{"id":544,"date":"2025-12-30T09:21:56","date_gmt":"2025-12-30T09:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/12\/30\/thin-desires-are-eating-your-life\/"},"modified":"2025-12-30T09:21:56","modified_gmt":"2025-12-30T09:21:56","slug":"thin-desires-are-eating-your-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/12\/30\/thin-desires-are-eating-your-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Thin Desires Are Eating Your\u00a0Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>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.<br \/>\nSocial media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.<br \/>\nPornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.<br \/>\nProductivity apps give you the feeling of accomplishment without anything being accomplished.<br \/>\nIn each case, the thin version is easier to deliver at scale, easier to monetize, and easier to make addictive.<br \/>\nThe result is a diet of pure sensation.<br \/>\nAnd none of it seems to be making anyone happier.<br \/>\nThe surveys all point the same direction: rising anxiety, rising depression, rising rates of loneliness even as we&#8217;ve never been more connected.<br \/>\nHow could this be, when we&#8217;ve gotten so good at giving people what they want?<br \/>\nMaybe because we&#8217;ve gotten good at giving people what they want in a way that prevents them from wanting anything worth having.<br \/>\nThick desires are inconvenient.<br \/>\nThey take years to cultivate and can&#8217;t be satisfied on demand.<br \/>\nThe 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.<br \/>\nThey embed you in webs of obligation and reciprocity.<br \/>\nThey make you dependent on specific people and places.<br \/>\nFrom the perspective of a frictionless global marketplace, all of this is pure inefficiency.<br \/>\nAnd so the infrastructure for thick desires has been gradually dismantled.<br \/>\nThe 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.<br \/>\nMeanwhile the infrastructure for thin desires became essentially inescapable.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s in your pocket right now.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.joanwestenberg.com\/thin-desires-are-eating-your-life\/\">www.joanwestenberg.com\/thin-desires-are-eating-your-life\/<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,53,24,7,54,15,35,38,52],"class_list":["post-544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-attention","tag-business","tag-computing","tag-consciousness","tag-craft","tag-culture","tag-learning","tag-society","tag-thick-desires"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}