Thick Desires in a Thin World
Wanting loops, and how to reclaim desires that actually change you.
You know the feeling. You close the app, and for a moment, there’s nothing. Then the pull returns. Not hunger, exactly. Not even want, in the old sense. Just a faint signal that says: again.
You scroll. You refresh. You open another tab. Each time, a brief flush of satisfaction; then it’s gone. You’re back where you started, only now the distance between impulse and fulfillment has collapsed to nothing. This is the texture of modern desire: instant, endless, and strangely hollow.
Until recently, for many of the desires that used to structure a life (e.g., security, status, belonging, mastery), the gap between wanting and having was long enough to demand patience, competence, and risk. The pursuit changed you. You had to become someone capable of achieving the thing you desired. You had to wait, to learn, to endure.
For a growing class of everyday micro-desires, that gap has narrowed dramatically. We live in an age of what have been called thin desires (i.e., wants that can be satisfied instantly, without transformation, without commitment, without changing who we are). Thin desires aren’t just “small wants.” They’re wants whose behavioral loop is trained by fast, uncertain rewards, so the wanting becomes self-renewing faster than it becomes meaningfully satiable. And the infrastructure of modern life has strong incentives to multiply these thin desires while the slower pursuits that change us get crowded out.
This isn’t just about technology or consumerism, though both play a role. It’s about something deeper: a crisis in how we understand ourselves and what it means to live a meaningful life. The philosopher Charles Taylor spent decades tracing how we got here, how the modern self, no longer anchored in a single shared framework of meaning, became both radically free and strangely fragile. We can choose anything, but that very freedom makes it harder to commit to anything. We’re autonomous agents in a world where moral sources have multiplied and compete.
The question is whether this freedom was worth what we gave up. And whether there’s a way back to desires thick enough to hold meaning, without abandoning the freedom we’ve gained.
Making the Modern Self
Imagine living in much of pre-modern Europe (or in many traditional cultures) where public meaning was largely scaffolded by thick, external frameworks. Your place in the cosmic order was given, not chosen. Where meaning came from outside you, built into the structure of reality itself.
That was the world many of our ancestors inhabited. The cosmos had a shape, a hierarchy, a purpose. You were born into a story already being told, and your job was to find your part in it. Meaning wasn’t fragile because it wasn’t optional. The transcendent (God, the Good, the order of things) was an inescapable horizon.
Then something changed. Taylor calls it the rise of the “immanent frame” (a social imaginary in which both belief and unbelief become live options1, where understanding the world doesn’t require anything beyond itself. Science explained nature without invoking divine purpose. Politics organized society without claiming divine authority. The human agent moved from being a small part of a vast, God-ordered cosmos to being a source of meaning itself.
This was supposed to be liberation. And in many ways, it was. The old order was rigid, often oppressive, indifferent to individual dignity. Modernity brought something new: the idea that you could define your own good, determine your own path, become the author of your own life.
But it also brought something unexpected. When meaning becomes one option among many competing frameworks, it becomes fragile. If I can choose my values today, I can reassess them tomorrow. If my commitments depend on my ongoing consent, they can always be withdrawn. The framework that once seemed un-challengeable becomes just one constitutive good (i.e., something I happen to find motivating, but that someone else might reasonably reject).
This is the paradox at the heart of modern identity. We gained the freedom to shape our own lives, but that freedom came at a cost: meaning itself became tentative, always subject to revision, never quite solid underfoot.
The Buffered Self and its Discontents
Taylor describes the modern self as “buffered” (i.e., detached, inward-looking, sealed off from external authority). The buffered self doesn’t receive its identity from the world; it constructs its identity from within. This is the self of authenticity, the self that seeks to be true to its own nature rather than conforming to external demands.
There’s something genuinely valuable here. The buffered self can resist oppression, question inherited norms, forge its own path. It’s the self that says: I don’t have to be what you tell me to be. I can discover my own truth.
But there’s also something lonely about it. The buffered self is what Taylor calls “punctual” (i.e., experienced as a kind of point of control, observing its own thoughts and desires as though they were external objects to be managed). It looks inward for meaning, but finds only itself looking back.
And here’s where thin desire enters the picture. The buffered self, searching for meaning internally across multiple competing frameworks, becomes vulnerable to a particular kind of exploitation. If you’re seeking fulfillment from within, if authenticity is your highest value, then the feeling of meaning becomes more important than its substance. And feelings can be manufactured.
The Mechanics of Thinning
Think about what it takes to master a craft (e.g., learning to appreciate classical music). Not just enjoy it casually, but really hear it: the intricate layering of voices, the architecture of a fugue, the emotional trajectory of a symphony. This is what Agnes Callard calls “aspiration” (i.e., the pursuit of a value you can’t yet fully grasp).
It takes time. You have to listen repeatedly, often to pieces that don’t immediately reward you. You have to learn the language: what a sonata form is, why a particular modulation matters. You’re reasoning toward a value you don’t yet possess, guided by what Callard calls “proleptic reasons” (i.e., reasons that point toward the future state in which you’ll understand why this matters.2 This is a distinctive rational process, not mere preference-satisfaction. You need practical learning and scaffolding.
This is a thick desire. It requires transformation. The person who emerges at the end of this process isn’t the same person who started. Their capacity for experience has expanded. They can hear things that were previously invisible to them. The pursuit has changed the structure of who they are.
Now imagine an alternative. You open your phone and scroll through short videos set to emotional swells of orchestral music: sunsets, mountain vistas, slow-motion waves. Each clip gives you a little hit: a momentary sense of profundity, a feeling of connection to something larger. And then it’s over, and you scroll to the next one.
What have you gained? The feeling of appreciating greatness, without the work. The neurological reward that comes from engagement with beauty, delivered efficiently, without obligation. Tomorrow, your capacity to engage with genuine complexity remains exactly where it was. Nothing has transformed. You’ve pursued the thin version of the desire, the part that can be commodified, the part that monetizes, the part that leaves you unchanged.
This distinction between thick and thin desires, between transformative pursuits and self-reproducing loops, comes from Luke Burgis, who built on René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. In his guide on understanding what you really want, Burgis uses the spectrum of thick to thin desires to help people distinguish between identity-anchored, multi-layered wants versus those that are highly substitutable and easily redirected by mimetic pressure. The framework is powerful because it gives us a way to see the difference between desires that expand our capacity for experience and those that merely repeat the same neurological pattern.
The fact that such patterns are repeatable isn’t merely an accident. It’s also a business model.
The Infrastructure of Thinness
The modern economy often succeeds at identifying thick desires and extracting their neurological essence. Take community, for instance (i.e., the thick desire to be embedded in a web of relationships, to be known and needed, to share in collective meaning). That’s inconvenient, from a market perspective. It’s local, specific, resistant to commodification. It requires time and vulnerability.
But the feeling of community (the intermittent social rewards that train checking and posting through reward-learning dynamics); that can be packaged. Research on social media engagement shows that posting behavior follows reinforcement learning patterns, driven by prior social rewards like likes and comments.3 Social platforms are optimized, through iterative design and recommender systems, for engagement metrics,4 which makes intermittent social rewards especially effective at training checking and posting. You get the reward without the obligation. You can feel socially connected while remaining fundamentally alone.
Or consider accomplishment. The thick desire is to master something difficult, to build something that matters, to become capable in a way you weren’t before. But that takes years. It’s inefficient. So instead, we often have gamification (i.e., achievement systems that can deliver the feeling of progress without necessarily requiring genuine skill development, especially when the metric becomes decoupled from the underlying competence). You “level up” in the game, get your achievement badges, feel the satisfaction of advancement. The self remains static.
The pattern repeats across domains. The thick desire for knowledge becomes the thin desire for information snippets. The thick desire for beauty becomes the thin desire for aesthetic stimulation. The thick desire for meaning becomes the thin desire for the feeling of profundity.
Why does this happen? Because thin desires have three properties that make them attractive to modern infrastructure:
First, they’re instantly gratifying. No waiting, no transformation required. The gap between impulse and satisfaction collapses to zero.
Second, they’re endlessly reproducible. Because they don’t change you, you can consume them again and again. They’re self-perpetuating, even addictive. Studies show that reward variability (i.e., unpredictable reinforcement schedules) can increase the addictive potential of non-drug reinforcers.5
Third, they’re easily commodified. One person’s thick desire for community looks different from another’s; it’s embedded in specific places, specific people. But the thin version (e.g., the validated post, the liked photo) can be packaged into repeatable units that work similarly for everyone, everywhere.
This is the great thinning: the systematic preference for desires that reproduce themselves over desires that transform us. And it’s not imposed from above. We choose it, freely, every day. Because in the moment, the thin version feels easier. It feels like freedom.
The Fragile Self
Here’s the deeper problem. When your identity is built on choices you can always reassess, when your commitments are contingent on your ongoing consent, when meaning depends on frameworks that compete and shift, everything becomes tentative.
Taylor talks about how modern culture can narrow spiritual life. The old transcendent frameworks, whatever their flaws, provided a sense of participating in something larger than yourself. Your life had significance because it was part of a cosmic story. Even if you struggled, even if you doubted, the framework was there.
Now multiple frameworks compete for allegiance. You can choose to believe in God, or not. You can commit to a community, or not. You can pursue a calling, or not. Every commitment is one you’ve made and could, in principle, unmake.
This doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like floating. The spiritual quest can narrow to a search for authenticity, but authenticity becomes circular (i.e., being true to a self that’s defined by its choices, which are themselves supposed to express its authentic nature). You’re looking inward for answers, but there’s nothing there except the question itself.
And into this void flows an endless stream of thin desires, each promising a momentary sense of meaning, each leaving you exactly where you were.
The Case for Freedom
Before going further, we should consider the strongest objection to this entire critique. Perhaps the problem isn’t modern freedom but our unwillingness to fully embrace it. Perhaps thin desires aren’t a failure of modernity but a transitional stage (i.e., artifacts of incomplete liberation).
The argument goes like this: Self-determination is the highest moral good precisely because it makes us responsible for our own lives. The old frameworks weren’t just restrictive; they were infantilizing. They treated people as passive recipients of meaning rather than active creators of it. Yes, meaning becomes “fragile” when it depends on choice, but that fragility is the price of genuine moral agency.
Moreover, modernity has also delivered real moral progress: a far wider institutionalized commitment to ideals like equality before the law and human dignity, whatever the ongoing disputes about their interpretation and application. These aren’t thin goods; they’re among the most important values humanity has articulated. And they emerged precisely from the culture of individual freedom and critical reflection that Taylor describes.
As for thin desires, maybe the solution is more choice, not less. If people are caught in loops of empty gratification, that’s a failure of imagination, not of freedom. The tools for pursuing thick desires are more available than ever. You want to master classical music? The world’s greatest performances are at your fingertips. You want community? Online platforms connect you with people who share your deepest interests. You want to build something meaningful? The barriers to creation have never been lower.
The transcendent hasn’t disappeared; it’s been pluralized. Each person can construct their own framework, choose their own constitutive goods, define their own path to meaning. Isn’t this better than being told what to value by tradition or authority?
This is a serious position. It deserves to be taken seriously.
Reconciling Freedom and Thickness
The resolution lies in recognizing that thick desire is the true expression of agency, not its opposite.
The problem isn’t freedom itself. It’s the reduction of freedom to mere choice among pre-existing options. Real agency isn’t passive selection from a menu. It’s the active process of transformation, Callard calls “value acquisition.” It’s becoming someone capable of valuing things you can’t yet fully appreciate.
This is hard to see because we’ve inherited a picture of the self as already complete, already formed, already equipped with all its preferences and values. On this picture, agency means efficiently satisfying the desires you already have. And if someone offers you a shortcut, if they can give you the reward without the effort, why wouldn’t you take it?
But this picture misunderstands the self. The self is not a fixed point with stable preferences. It’s a process of becoming. And thick desires are how that process unfolds. When you pursue a thick desire, you’re not just satisfying a want. You’re expanding your capacity for experience. You’re becoming someone different, someone who can see value that was previously invisible to you.
Thin desires short-circuit this process. They freeze you in place. They give you the neurological reward associated with growth without the actual growth. And because they don’t change you, you need them again immediately. They’re not desires you can satisfy; they’re desires that reproduce themselves endlessly.
The key insight from Taylor is that the self is dialogical, not punctual. You can’t become who you are in isolation. Identity emerges from dialogue: with other people, with traditions, with frameworks of meaning larger than yourself. The buffered self, sealed off from external authority, isn’t freer; it’s just lonelier.
Genuine authenticity, then, isn’t the unmediated expression of some inner essence. It’s the integration of the multiplicity within you: your individual impulses, your dialogical relationships, your participation in shared frameworks of meaning. You’re not just being true to yourself; you’re discovering what self you want to become, in conversation with others.
This requires what Taylor calls “strong evaluation” (i.e., the capacity to make qualitative distinctions between higher and lower goods). Not all desires are equal. Some are worth pursuing because they expand your capacity for experience and embed you more deeply in webs of meaning. Others just reproduce themselves.
The difference isn’t external (imposed by authority), but it’s not purely subjective either. It’s something you discover through the process of aspiration itself. You start with proleptic reasons, partial glimpses of a value you don’t yet grasp. You commit to the pursuit even though you can’t fully articulate why it matters. And gradually, if you’re patient, the value becomes intelligible. You become someone who can see it.
This is agency. Not choosing from a menu, but expanding the menu. Not satisfying desires, but transforming yourself into someone with richer, deeper, more demanding desires.
What it Requires
If thick desire is the path back to meaning without abandoning freedom, what does it require in practice?
First, it requires time. Not just clock time, but what we might call invested time: time during which you’re changed by what you’re doing. This is increasingly rare. The infrastructure of modern life is optimized for efficiency, for minimizing friction, for collapsing the gap between impulse and gratification. To pursue thick desires, you have to deliberately choose inefficiency. You have to accept that some things worth doing take time in a way that can’t be compressed.
Second, it requires vulnerability. Thick desires embed you in specific relationships, specific places, specific practices. They make you dependent on things outside your control. A craft can be forgotten. A community can dissolve. A calling can become obsolete. The buffered self resists this vulnerability; it wants to remain detached, mobile, able to exit at will. But that detachment is precisely what makes meaning fragile.
Third, it requires dialogue. You can’t reason your way into thick desires through deduction from your current preferences alone. You need guides: people who already see the value you’re trying to acquire, who can point you toward it even though they can’t fully explain it. This is why traditions matter, why teachers matter, why communities of practice matter. They’re not constraints on your freedom; they’re conditions for its meaningful exercise.
Fourth, it requires commitment despite uncertainty. When you begin pursuing a thick desire, you can’t fully know whether it will pay off. You’re acting on reasons that point toward a value you don’t yet grasp. You have to accept temporary unintelligibility. You have to tolerate the period where you’re doing something that doesn’t yet make complete sense to you, trusting that sense will emerge.
This is the opposite of how thin desires work. Thin desires promise certainty: you know exactly what you’re getting, and you get it immediately. Thick desires demand faith, not religious faith necessarily, but faith that the process of transformation will be worth it.
Living the Distinction
So the distinction between thick and thin desires isn’t always obvious in the moment. Both feel like wanting. Both produce satisfaction when fulfilled. The difference only becomes visible over time.
Here’s a test. Think about something you achieved that matters to you (e.g., a skill you mastered, a relationship you built, a project you completed). Now ask: Could this achievement have happened without the process changing you? Did the difficulty force you to become more capable, more patient, more skilled?
Often, the meaning was in the change it demanded of you. Difficulty is one common way that change is forced, but not the only one. Some intensely meaningful events transform you suddenly (e.g., a moment of awe, a birth, an act of forgiveness). What matters isn’t the difficulty itself, but whether you’re different afterward.
The thick life, then, is one that deliberately chooses these transformative possibilities. It resists the logic of pure optimization. It accepts obligation, embraces inefficiency when necessary, tolerates frustration. It pursues desires that demand you become someone new.
And it does this not by rejecting freedom, but by understanding freedom more deeply. You’re not free when you can choose anything. You’re free when you can choose to become someone capable of valuing what you can’t yet value.
Practical Questions
All of this raises a practical question: How do you distinguish between thick and thin desires in advance? How do you know which pursuits will transform you and which will just deliver empty gratification?
There’s no formula, but there are signs. Thick desires tend to involve:
Delayed gratification. If you get the reward immediately, you’re probably pursuing the thin version.
Specific commitments. If the desire could be satisfied by any number of interchangeable options, it’s probably thin.
Required transformation. If you could do it right now without changing, it’s thin.
Dependence on others. If you could do it entirely alone, disconnected from any community or tradition, it’s probably thin.
Resistance to commodification. If the experience can be packaged into repeatable units without losing its essential character, it’s thin.
But the surest sign is this: Does pursuing it change what else you value? Thick desires don’t just satisfy themselves; they reorganize your whole structure of priorities. When you learn to appreciate classical music, you don’t just add one more item to your list of preferences. You become someone who hears differently. Other things you valued might seem less important. New possibilities open up.
Thin desires, by contrast, leave everything else unchanged. You satisfy them and return to exactly the state you were in before, except now you need to satisfy them again.
Now, we’ve arrived at the hardest part. Even if everything said here is true, even if thin desires are empty and thick desires are transformative, there remains a question we can’t avoid:
Why pursue thickness at all?
In a world with multiple competing frameworks, without a cosmic order that tells you what matters, why shouldn’t you just maximize pleasant experiences? Why undergo transformation when you could have gratification? Why commit to the difficult when the easy is available?
Taylor’s answer is that some experiences of the world are richer than others. To live in the immanent frame alone, to see nothing but material causation, to find meaning only in what you happen to choose, can be to live in a flattened world. It’s not that this worldview is false, exactly. It’s that it can be impoverished. There are dimensions of experience (e.g., moral intuitions, aesthetic responses, moments of transcendence) that risk becoming unintelligible without some sense of a reality beyond the purely material.
You don’t have to call this God. You don’t have to adopt any particular religious framework. But you do have to acknowledge that not all ways of experiencing the world are equally rich. Some open up dimensions that others close off.
This is a claim about qualitative distinctions, about higher and lower, not just different. And it’s contestable. Many would argue that all value systems are ultimately just preferences, that what feels profound to you is just your subjective experience, no more valid than anyone else’s.
But here’s the thing: even people who intellectually endorse that view don’t actually live by it. No one treats all their desires as equally valid. Everyone engages in strong evaluation, making qualitative distinctions between what’s worthwhile and what’s trivial, what’s noble and what’s base. The question isn’t whether we make these distinctions (We can’t help it), but whether we do so explicitly or let them operate unconsciously.
The thick life requires making these distinctions explicit. It requires saying: this desire is worth pursuing because it will make me capable of richer experience. That desire, however pleasant, will leave me unchanged.
The Way Forward
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering: what now? What do you actually do with this distinction?
The answer isn’t to abandon all thin desires. That’s not realistic and probably not desirable. The modern world isn’t going away. The infrastructure of instant gratification will remain. You’ll still have a phone, still scroll sometimes, still take the easy path when you’re tired.
The goal isn’t purity, but awareness. Can you notice the difference between desires that transform you and desires that just repeat themselves? Can you catch yourself in the moment of choosing the thin version when the thick version is available?
More importantly: Can you create space in your life for genuine aspiration? Can you commit to at least one pursuit that will require you to become someone new?
This doesn’t have to be grand. You don’t need to master classical music or learn ancient Greek (though you could). You could commit to a craft (e.g., baking bread, writing by hand, building furniture). You could join a practice community (e.g., a choir, a study group, a volunteer organization). You could take up a physical discipline that demands patience and rewards slowly increasing skill. You get the idea.
The key is that it has to resist easy commodification. It has to be something that can’t be made frictionless, can’t be sped up without losing its essential character. It has to embed you in specific relationships or traditions. It has to require dialogue with people who’ve gone before you.
And it has to be pursued not for some external goal, not to optimize yourself, not to become more productive, not to signal virtue, but for its own sake, because the person you’ll become through pursuing it is someone you want to be.
Unavoidable Tension
Let’s be honest about what this requires. To pursue thick desires in a world optimized for thin ones is to accept ongoing tension. You’ll feel it constantly: the pull toward the easier path, the temptation to satisfy the feeling rather than undergo the transformation.
This tension is the friction between two conceptions of freedom. One says freedom is the ability to do what you want with minimal obstacles. The other says freedom is the capacity to become who you want to be.
Both are real. Both matter. But they can’t be fully reconciled. Every time you choose the thick path, you’re giving up the immediate satisfaction the thin path offers. Every time you commit to transformation, you’re accepting constraints on your future self.
The buffered self resists this. It wants to remain mobile, uncommitted, able to reassess everything at any moment. It experiences commitment not as liberation but as limitation.
But here’s what Taylor helps us see: The buffered self, for all its apparent freedom, is actually trapped. Trapped in the present moment, in its current configuration, unable to become anything fundamentally different. Real freedom isn’t the absence of constraints, but the capacity for self-transformation.
And that capacity requires accepting the constraints that make transformation possible: the obligations, the dependencies, the commitments you can’t easily undo.
Strip away the philosophical language, and here’s what we’re really asking:
Can you still become someone new? Or are you frozen, not by external constraints, but by the very freedom that was supposed to liberate you?
The great achievement of modernity was to free us from un-chosen obligations, inherited frameworks, imposed meanings. We gained the right to define our own good, shape our own lives, author our own stories.
But somewhere in that achievement, we lost something too. We lost the sense that some ways of living are qualitatively richer than others, not because authority says so, but because they expand your capacity for experience in ways you can’t anticipate. We lost the willingness to commit to pursuits whose payoff can’t be calculated in advance. We lost patience for anything that doesn’t deliver immediate gratification.
And in losing these things, we didn’t become more free. We became more trapped: in loops of empty satisfaction, in endless scrolling, in thin desires that reproduce themselves without remainder.
The way out isn’t backward. We’re not going back to cosmic hierarchies or un-challengeable frameworks. That world is gone, and there were good reasons for leaving it.
The way forward is through: toward a conception of agency that’s richer than mere choice, toward commitments that don’t feel like limitations, toward a self that’s defined not by its fixed preferences but by its capacity for transformation.
This requires recovering what aspiration really means. Not just wanting something, but becoming someone capable of wanting it properly: someone who can see its value, who has reorganized their life around it, who has been changed by the pursuit.
That’s one of the most reliable diagnostics: transformation (though not the only one, and not always a positive one). Thick desires also tend to be non-substitutable, to carry obligation, to integrate with your sense of identity in ways that resist easy commodification. If pursuing something leaves you unchanged, it’s probably a thin desire. It was just a signal firing in your brain, gone as soon as it arrived, leaving nothing behind but the need to fire again.
Consider this: When was the last time something you did required you to become different? Not just slightly better at something you already valued, but fundamentally transformed: capable of seeing value that was previously invisible to you, caring about things you couldn’t have cared about before?
If you can’t remember, if it’s been too long, then you know something has been lost. Not your freedom (you’re freer than ever to choose). But the freedom to become something other than what you are. The freedom that matters most.
The thick life isn’t waiting for permission. The infrastructure won’t shift to support it. The marketplace won’t suddenly optimize for transformation instead of gratification. If it’s going to exist, you have to build it yourself, deliberately, against the grain of everything around you.
You have to choose (not just once, but repeatedly) to pursue desires that demand you change. To accept obligations that constrain your future self. To commit to pursuits whose value you can’t yet fully see.
This is harder than scrolling. Harder than optimizing. Harder than staying buffered and safe. But it’s the only way back to meaning that doesn’t require giving up freedom. The only way to live in the modern world without being flattened by it.
The choice is there, every day. The question is whether you’ll keep choosing the thin version, or whether (just once, then again, then again) you’ll reach for something thick enough to transform you.
What are you pursuing that requires you to become someone new?
Taylor’s conception of the “immanent frame” describes a social imaginary in which both belief and unbelief become live options. See discussions in A Secular Age and analyses at The Immanent Frame.
Agnes Callard’s work on aspiration and proleptic reasons appears in her book Aspiration and in “Proleptic Reasons,” published in The Oxford Handbook of Reasons and Normativity.
Lindström, B., et al. (2021). “A computational reward learning account of social media engagement.” Nature Communications, 12, 1311. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19607-x
For an overview of algorithmic mechanisms and feedback loops in social media design, see Metzler, H., Garcia, D., & co-authors (2024). Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 19(6), 1185057. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231185057
Clark, L., & Zack, M. (2023). Engineered highs: Reward variability and frequency as potential prerequisites of behavioural addiction. Addictive behaviors, 140, 107626. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2023.107626