waving.
- paulcole 5y ago
  > You're not going to find your next life changing art exhibit at the local gallery, you'll find it online, and then seek it out in person. But in the past the only reason you ever found your next life changing art exhibit at the local gallery was because the local gallery was your only option.
Lamad123 5y ago
Remember, these are just random opinions of some random person.. Education, institutions, politics, technology, sex, work, art, and media. This seems like a very random categorization of "things".. Why is food or religion or violence or consumerism there?
- jstx1 5y ago
  I don't know if I'm getting cynical or close-minded or just old but I'm very quick to roll my eyes at an article like this. I don't get the appeal.
neuroma 5y ago
Anorexia means without appetite. We are demonstrably full of hunger for culture. But the quality and nature of that culture is changing rapidly with modern tech. I think the author's metaphor is better framed around nutritional value. Modern culture is rich in and dominated by junk. Consuming it builds junk values and junk ideas.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  Yes it's hard to know what is appetitive and what is rejecting in culture right now. It is really self-devouring in some ways. What the author (Luke Burgis) refers to as "thick" desires are, to me, simply the age old depth of human values - messy, complex, emotional. And he paints the countervailing ethos as "thin" - one dimensional man (to use Herbert Marcuse's term). But I am not sure his food metaphor works as vibrantly as he would like, to describe culture, and in some places I think he gets it backwards. Also, one should more sensitive throwing around words like "anorexic" without thinking what that condition entails. When I wrote Digital Vegan, it's original title was going to be something like "Digital self-defence" [1]. But I wanted to avoid too strong a combatative metaphor for that book. The Cody Brown quote that is the final title came late, in recognition of the hostility towards those wanting more control over their diet, whether digital or culinary, and the courage needed to take a principled stance. But control, or the lack of it, and compensatory behaviours is at the heart of many problems. I had been reading Susie Albach's Bodies about dysmorphia, abuse and self-perception. The relation of these to technology had a big influence on me. However, reading about teen suicides, now linked to social media and having in some ways supplanted eating disorders in focus, led me to add this to the preface: " Throughout this book I use the metaphor of food and consumption to talk about technology. In no way do I mean disrespect or to trivialise the serious conditions of anorexia, bulimia, avoidant eating, or obesity. Indeed, I believe that many forms of technological and material abuse share the same root causes. " Whether we build ourselves and our culture "thin" or "thick" revolves around our ability to control what we take in, our knowledge of how it affects us, and our own extant self-image in relation to what we seek out. [1] Thats phrase has been knocking around the cryptoparty scene since 2010, and Snowden uses it in "Permanent Record".
automatoney 5y ago
The piece overly relies on the metaphor to the point of almost being incomprehensible. From the title and opening example I assumed it had something to do with literal human bodies. But then the definition of a thick desire is vague to the point of uselessness - "enduring, sustainable, and ultimately fulfilling desires", especially because it calls Putin's desires thick - as if megalomania is sustainable and fulfilling? This largely seems like an overly broad fluff piece, rather than rigorous and well thought out writing.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  I think he's trying to differentiate between intrinsic desires (creativity, passions) and compulsive desires (spiritual junk food of various flavours). I do think he goes too deep into purple prose though, forgetting that poetic language in philosophy is usually either referential or narrative, but this article is using purple prose in an explanatory fashion which often reads badly imo.
- hnhg 5y ago
  Agreed. It seems the author is selling training courses, and perhaps this article and its vague style are part of a sales/marketing approach for its target audience.
- jmeister 5y ago
  Putin’s desire, whatever you may think of it, is glory and a place in the history books, a hallowed, “thick” desire covered in the greatest oldest epics. Just read his recent, infamous essay on “unity”.
- trailmonster 5y ago
mihaic 5y ago
I remember reading Girard's "Things hidden since the foundation..." and feeling the way it's used now to reason around human desires to be incomplete. Looking back at my grandfather's living as a simple peasant, he did many things mimetically, yet there were long periods of nothingness where his internal desires sprung forth: one day I remember he just weaved basked because he wanted new baskets. There was no need for them, there was nobody among our neighbors that was doing this, he was free and decided to make some baskets. That's why I'd relabel desires as internal or external originating instead of thick and thin. True internal desires come out best when there aren't any externally generated desires, and modern life seems to overload our capacity for generating internal originated desires. Internal desires now only seem to show up in times of crisis, and then we've got a much harder time to actually work with them.
john-titor 5y ago
this reads to me as a rant of someone who just finished their undergrad degree in sociology and wants to show it. some specifics aside, the same article might as well been a topic some 10, 30, 60 years ago. re-packaging an old opinion that our society is degenerating for whatever contemporary reasons without actually providing any constructive solutions does not feel very productive to me. ironic that the not very fitting metaphor of anorexia is used here.
- iamhamm 4y ago
  Apparently it’s by a former investment banker turned philosopher? I didn’t he get the rant because the metaphors were so clunky. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukeburgis https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukeburgis
mbawg 5y ago
This article, despite all of its words, says nothing of value.
matthewmacleod 5y ago
I’m actually kind of angered that I lost five minutes of my life to reading this ironically paper-thin construct.
ivoras 5y ago
I think the issue is more about the lack of true diversity. Look at music for example - to achieve global success, bands all over the world need to start using western rhytms and melodies, losing the very things that made them unique. Not that there's no innovation in niches, but those never reach the highlight. A friend of mine is a musician, and was fairly popular in his circles, but has almost a decade ago renounced all pandering to the audience, started playing incredibly complex music, polyrhythms, fractal melodies, uniquely tuned instruments - and has since lost almost all of his audience and the income which came from music. But - and this is important - he's never been both happier and more virtuosic as a musician, it fulfills him like more popular music never did. Unfortunately, he'll probably never be as appreciated as before and must have other sources of income. Edit: this is him and a single, weirdly tuned guitar: https://nikopotocnjak.bandcamp.com/ https://nikopotocnjak.bandcamp.com/
- ehnto 5y ago
  Perhaps the problem is that the trend of exceptionalism and the platforms that enable it, is driving everyone to want to be global successes. We should be perfectly content being successful in our communities, and with the freedom that this brings us. Our community may be our local area, or it may be our musical niche, or other niche community related to what it is you're doing. But if everyone is chasing #1, and #1 is defined by a popular vote, then you're going to eventually conform to the the lowest common denominator. This is probably more related to chasing fortune and fame, rather than objective exceptionalism in skill building that you see online.
  - headsoup 5y ago
    Or as simple as the promotion of the 'self' as the greatest social unit, rather than the community or other larger unit. And that self is not focused on healthiness and contentness, but desire fulfilled, the narcissist reigns.
- recuter 5y ago
  I think the issue is more about the lack of true diversity. Look at music for example - to achieve global success, bands all over the world need to start using western rhytms and melodies, losing the very things that made them unique. Yes, sure, everything is about a lack of diversity. You might want to look some more into musical theory and where those twelves notes, rhythms and melodies originate from in the first place. Not that there's no innovation in niches, but those never reach the highlight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_music Starting with the 60s hippies who need a haircut got rather into Indian stuff. In the 80s you had an African wave with the likes of Paul Simon. Peter Gabriel was all over the map. Hardly niche. All of this comes and goes, and comes round again. A lot of the biggest stars at the moment are not from the US/West. has almost a decade ago renounced all pandering to the audience, started playing incredibly complex music, polyrhythms, fractal melodies, uniquely tuned instruments - and has since lost almost all of his audience and the income which came from music Jacob Collier seems to be thriving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meha_FCcHbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meha_FCcHbo Now whether or not there is money in it is altogether a different question. Music has been devalued. You/Friend might enjoy Rick Beato ranting about this subject on Youtube. This isn't a new thing, if he wants to make money he needs to look cute, even the Beatles started by getting a makeover and going the boy band route. Such is life.

73 points by vitabenes 5y ago

<< I often wonder what value there is in attending these things, and then I remember that red meat, properly cooked (medium rare) tastes really good. And that’s the strongest case for veganism I’ve ever heard. I chuckled. Then I hesitated. Is the author suggesting cultural veganism?

andrewclunn 5y ago

One of the often missed features of religions is that of cultural critic and cultivator. A group of people who find works of art that at least don't offend their sensibilities and which align with their didactic goals (child rearing, conversion, etc...) Having an explicit standard for judging art gives a means of determining what is that thick and thin: which pieces of entertainment are just that and which are meant to be shared, reenjoyed, and such. Not endorsing a specific religion or philosophy here, but how is one to aspire to something more meaningful and deeper when they cannot even distinguish what that is?

PaulHoule 5y ago

It’s a class thing isn’t it? Today poor people are fat but kids in rich families get anorexic because it is a way they can control the agenda. (Being ‘thin’ looks like it is mirroring the high-achieving attitude of the parents which makes them unresponsive for the children, but it ultimately creates a crisis which forces attention to be given.)

dwighttk 5y ago

I recommend C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image if this article resonates.

throwaway-m3232 5y ago

When I see someone mention human nature in some blog, I stop reading... Human nature is our species ability to transform nature. A cat, for example, is only doing hunting for immediate consumption. A pet cat is even more limited, just a furrring biological shell, he does not hunt. So when a human is limited in all his potentials, thinking, planning, building, etc to something like a tool on the market, optimized for some task, when human relations limited to objects of consumption... this will reduce human to just one sided being. May be this optimization was once necessary some time ago, since labor productivity was low and this high division of labor allowed optimized production, to feed everyone. At the moment, the labor productivity is so high, that only 10-20% working on something necessary for living. But all work is still done as this optimized instrumental labor, as life depends on it. This is not required anymore. The solution is obvious.. build more not as an optimized one sided "worker", but as an universal human being, as a free time activity. Which politically means that the work day should be reduced.. and this is not easy to implement. But if you really want a social change, this is the way to go.

headsoup 5y ago
Does that mean when I read 'human nature is' as the very next words you write I should stop reading your comment? Or are you saying you already understand it better than anyone else writing about it?
- samtimalsina 5y ago
  I stopped reading as soon as I read ‘I stopped reading’ because generally that means that person has a strong opinion. Oh wait..
  - JackFr 5y ago
    I stopped.
lettergram 5y ago
Interesting perspective. Mines a bit different.. I agree specialization has allowed the expansion to other fields. Fields like microcontrollers, biological development, energy research, etc. This is why we see an exponential growth in development of new products and new science. If those same people were required to work in the fields to eat, we wouldn’t see the expansion. ... now ... how does this work In practice? How do we get these efficiency gains in agriculture and other necessary parts of life? Cheap and transportable energy. Fuel, gas, etc. if we want to reduce the work week we need exponentially cheaper energy OR research into new forms of energy production. The later is currently happening and needs to continue to happen. In the mean time, we also need cheap and transportable energy. For reference, I own a farm. I code professionally and as a hobby raise cattle and food. I can do that only because I have the fuel to run a tractor and the wireless internet provided from the satellites. To your point, in a 50-60 hour work week I can produce enough food for 20-30 families for the year AND be a highly skilled tech worker AND raise a family. All because of fuel. Now to my point, in my opinion, specialization has less to do with it. Cheap energy is what allows it. Anyone could raise cattle or grow food with minimal training. But without fuel you can’t produce food for more than a few families per year.
refurb 5y ago

ianai 5y ago

“In order to break out of the mimetic cycle were going to need to find something worth hoping for. ” See now I think this wasn’t proofread. Not entirely sure this belongs on HN either. Maybe if it was written more coherently?

Tade0 5y ago

The author strikes me as someone not really in touch with popular culture or even global politics. > NATO is an institution that does not, for instance, seem able to withstand the thick desires of Vladimir Putin because it scarcely recognizes that he has any. As a Polish citizen I have to say that the initial reaction to Putin's invasion, aside from shock, was a feeling that this could have been us hadn't we joined NATO over 20 years ago. Still no guarantee that he won't do it(there was a major scare in 2014), but it's obvious that he's picking non-NATO members first. ---- On to another topic: Sex. That paragraph is the most out of touch in my view, because it's deeply rooted in the "war on drugs" mentality. I was of the impression that nowadays vices are seen as more of a symptom of a deeper problem than the problem itself. Or is it just my bubble? Also pornography is not any more the pinnacle of degeneracy the author thinks it to be[0]. With the advent of curated content, platforms with safe, functional payments and performers increasingly securing their rights - especially to privacy, it has become somewhat of a mainstream thing. Case in point: OnlyFans is essentially a household name now. [0] I suppose the author only wrote this because he's unaware of the existence of the furry fandom or anime waifus. Those two phenomenons went where traditional pornography can't and won't go. ---- As for art: most of modern art doesn't happen in galleries or closed meetings with expensive wine and other cartoonishly stereotypical attributes. Modern art is chiefly memes produced and shared by the public for the public - anonymously at that. It even went through a series of trends, each spanning a few years, like the enigmatic, surreal "E" memes, with their characteristic "deep fried" art style. To this day it isn't clear how did this achieve mainstream adoption, what were they actually expressing and for what purpose. There probably wasn't any and people just collectively decided to make it so, which makes this the purest manifestation of art possible.

prewett 5y ago

I was hoping to find out what he thought “thick” and “thin” desires were, but he never bothers defining them. Maybe he talks about them in another essay? But without definitions, this piece is just a catalogue of all the ills of society, justified by some unseen value system. And the title is just wrong, it’s not about the pursuit of thicket desires (whatever those are), it’s about cataloguing society’s pursuit of thin desire (whatever those are). And an advertisement at the end.

karaterobot 5y ago
About that ending: At first I thought the article was merely vague and perfunctory, but the advertisement for his $1500 course at the end recast him in the light of a self-help guru. The thing is, he made what I feel could be some good points, but now I wonder whether it's just so non-specific that I'm reading my own anxieties and hopes for meaning into them, like a classic rube. The implication that I need to pay him money to really understand what the hell he's saying makes me wonder if his philosophy might be a little "thin".
presentation 4y ago
He talks about it in his book, Wanting
exo-pla-net 4y ago
Examples of thin desires: our desire to spectate on petty rivalries + hot takes. >> petty rivalries dominate politics and Hot Take Artists sit in their cages, hungrier than ever while inducing hunger in others. Another thin desire: porn. >> Readers will know by now that I believe pornography is one of the primary scourges on our culture, particularly our youth. Example of thick desire: searching for glory (?) >> NATO is an institution that does not, for instance, seem able to withstand the thick desires of Vladimir Putin More thick desire: strength + honor >> "We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function." I stopped reading at this point, since it seems to be a reactionary rant. The author appears to want a return to our days of glory, when we laid down our lives for our country, and we righteously murdered all those we deemed wicked or too effete to withstand us, allowing us to take their wives and their daughters as our own, etc. This is a common authoritarian sentiment, and it's the polar opposite of the ideas developed during the Enlightenment (espousing science, humanism, etc.). Steven Pinker talks about it in Enlightenment Now, an excellent book.

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago

I have some disagreements with the notion that deep, passionate hobbies and interests are increasingly difficult to acquire. If anything, they’ve never been commonly acquired; only the wealthy ever had the space for passion in their lives. Additionally, how do you tell the difference between a hot take person on Twitter and someone who is deeply feeding their hobby? What if the hobby is spicy Twitter takes, because they are a YouTuber and so getting in on the controversy on one social media site gets you more audience for your platform on YouTube? I have some concerns this essay is essentially dismissing other people as shallow out of the same influencer style posturing that it positions as shallow/thin. Doesn’t help that it ends with a $1500 thinking package, lol.

MattGaiser 5y ago
> If anything, they’ve never been commonly acquired; only the wealthy ever had the space for passion in their lives. It is how people look back at the past and think that their life would be better in past times. They assume that either the lives of the well off were fairly normal or that they would be one of the well off.
- formerkrogemp 5y ago
  The target audience for this seems to be people like developers who can afford this form of distinction of desire. I don't see anyone in retail giving this article much of a second thought. We know what we want, and, largely, we can't afford it. It all comes down to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
- trailmonster 5y ago
  I spent a solid percentage of my life thinking exactly along those lines, with a checklist of medical advances and modern appliances to back it up, but I don't think that any more. A combination of international (wayyy off the beaten path) travel and super long distance backpacking, coupled with a technologically focused career living in large US cities has convinced me that we've simply forgotten what made people in the past happy, or passionate, or content, and none of things had very much to do with wealth at all. Once basic survival needs are met, it really doesn't take much if you don't know you need it. Put another way, if I were an ascetic monk 500 years ago, I have no doubt that there would be a collection of people ready to tell me that only a fool would live in the woods when I could easily live in a village and have any type of straw mattress I wanted. We could discuss whether or not they had a worse life than us, but we don't really need to because they're just us, but earlier. 100 years from now some father will be explaining the exact life we live today to his daughter, and she'll never believe that we could be anything except miserable in our abject poverty because we what... didn't have a biobelt generated environment shield around us or something. For the same reasons that it took a lot of convincing for people to believe that the entire universe didn't revolve around the Earth, it's almost impossible to take ourselves our of the time we live in and put us the continuum of history where we actually exist. But if you walk away for a little bit to a place where life works the way it used to a few generations ago (but with modern medicine of course, and free food, in historic terms), it makes it very very difficult to understand how people today could ever be happy living anonymous, isolated lives with social interactions mediated by software. ps. I know that there are starving people somewhere, and of course their lives are actually miserable.

tdehnel 5y ago

For me, the article cast doubt on my day to day work and desires. That’s a good thing since it will help me examine and critique my life, which is the only way to make progress. If this article made you feel bad, perhaps you could examine why it makes you feel that way. Instead of thin criticism (e.g. grammar issues, non-obvious definition of thick/thin) maybe try going a little thicker.

redmen 5y ago

Funny. Maybe the desire for acceptance and popularity on social media incentivizes articles that defend social media to be written. I'm not sure how anyone can actually be in denial about how bad social media, and constant notifications are for the brain.

KaiserPro 5y ago

I don't think that the author has fully outlined the case for cultural anorexia. If I was going to try and prove the premise: that people are now shedding a wide cultural "diet" for one consisting of a few mass produced, single sourced things. But I don't see evidence of that. If anything its the reverse. What I will concede is that locality of the cultural "sources" have gone. You're not going to find your next life changing art exhibit at the local gallery, you'll find it online, and then seek it out in person.

lkrubner 5y ago
"for one consisting of a few mass produced, single sourced things." Clay Shirky made the point that something like the Internet expands the total number of offerings available to one person while decreasing the total number of offerings available overall. He hints at this in his essay on powerlaws: https://web.archive.org/web/20060208093032/http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060208093032/http://www.shirky... He went into greater detail in a later essay, but that later essay now seems to be offline.
- KaiserPro 5y ago
  > Internet expands the total number of offerings available to one person while decreasing the total number of offerings available overall. This argument makes much more sense to me, and I like that the author has actual plotted their idea using some sort of data, which is much more convincing than hand waving.
paulcole 5y ago
> You're not going to find your next life changing art exhibit at the local gallery, you'll find it online, and then seek it out in person. But in the past the only reason you ever found your next life changing art exhibit at the local gallery was because the local gallery was your only option.

Lamad123 5y ago

Remember, these are just random opinions of some random person.. Education, institutions, politics, technology, sex, work, art, and media. This seems like a very random categorization of "things".. Why is food or religion or violence or consumerism there?

jstx1 5y ago
I don't know if I'm getting cynical or close-minded or just old but I'm very quick to roll my eyes at an article like this. I don't get the appeal.

neuroma 5y ago

Anorexia means without appetite. We are demonstrably full of hunger for culture. But the quality and nature of that culture is changing rapidly with modern tech. I think the author's metaphor is better framed around nutritional value. Modern culture is rich in and dominated by junk. Consuming it builds junk values and junk ideas.

nonrandomstring 5y ago
Yes it's hard to know what is appetitive and what is rejecting in culture right now. It is really self-devouring in some ways. What the author (Luke Burgis) refers to as "thick" desires are, to me, simply the age old depth of human values - messy, complex, emotional. And he paints the countervailing ethos as "thin" - one dimensional man (to use Herbert Marcuse's term). But I am not sure his food metaphor works as vibrantly as he would like, to describe culture, and in some places I think he gets it backwards. Also, one should more sensitive throwing around words like "anorexic" without thinking what that condition entails. When I wrote Digital Vegan, it's original title was going to be something like "Digital self-defence" [1]. But I wanted to avoid too strong a combatative metaphor for that book. The Cody Brown quote that is the final title came late, in recognition of the hostility towards those wanting more control over their diet, whether digital or culinary, and the courage needed to take a principled stance. But control, or the lack of it, and compensatory behaviours is at the heart of many problems. I had been reading Susie Albach's Bodies about dysmorphia, abuse and self-perception. The relation of these to technology had a big influence on me. However, reading about teen suicides, now linked to social media and having in some ways supplanted eating disorders in focus, led me to add this to the preface: " Throughout this book I use the metaphor of food and consumption to talk about technology. In no way do I mean disrespect or to trivialise the serious conditions of anorexia, bulimia, avoidant eating, or obesity. Indeed, I believe that many forms of technological and material abuse share the same root causes. " Whether we build ourselves and our culture "thin" or "thick" revolves around our ability to control what we take in, our knowledge of how it affects us, and our own extant self-image in relation to what we seek out. [1] Thats phrase has been knocking around the cryptoparty scene since 2010, and Snowden uses it in "Permanent Record".

automatoney 5y ago

The piece overly relies on the metaphor to the point of almost being incomprehensible. From the title and opening example I assumed it had something to do with literal human bodies. But then the definition of a thick desire is vague to the point of uselessness - "enduring, sustainable, and ultimately fulfilling desires", especially because it calls Putin's desires thick - as if megalomania is sustainable and fulfilling? This largely seems like an overly broad fluff piece, rather than rigorous and well thought out writing.

beaconstudios 5y ago
I think he's trying to differentiate between intrinsic desires (creativity, passions) and compulsive desires (spiritual junk food of various flavours). I do think he goes too deep into purple prose though, forgetting that poetic language in philosophy is usually either referential or narrative, but this article is using purple prose in an explanatory fashion which often reads badly imo.
hnhg 5y ago
Agreed. It seems the author is selling training courses, and perhaps this article and its vague style are part of a sales/marketing approach for its target audience.
jmeister 5y ago
Putin’s desire, whatever you may think of it, is glory and a place in the history books, a hallowed, “thick” desire covered in the greatest oldest epics. Just read his recent, infamous essay on “unity”.
trailmonster 5y ago

mihaic 5y ago

I remember reading Girard's "Things hidden since the foundation..." and feeling the way it's used now to reason around human desires to be incomplete. Looking back at my grandfather's living as a simple peasant, he did many things mimetically, yet there were long periods of nothingness where his internal desires sprung forth: one day I remember he just weaved basked because he wanted new baskets. There was no need for them, there was nobody among our neighbors that was doing this, he was free and decided to make some baskets. That's why I'd relabel desires as internal or external originating instead of thick and thin. True internal desires come out best when there aren't any externally generated desires, and modern life seems to overload our capacity for generating internal originated desires. Internal desires now only seem to show up in times of crisis, and then we've got a much harder time to actually work with them.

john-titor 5y ago

this reads to me as a rant of someone who just finished their undergrad degree in sociology and wants to show it. some specifics aside, the same article might as well been a topic some 10, 30, 60 years ago. re-packaging an old opinion that our society is degenerating for whatever contemporary reasons without actually providing any constructive solutions does not feel very productive to me. ironic that the not very fitting metaphor of anorexia is used here.

iamhamm 4y ago
Apparently it’s by a former investment banker turned philosopher? I didn’t he get the rant because the metaphors were so clunky. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukeburgis https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukeburgis

mbawg 5y ago

This article, despite all of its words, says nothing of value.

matthewmacleod 5y ago

I’m actually kind of angered that I lost five minutes of my life to reading this ironically paper-thin construct.

ivoras 5y ago

I think the issue is more about the lack of true diversity. Look at music for example - to achieve global success, bands all over the world need to start using western rhytms and melodies, losing the very things that made them unique. Not that there's no innovation in niches, but those never reach the highlight. A friend of mine is a musician, and was fairly popular in his circles, but has almost a decade ago renounced all pandering to the audience, started playing incredibly complex music, polyrhythms, fractal melodies, uniquely tuned instruments - and has since lost almost all of his audience and the income which came from music. But - and this is important - he's never been both happier and more virtuosic as a musician, it fulfills him like more popular music never did. Unfortunately, he'll probably never be as appreciated as before and must have other sources of income. Edit: this is him and a single, weirdly tuned guitar: https://nikopotocnjak.bandcamp.com/ https://nikopotocnjak.bandcamp.com/

ehnto 5y ago
Perhaps the problem is that the trend of exceptionalism and the platforms that enable it, is driving everyone to want to be global successes. We should be perfectly content being successful in our communities, and with the freedom that this brings us. Our community may be our local area, or it may be our musical niche, or other niche community related to what it is you're doing. But if everyone is chasing #1, and #1 is defined by a popular vote, then you're going to eventually conform to the the lowest common denominator. This is probably more related to chasing fortune and fame, rather than objective exceptionalism in skill building that you see online.
- headsoup 5y ago
  Or as simple as the promotion of the 'self' as the greatest social unit, rather than the community or other larger unit. And that self is not focused on healthiness and contentness, but desire fulfilled, the narcissist reigns.
recuter 5y ago
I think the issue is more about the lack of true diversity. Look at music for example - to achieve global success, bands all over the world need to start using western rhytms and melodies, losing the very things that made them unique. Yes, sure, everything is about a lack of diversity. You might want to look some more into musical theory and where those twelves notes, rhythms and melodies originate from in the first place. Not that there's no innovation in niches, but those never reach the highlight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_music Starting with the 60s hippies who need a haircut got rather into Indian stuff. In the 80s you had an African wave with the likes of Paul Simon. Peter Gabriel was all over the map. Hardly niche. All of this comes and goes, and comes round again. A lot of the biggest stars at the moment are not from the US/West. has almost a decade ago renounced all pandering to the audience, started playing incredibly complex music, polyrhythms, fractal melodies, uniquely tuned instruments - and has since lost almost all of his audience and the income which came from music Jacob Collier seems to be thriving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meha_FCcHbo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meha_FCcHbo Now whether or not there is money in it is altogether a different question. Music has been devalued. You/Friend might enjoy Rick Beato ranting about this subject on Youtube. This isn't a new thing, if he wants to make money he needs to look cute, even the Beatles started by getting a makeover and going the boy band route. Such is life.