Moderation – Week 1
In 2025, I will explore the four cardinal virtues from the Aristotelian, Stoic and Catholic tradition – wisdom, moderation, justice, courage – in thirteen cycles of four weeks, and share my learnings in the form of a reflective meditation.
From thirteen weeks exploring moderation in 2017, I derived one core insight. It is not a form of self-limitation. Rather, it is about experiencing more pleasure and nourishment with less external input. Moderation is not a blunting of the senses, or a retreat from materiality. It is a deliberate attempt to increase both my sensitivity to the world, and my capacity to metabolise it. As a result of which, I will be content with less.
I come from a family that places great emphasis on food. My grand-mother used to quote her father’s pre-dinner motto: ‘little belly, rejoice rejoice, every penny I earn is for you.’ I live in a place and period of extreme material abundance. I am a gay man in a culture that supports sexual indulgence. How should I navigate all this with moderation?
I set myself a comically simple goal for the week: chew slowly. This is a major break of habit for me. My father wolfs down his food, as do I. In fact, I have a precise memory of the first time I consciously chose to eat slowly. I was on a plane, coming back from a trip to the US. I had a heavy stomach, I was reading a book about introversion and the power of focus. I decided to change pace. I can still remember the feeling of slow-chewing on airplane lettuce, butter on a bread-roll, and chocolate pudding. I uttered moans of joy in my seat. And yet – that moment stands out as unique. After landing, I reverted to wolf.
For this week at least, the practice worked, surprisingly so. At my co-working space, I take a pause for lunch. I sit alone at a table in the back, and slow chew grated carrots with hummus and coriander. I find myself entering a state of quasi-orgasm, as carrots crack under my teeth, and lemon squashes around my taste buds. It repeats, with every meal.
I extended this deliberate slow pace to the rest of my movements, occasionally at least. Walking around, I would slightly reduce my speed and pay close attention to my bodily sensation. Result: an oozing sense of wellbeing. Taking notes in my notebook, in preparation for this post, I experienced the same feelings: the slightly slower movement of the pen caused ripples of sensual joy.
This increased attention to my body made me notice another phenomenon, which I came to call ‘the trance’. I’m working on a text that resists, and find myself in loops of Minesweeper, scrolling on my phone, or searching through the menus of a potential restaurant, absorbed in the screen. I am no longer aware of my physical self, except where my eyes tense up. It is certainly not pleasurable. A short mindful pause is enough to step out of the trance, but I keep finding myself caught in it.
Last year, I translated a short book written by my friends and FOGA co-founders Corin Ism and Markus Amalthea Magnuson: Slow Internet. In short, it’s an appeal to bring the principles of the Slow Movement to Internet development, in a call to reclaim that technology for human flourishing. One of the threads running through the book is that today’s Internet rarely leaves us fulfilled – designed as it is for addictive attachment, in the service of ad revenues. It’s a machine optimised to stimulate all sorts of appetites: the opposite of contentment. Slowing down, in a deliberate effort to be more satisfied with less, is a radical departure from the logic of the Internet – whose design elicits the trance.
As I mindfully resisted the trance and slow chewed my way through the week, I obviously wondered why this is not my default mode. The first hypothesis was that it would give me more pleasure than I can handle – but then, why couldn’t I handle that much? Thinking one step further, I came to see that this place and period of extreme abundance is also geared towards frustration. By cultivating satisfaction, rather than running after the next shiny object, I work against social design. The trance is our collective default. In a world optimised for desire, contentment is maladaptive.
**
How can we cultivate moderation when the world around us is designed for excess? Twenty five years ago, I was arguing that sustainable living – and social peace – would require a ban on publicity. We can’t blame people for their excessive desire, and all associated consequences, when we’re constantly bombarded by messages to want more. I was amazed how low the bar is for myself, in terms of what would count as austerity. On Tuesday night, I felt an urge to get ice-cream. Instead, I went out to buy milk at the supermarket, and made semolina pudding with nutmeg, prunes, and a touch of sugar. Home-made sweets would surely bring greater sensory connection, with the added benefit of saving money. I was indeed contented, with a touch of pride on top, but the next day, new cravings returned.
We are not self-contained beings. We must eat, and drink, and feel our way through the world. We must constantly replenish ourselves as we live. Moderation is not a movement towards higher realms of self-reliance, but an effort at maintaining homeostatic balance in this ever-changing environment. It’s not linear progress against a static background, but constant compromise in a dynamic context, inside and outside of ourselves. Wednesday night was hot. I was bothered. I put a fan on and stood up to drink. I sweated more, cooling me down. My sleep was patchy. I slept in late to compensate. I started work later. My goals for the day would have to shift or, with the prospect of another hot night, sticking to the plan would mean a late finish, stress, and the risk of yet further oscillation.
At one point in the week, I had a conversation with a friend on goal setting, and what makes it hard. When we can articulate a clear picture of what we want – when it’s a simple form of linear growth – we can rely on discipline and expert advice to get there. Lose weight, build muscle, make money: all this is not very difficult to plan or achieve, even factoring in occasional turbulence. But most of the time – and for all the more important decisions we make – we don’t have a clear end state in mind, nor a clear path forward. We must adapt our goals and plan as we go. Whatever move in whatever direction is in large part a way to learn more about whatever drive invites us to go there.
A vague desire based on intuition sets us in a certain direction. We move ahead to learn about what we want. And as we do, we face unexpected difficulties. Then we must discern. When something feels wrong, is it a sign that we pushed too far too fast in the wrong direction and need to change course – that we’re pursuing somebody else’s desire, not ours – or is it a normal obstacle on our path that we must courageously go through?
This is where moderation can serve, as a precondition of wisdom. By refining my sensitivity, I can better judge in the moment whether I ordered more than I can swallow, or should finish what I started. By building a habit of slowing down, I gain extra time for discernment. Moderation builds a reflective feedback loop to test and adapt my goals in a dynamic world.
**
My commitment to marking days entirely off and set a daily regime of physical exercise both proved highly positive. Another thing I wanted to weave in through the year was fasting – and settled for one day each Moderation Week.
Fasting is not a practice I ever experimented with. Even in 2017, the most I did was cut meat and coffee for a period of Lent. So, I started with a mild version, suggested by a close friend from India. A nurturing breakfast early in the morning, fruit for lunch, and a good meal in the evening, with unlimited access to water and peppermint tea through the day. By 10:30 am, I started obsessing about food, and let myself get into the trance to blank off those thoughts. By 11:30, I was completely off balance, restless, incapable of writing. I fret, I grumble, I lean into the trance. Resolving to get something done, I accept a cheat at 4:00pm, with a cup of English breakfast tea and a dash of milk, that instantly puts me at peace. I have ninety minutes of mindless work, and leave to meet a friend.
This reaction was in part physiological, glucose dependent metabolism or whatever else. It was in part a lack of wisdom – that I set myself to write up the first post in this series on my first fasting day. But the instantaneous ease I felt after a dash of milk tells me that it’s also largely psychological. Fasting was a constraint. I don’t like them. Which is concerning. What if I had to face proper scarcity – not replacing store-bought ice-cream with homemade pudding, but a genuine shortage, or other drastic reduction to my sensory pleasure, imposed by the circumstances. Could I still function then?
**
My take on moderation comes with a queer touch. This is, at least, how I engaged with the sexual aspect of it. Back in 2022, at a Regen Melbourne event, when asked about our hopes for Melbourne in 2030, I provocatively put forward a vision that included ‘glitter and lots of sex’. It was a reaction to the sense of puritanical earnestness I often experience in climate-related and other do-gooder forums. Sure, we must protect the world, but what for? Besides, isn’t sex the most environmentally friendly source of pleasure we have?
On Thursday night, I accompanied a friend and lover to Wet on Wellington. As it turned out, it was Queer Night. I anticipated the usual crowd of gay men in their towels with a few trans people in the mix. Not so: there were gangs of Gen-Z friends in all versions of the gender spectrum chatting in the pool, bisexual couples in the jacuzzi, even two women on a date. The vibe was chatty, like an old-school queer venue – but in the mix was something else: curious straight men, attracted by the sexual abundance of a queer space.
Gay sauna have their implicit code. Everyone is at least open to sex. Looking is always ok. Gently touching is fine. People will decline an extended hand if they don’t want it. The presence of women – that’s how I read the room – moderated this usual silent approach, with getting to know you’s and explicit verbal consent. The presence of straight men – that’s how I read the room – brought a sense of possible danger, from bro-vibes (‘Hey mate’ in response to an insistent look in the jacuzzi) to roaming security through the labyrinth upstairs. But the presence of those people in the space also brought a sort of comedic chaos – best captured by this one question overheard upstairs, in a perplexed male voice, expressing a mixture of disbelief and titillation: ‘Fuck me in the ass?’
I derive my political optimism from my young adult involvement in queer movements: LGBTIQ+ rights may be the biggest social and political shift of the past fifty years, proving that radical change is possible. Back then, I put up a quote from Plato’s Symposium on the board assigned to the student group I led. “In Ionia and other places, and generally in countries which are subject to the barbarians, the custom is held to be dishonourable; loves of youths share the evil repute in which philosophy and gymnastics are held, because they are inimical to tyranny; for the interests of rulers require that their subjects should be poor in spirit, and that there should be no strong bond of friendship or society among them, which love, above all other motives, is likely to inspire.” A reminder that same-sex love is at the root of our European tradition, and has a long association with freedom.
A few weeks back, my partner jokingly spoke of embracing cabaret, to lean into the current Weimar era. Are we collectively heading towards a post-gender age of freedom and pleasure? Or is this just an exuberant interregnum, before a coming wave of punishing puritanism? What we want and therefore intentionally work towards will, at least in part, determine what will be. So we must spend some time considering it. The quest for homeostatic balance is not a purely static game: it accompanies movement. So what will we choose to balance towards? What will we take as markers of success, or progress – and what will be warning signs? What will we praise, monitor, and punish? All those questions should guide the way we practice moderation. They’re also central to the practice of justice. Which will be the focus of my next post.