We’ve all met older people who realized too late that their desires were thin—for example, a person who looked forward to retirement for decades only to find out that attaining it left them unsatisfied. That’s because the desire to retire (not widely adopted until after World War II, by the way) is a thin desire, filled with mimetically derived ideas about the things one might do, or not do, in this ideal state. The desire to invest more time with family, on the other hand, is a thick desire—and the proof is that a person can start to fulfill it today and continue to fulfill it into
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