In Favor of Giving Things Up
The human being is the only animal that can say no to treats. That’s what makes us special.
A hungry dog, fish, sheep, centipede – none of them can have their favorite food in front of them and voluntarily refrain from gobbling it up, unless it’s dangerous to do so. A trained dog might hold back for a bit, but it’s really just angling for another reward (pleasing its master) and it knows it’s getting the treat anyway.
The human being can – but might not – simply refrain from gobbling the fudge-covered Oreo sitting in front of him, however it feels to do so.
He might do that because he prefers a competing reward, such as losing weight or not having to brush his teeth again tonight. But he also might do it solely to free himself from the Oreo’s dominance over him. If you can’t not gobble the Oreo, it owns you. It will turn you into its marionette, operating your arms and mouth, insinuating itself into your mind, and then your body.
This danger is why basically every culture has some sort of fasting or renunciation practice – some formalized way of refraining from doing a thing that attracts you like a magnet. People have done it with food, sex, entertainment, comfortable bedding, even idle chit-chat, so that those things don’t turn you into their marionette. The more you can move independently of the things that tempt and comfort you, the more you can live your actual values – whether or not those values include the occasional well-enjoyed cookie or bottle of wine.
The main exception is our own modern, you-do-you culture. Our age rejects any whiff of asceticism, while also offering an infinite buffet of food, sexual stimulation, news, gossip, and entertainment. A million thinkpieces have described the suffering caused by overindulgence in these things. People are dying of depression and addiction and nihilism, yet if you stop watching the news people will say you “have your head in the sand,” and if you skip a single meal people will assume you have an eating disorder.
I don’t suggest we all go and join monasteries. But there’s perhaps never been a culture that would benefit more than ours from small, manageable experiments in renunciation. We’re like withered desert plants that avoid water out of fear of drowning. The great fear of our age is “feeling deprived,” rather than the consequences of excess: addiction, despair, lack of focus, and early death.
The transformation isn’t in the not-having but in the not-taking
If you give up sweets or TikTok for a month, you’ll notice some benefits from simply not having that stuff in your system.
That’s not the main reason to do it though. In my experience, the real power is in the exercise of restraint itself, not just in avoiding the negative effects of the thing. You can feel a loosening, a new tier of agency, when you voluntarily defeat the Oreo in a standoff.
In other words, you’d gain much more from not watching TikTok voluntarily than you would if it were simply unavailable to you. You’re gaining the ability to stand apart from it under your own strength, and that newly strengthened will can be applied elsewhere in your life.
An experiment in renunciation
For the month of December, with the exception of Christmas Day, I will eat nothing before 6pm except plain oatmeal for breakfast, and soup with two boiled eggs for lunch. I also must eat raw, unseasoned vegetables with every meal.
I want to do this precisely because some part of me really doesn’t want to. A cowardly homunculus in my brain believes I am such a delicate being that I can bear nothing less than complete hedonistic freedom. To live at all, I need a guaranteed right to consume any random cookie or Lindt chocolate ball that passes through my sight.
That part of me either masters me or it is my master. It drives or I drive. I want to develop the strength to let that hypothetical fudge-covered Oreo sit uneaten on that plate — forever.
But first let’s see if I can eat oatmeal with nothing else it. If this strikes you as crazy or weird, I urge you to consider how weird it is to live in a culture that makes a taboo of denying yourself anything you might want.
Something like 98% of human lives were lived with nothing approaching a guarantee of three meals a day. People would cross deserts for a chance at the level of food security I am still going to enjoy this December. And many of them still practiced fasting and other forms of formal sacrifice, viewing it as a necessary measure to stay upright and focused on what’s important.
If you want to do something like this too
I invite those of you who like this idea to give something up for December. Take something that attracts you with some level of magnetism, and give it up completely:
- Deep fried food
- Speaking of others in their absence
- Caffeine
- Complaining
- A troublesome phone app, or a few
- Alcohol
- White lies
- Certain types of seedy websites
- Meat
- News
- Political content
It doesn’t have to be a thing you think you should never indulge in. It just needs to be troublesome in some way, a thing you battle or bargain with. You will sacrifice it for a month in the name of growing your inner strength against its influence on you. (If it’s hard to give up, it does have some power over you.)
And you do need to give it a hard no. It’s much better to choose an easier sacrifice and give it up completely, without compromise, all 31 days, than to pick a tougher thing only do it halfway.
Of course, you want to avoid replacing your renounced thing with something equally troublesome – Instagram for TikTok, sugary snacks for fried snacks. You want to feel the absence of the thing, and enjoy the higher but subtler pleasure of steadfastness and temperance.
A Raptitude Forum
For the first time, I’m going to open a discussion forum for this experiment, rather than just keep my own log. That way people can post about their own renunciation project and how it’s going. This is sort of an experiment in itself – if it works I’ll probably do all Raptitude experiments this way.
If you enter your email address at this page, I’ll sort it out over the next few days and email you with instructions on how to post in the forum.
Meanwhile, think about what you want to do without in December – the thing whose puppet-strings you want to free yourself from.
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