A Defense of Appetite - by Joe Spano - 0x4A6F65 (Joe)

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A Defense of Appetite<br>Don't forget to be human.

Joe Spano<br>Jul 19, 2026

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I cook quite often, primarily traditional Italian dishes (or my interpretation of them since some ingredients aren’t readily available). What stands out is that certain dishes require nothing but my presence for about three-quarters of the cooking time. I stir, taste, smell, and occasionally taste again, and maybe one more time. Cooking in this manner is likely the least efficient activity in my life. By every metric that society currently values, it only results in a meal (fuel, as the optimizers would like you to consider), and I’ve come to believe that this kind of cooking is one of the last places where I feel fully human.

Something that just needed me to be around (Photo Credit: Me)<br>I bring this up because I have read a few pieces on the “millennial midlife crisis”1 and my favorite is how it is forming a barbell: loud public optimization on one end, quiet retreat on the other, and a hollowed-out middle where impulse spending used to live. The detail that stopped me is about what’s humming underneath both ends. GLP-1 drug craze doesn’t just suppress hunger, they lead towards less craving generally. Less alcohol, less impulse buying, less of the itch, and arguably less fun. A generation is entering the statistical bottom of the happiness curve at the exact moment wanting itself became adjustable, and the open question, what a midlife crisis looks like with the craving turned down, is the most interesting question I’ve encountered this year.<br>I keep thinking about what happens to the human experience.<br>0x4A6F65 (Joe) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support the human experience, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Wanting and liking are different machines

The behavioral science here is genuinely useful, so let me spend a paragraph on it. Wanting and liking run on separable systems in the brain. The research tradition behind this calls wanting “incentive salience,” the pull toward a thing, and it operates on different circuitry than the pleasure of actually having the thing. You can crave something you no longer enjoy, which every lapsed smoker already knows (and who I also just triggered their desire for a cigarette, sorry about that), and you can enjoy something you never crave. The systems usually travel together, so we experience them as one feeling, but they can be turned independently, and now, at population scale, we’re turning one of them.<br>Here’s what worries me about that, and it has nothing to do with the medicine itself. For people fighting metabolic disease or addiction, muting the wanting is mercy, full stop, and I’d hand the prescription over myself. What worries me is the ambient ideology arriving alongside it, which treats wanting as such, appetite in the broad sense, as a design flaw in the human being. Something to be managed down. And that ideology didn’t need the drugs to get started. The drugs just gave it a molecule.<br>We were already dimming the senses

Look at what optimization culture did to sensation before a single peptide shipped. Food became macros, and a meal became a delivery mechanism for protein targets. Sleep became a score you receive in the morning like a performance review from your own mattress. A walk became steps. Music became focus-enhancing background at 40 hertz. Wine became a toxin with a public relations problem. Every sensory channel a human has got converted from an experience into an input, evaluated by what it does for the project of the self, and the project of the self somehow never includes the self having a nice time.<br>Desai’s piece has an image from the retreat end of the barbell that I can’t shake: dopamine sites in South Korea, where stressed users browse fake restaurant menus and fill shopping carts they’ll never check out. The ritual of wanting, preserved. The object, deleted. She reads it as consumption with the acquisition removed, which is right, but flip it around and it’s even stranger. It’s appetite in a terrarium. We’ve built little enclosures where wanting can still run around safely, because we no longer trust it loose in our lives.<br>And between the optimization that quantifies every sensation and the simulation that domesticates every desire, a whole territory sits abandoned. It’s the territory where the finer things live, and I want to be precise about what I mean by finer, because I don’t mean expensive.<br>The finer things are mostly free and mostly skipped

The finest things I have access to cost almost nothing and demand the one currency the optimized life refuses to spend, which is undefended attention. A piece of fruit eaten over the sink or an espresso drunk standing up, as a punctuation mark rather than a fuel delivery. Better yet, a dinner that runs two hours because nobody ended it. These are not consumption in any sense a dashboard...