by CGMthrowaway | 2025-12-17 19:06:44+00:00
I asked my agent to rewrite this in a more traditional style, if it's helpful to anyone:

A defining experience of our age is a paradoxical hunger: we crave more even when we have an excess, and we crave less while more accumulates around us. It is a vague hunger we often can’t articulate, a deep sense of wanting something fundamental. This is the essence of "thin desire": a craving for something undefinable and ultimately unattainable, from a source with no interest in providing it.

The distinction between "thick" and "thin" desires is simple: a thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it, while a thin desire does not. Consider the desire to understand calculus versus the desire to check your notifications. The desire to learn calculus is thick; it transforms the learner, revealing new patterns in the world and expanding their capacity to care about new things. The desire to check notifications is thin; afterward, you are the same person you were five minutes before. A thick desire transforms its host; a thin desire merely reproduces itself.

The business model of most modern consumer technology is to exploit this distinction. It identifies a thick human desire, isolates the part that produces a neurological reward, and then delivers that sensation without the enriching substance. Social media offers the feeling of connection without the obligations of friendship. Pornography provides sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership. Productivity apps can give a sense of accomplishment without anything of substance being accomplished.

This thin version of desire is easier to deliver at scale, easier to monetize, and far easier to make addictive, resulting in a cultural diet of pure sensation. Yet, despite getting what we want with such efficiency, we are not happier. Surveys consistently show rising anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Perhaps we have become so proficient at giving people what they want that we have prevented them from wanting anything truly worthwhile.

Thick desires are inherently inconvenient. They cannot be satisfied on demand and often take years to cultivate. Mastering a craft, reading a book slowly, or becoming part of a genuine community requires sustained effort. These pursuits embed us in webs of obligation and make us dependent on specific people and places—all of which is pure inefficiency from the perspective of a frictionless global marketplace.

As a result, the infrastructure for thick desires—workshops, apprenticeships, local congregations, front porches—has been gradually dismantled. In its place, the infrastructure for thin desires has become inescapable, residing in the pocket of nearly every person. Grand programs to "rebuild community" often fail because they try to apply the same logic of scale they hope to escape. The thick life, however, doesn't scale. That is the entire point.

The antidote, therefore, may not lie in large-scale movements but in small, deliberate, and beautifully inefficient acts. Bake bread; the yeast is indifferent to your schedule, and the process teaches a patience that the attention economy has stripped away. Write a physical letter and send it through the mail; it creates a connection that exists outside the logic of engagement metrics. Code a software tool for just one person; building something that will never be monetized is a beautiful heresy against the assumption that all creations must serve millions.

These individual acts will not reverse the great thinning of our culture. But the thick life is worth pursuing anyway, on its own terms. The person who bakes bread isn't trying to fix the world; they are simply trying to spend an afternoon in a way that doesn’t leave them feeling emptied out. They are remembering, one small act at a time, what it feels like to want something that is actually worth wanting.