Moderation – Week 7
Where I look back to the year so far, and reflect on living in abundance, how to resist, and the side questions of money, achievement and humility.
Halfway through this project, I decided to look back and read through my first six posts: what I did, what I learned, and what new insights emerged about moderation.
The world I live in is lubricated by material abundance. As a child, I was trained to treat nature as infinity bounty. It’s only later that I became aware of planetary limits, and felt the need for a shift. This is the background against which I’ve been thinking about moderation.
I turned my attention to myself, and observed where moderation was a struggle. I noted a certain tendency towards addiction: I’m prone to bingeing, whether it’s food, games, films, projects – or books. Three main areas of excess came forward.
Food. I think about food a lot. At a gathering, my mind kept returning to the sweets in the kitchen. My sense of celebration involves eating and drinking. Besides, the bar is low for what would count as austerity: once, I made a semolina pudding at home instead of buying ice-cream, and felt very moderate. As for my attempts at fasting, it felt like a severe constraint. Which made me wonder: how would I cope if I had to face actual austerity?
Screens. So much of my life is spent on a screen. I easily fall into the trance, sucked up by the Internet. I developed an addiction to a silly video game called Dragonsweeper. Playing it gives me a dopamine high that is hard to resist, especially when I work on complex things with no immediate outcome. And so the time goes.
Movement. I multitask a lot, placing my body in a state of regular tension, while I clumsily combine a range of different gestures. I try to do too much – and worse, because I’m disciplined, I actually do quite a lot. At a cost to my own balance.
What I also noted is that this is not a pure me-problem. I live in a world where desire has replaced satiety. This is a culture of extreme hedonism. Not only food is abundant, but all manners of energy. The Internet is optimised to make us want more. We’re obsessed with doing. So, moderation will involve resistance.
I tried three different avenues to do this:
Slowing down. On my first week, I chewed slowly. This is incredibly simple, yet a major break of habit. The result was ecstatic. I still remember a plate of carrots and hummus with lemon and coriander at my coworking space, that only took a few minutes more than usual to finish. Slowing down my movements had similar impact on pleasure, whether walking, writing, or typing. Meanwhile, this extra time would give me just a little more room for discernment, and less tension building up.
Stopping. Addiction is unsatiable desire for more. It’s eyes bigger than the belly, mouth faster the your stomach, consumption outpacing digestion. It’s eating food reframed as a to do list. But I will never be able to swallow the global food chain. Food, sex, news: there will always be more. At some point, stopping has to be my decision. To curb gluttony, I trained myself to leave food on the plate. And more generally, finish what I was doing, then move on – whether it’s enjoying a morning work station at a café, or falling into the trance. It’s accepting an end to things.
Fasting. The best way to resist a temptation is yield to it, quipped Oscar Wilde. That may be true for some – but there’s a different wisdom. As my grandmother would say, never mess with drugs. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Of course, we’re not self-contained beings, and are always adjusting for homeostasis. We may do without drugs, but not without food forever, movement, even screens. But if I can experiment with privation, I might at least reset my appetite. Fasting was hard. I would replace lunch with an apple and called it a fast. But hey, one thing it did was stick to the mind. Each fast felt like a celebration: in those times of extreme abundance, voluntary privation was a memorable holiday.
Somewhat surprisingly, the benefits of moderation were clear. In the virtue cycle, this was my week of pleasure. Yet I did not stick with it after the focus shifted. I still default to wolfing my food, multitasking, and letting the trance get a hold of me. I’m of this world, and in a world optimised for desire, content is maladaptive. If we want to cultivate moderation, we need more than personal discipline: we needs norms and systems around us.
This led me to secondary threads I noted, around the direct practice of the virtue.
The first was around money. Can moderation be framed as simply cutting cost? Or is it about more deeply reducing my dependence on external stimuli? What about unseen costs – is it moderate to buy cheaper food from the supermarket, and discount whatever plastic packaging? Should I not actually pay more to contain my appetite? Or what about greed: money you don’t spend is money you don’t have to earn. It might even return interest, all of which increases strategic freedom. Over the years, a measure of control over my appetites, combined with family privilege, yielded a very free life. But should this count as moderation?
The second was around achievement. After finishing a major task, I observed how success challenges virtue ethics, tempting us to a utilitarian view. No wonder I have a nagging fear of it: this is when positive habits are most likely to fall through. Moderation comes with humility. It’s laughing at my own lack of competence. It’s gardening, to stay rooted in the simple things. It’s remembering that not everything in our lives has to be solution oriented, or achieve something. It’s norms that frame the sheer pursuit of winning as a shameful goal.
The third was around embodiment. I curbed my desire to do more by repeating qi gong movements. It worked, as it does for millions of people around the world. Embodiment means accepting that there is something generic about me. It’s embracing sex as the most environmentally friendly source of pleasure we have – and the generic nature of that pleasure. It’s accepting death as the end point of embodiment, against the tech lords who gamble the world in hope of digital immortality.
Closer to home, there is a verbal aspect to moderation. On a call with a friend, reviewing her website, this little slogan kept echoing in my mind: “off with your headings”. My editorial calling involves a measure of containment. One of the traits I have least tolerance for is verbal incontinence. Moderation is learning to control your mouth, and listen better.