Moderation – Week 3
Where I reflect on the ethics of abundance, our relationship with money, and the importance of collective norms for self-restraint.
La Grande Bouffe presents a set of French and Italian bourgeois eating themselves to death over the course of a long week-end. Allegory of our contemporary world, or rather the late 1970s, when the movie was made. Things have gotten worse since. Yet, I remember a morbid fascination for the plot, and fantasising death over a tray of gherkins and charcuterie.
On my third week with Moderation, I trained myself to leave food on the plate. I’m primed for gluttony, and wanted to reconnect with my embodied appetite. Resist end-times hedonistic anxiety, and deepen my appetite for life as it comes. Eat as much as I need, trusting there will be more later – rather than storing up fat and pleasurable memories in preparation for a looming downturn.
I’ve caught myself treating food as a thing to do. Not only would I eat too much ‘because I must finish’, but it would shift my attention towards indifferent goals. Is it a good thing for the world that I ate up the chocolate in the pantry, rather than leaving half a bar in there? Should I be proud? Plus, it’s a Sisyphean task. There is endless supply in the supermarkets, and I refill the shelves as soon as I empty them. Leaving food on the plate is a deliberate reset, untraining my brain to feel the need to finish, and reconnect eating with appetite.
At the Commons, I bring a daily jar of coconut, LSA, chia seeds and grapes, which I mix with oats, apple and soy milk. It’s a simple healthy lunch experiment, and I’m happy to leave some in the bowl. It works too. In times of abundance, our lives need editing: find a more pleasant shape by removing, not adding things. A few days in, I can feel a sense of physical lightness, and greater attentional bandwidth. My stomach is flatter, my back stronger from core strength exercises, and my libido rises. Desire has replaced satiety.
**
Drinking is fun. Friday night at Hippo, I have a pint of Narwhal Imperial stout with a friend. It’s a known favourite: 4.4 standard drinks in one can, 11.8% alcohol, with flavours of molasses and brown sugar. My mood lifts. I share my joy at having this friend around, the warm air, life in Melbourne. If it wasn’t that I always struggle to sleep afterwards, I would drink more. It’s so pleasant. I haven’t tried many other drugs, but imagine they respond to the same impulse. If we can access well-being in a can, why wouldn’t we go for it?
Well I wouldn’t, in part because my grandmother was so firmly against them. She lived in a small village of Lorraine, and her cleaning lady’s daughter was addicted to cocaine. ‘She’s not like you and me’, she said, ‘She’s got part of her nose missing.’ My grandmother was highly judgemental. Her cleaning lady was poor, yet she would give her daughter money, all of it would be spent on drugs, and then she would get in debt. At least that’s what I was told. ‘When I pay her I tell her, don’t give it to your daughter to spend on drugs. But I know she does. And then she comes crying. But I don’t pity her. If it was my daughter, it wouldn’t go down like this, no it wouldn’t.’ Then she would look at me sternly. ‘Never mess with drugs.’ The women in my family were quite sexually liberated, but when it came to food, they were constantly judging each other, on weight and portion size. Guilt as a pathway to self-control.
I take a different path in this exploration of moderation. Restraint as a pathway to pleasure sounds like oral pop tantra, sure – but then, that’s kind of how it works. Friday lunchtime, before a call, I devour three slices of smoked salmon and a ball of fresh mozzarella. Then I wash it down with muscat grapes. All in a few minutes. Favourite foods, gulped down directly from the fridge. I put a small piece of mozzarella in the bin as a token, but the rest ends up inside of me. Sure, in the moment, I made a roar of pleasure, like I imagine a bear would when gorging on fish in peak season. But then I feel ambivalent. Not so much guilt as frustration. I want more and I want to stop. There’s a learning here. If I don’t set a boundary first – edit my food into meal-sized portions – I will end up swallowing part of the global food supply chain, and find myself hooked.
That gluttonous moment was a missed opportunity to fast on Friday. So, I shifted my weekly fast to the next day, while on a long walk along coastal marshlands, Aircraft to Williamstown. A friend is with me, and kindly joins on the fast. It’s getting easier – maybe through pure force of habit, or because fasting is best combined with distraction and rest. Unless it’s a side effect of me forgetting, and foraging a few figs along the way. Thirty kilometres and many litres of sweat later, we finish at a beach kiosk with a diet coke, worse for wear but satisfied.
**
Over that walk, we spoke at length of our relationship to money, noting how much early family discourses and experiences shaped it, yet how rarely we reflect on it. My father worked in real estate, then asset management. For better or worse, I taught me to think of money like an investor more than a labourer. By default, I think of earnings as proportional to risk, not work. You might get a disproportionate windfall for a good deal, or spend weeks working towards one that never comes good, and get nothing for it. Also, there is no justice to the system, only privileged positions. All of this gave me the strongest vaccine against any belief that money signifies anything other than itself. Hence my dislike, probably, for merging profit and social good. I see them following radically different logics. Pretending otherwise is delusional.
We live in a decadent merchant culture where everything is on sale. Moderation, in that world, has been reframed as avarice: storing up your potential instead of spreading your talent. Over the week, I read Lietaer Rethinking Money, on the role of alternative currencies, driven not by interest but demurrage – a deliberate decline in their value over time, to encourage circulation. By contrast, I note my early fascination for interest. My aunt had given me quite a large sum as a child, maybe 10,000 or 20,000 francs, or about 1500 euros. My parents put it in a savings account, and I could see the amount rise in a little booklet. If I don’t spend, that’s what I thought back then, I can have more later, and get ahead of those who weren’t given as much, or chose to spend it. My present financial situation is, in part, the result of this and further early privilege, combined with a personal preference for delayed gratification. From about 20, I got on a scholarship journey, and spent less than I earned. Control over my appetite, combined with family privilege, yielded a very free life.
It wasn’t the only thing I was taught, though. I have another childhood memory. On the way back from holidays in Corsica, I’m on the ferry with my mum and my step-father. My step brother keeps nagging them for coins to play an arcade game. They offer me some, for fairness, but I hold back. ‘I don’t feel like playing, thanks.’ Meanwhile, I keep count. I’m eyeing a robot in the toy store. When my step-brother’s had about as much as the price of the robot, I step up and ask for my share. My logic is harshly rebuked. I still remember this as terrible injustice, but maybe they were trying to teach me something. Or they simply wanted peace. If I got a robot, he would want one as well, and they would end up either with a jealous kid or spending too much. Hedonism is endearing. Moderation attracts envy.
As we pass by Altona, my friend shares a story. He once met with a guy who was interested in finance and investing. That guy was obsessed with winning. He was raving at length about a mistake 7/11 had made at the time. They had a voucher system, where you could get a free can of something. Except, the vouchers were designed in a way that you could just print as many of them as you wanted. That guy was exultant, ‘you could print thousands, imagine’. He’d been to the shop and gotten eight free cans, he was planning to grab more, thrilled at the thought of something for nothing. My friend was confused by that behaviour ‘What will you do with all those cans? Couldn’t you just get two? And why feel so much joy that someone else messed up?’ That reaction is precisely one of the many reasons I like that friend.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Moderation teaches us to stop, pause and refrain. Trumps said of Putin invading Ukraine ‘he’s doing what anybody would’. Unless they chose not to take advantage of the situation. Which, in some cultures, anybody would. We all lead by example, and shape our collective default settings. If we want to live in a world where people will not press their advantage on the first occasion, we need some sort of collective mechanism. Peace calls for norms that frame the sheer pursuit of winning as a shameful goal.