The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.
Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.
Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.
Productivity apps give you the feeling of accomplishment without anything being accomplished.
In each case, the thin version is easier to deliver at scale, easier to monetize, and easier to make addictive.
The result is a diet of pure sensation.
And none of it seems to be making anyone happier.
The surveys all point the same direction: rising anxiety, rising depression, rising rates of loneliness even as we’ve never been more connected.
How could this be, when we’ve gotten so good at giving people what they want?
Maybe because we’ve gotten good at giving people what they want in a way that prevents them from wanting anything worth having.
Thick desires are inconvenient.
They take years to cultivate and can’t be satisfied on demand.
The desire to master a craft, to read slowly, to be embedded in a genuine community, to understand your place in some tradition larger than yourself: these desires are effortful to acquire and impossible to fully gratify.
They embed you in webs of obligation and reciprocity.
They make you dependent on specific people and places.
From the perspective of a frictionless global marketplace, all of this is pure inefficiency.
And so the infrastructure for thick desires has been gradually dismantled.
The workshops closed, the congregations thinned, the apprenticeships disappeared, the front porches gave way to backyard decks and studio apartments and the coveted Micro Homes where you could be alone with your devices.
Meanwhile the infrastructure for thin desires became essentially inescapable.
It’s in your pocket right now.
— Read on www.joanwestenberg.com/thin-desires-are-eating-your-life/
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