Humans are the only animals that can say no to snacks. That’s what makes us special.
Hungry dogs, fish, sheep, centipedes – no one can avoid gobbling down his favorite food unless doing so is dangerous. A trained dog may hesitate, but it’s really just looking for another reward (to please the owner), and it knows it will get it no matter what.
human able – but probably not – just don’t wolf down the Oreos in front of him, no matter how it feels.
He may do this because he prefers competitive rewards, such as losing weight or not having to brush his teeth again tonight. But he might also be doing it just to free himself from Oreo’s hold on him. if you can’t no Gobble up the Oreos and it owns you. It turns you into its puppet, manipulating your arms and mouth, creeping into your mind and then your body.
This danger is why basically every culture has some kind of fasting or abstention practice—some formal way of avoiding doing things that attract you like a magnet. People do this with food, sex, entertainment, comfy bedding, and even small talk so that these things don’t turn you into their puppet. The more you can act independently of the things that tempt and comfort you, the more you can live your actual values—whether those values include enjoying the occasional cookie or bottle of wine.
The main exception is our own modern, you-do-you culture. Our era rejects any flavor of asceticism while also offering an unlimited buffet of food, sexual stimulation, news, gossip and entertainment. Millions of thinkers have described the pain caused by overindulging in these things. People are dying from depression, addiction, and nihilism, but if you stop watching the news, people will say you “bury your head in the sand,” and if you skip a meal, people will think you have an eating disorder.
I don’t suggest that we all join a monastery. But perhaps never has a culture benefited more from small, manageable experiments in abandonment than ours. We are like withered desert plants that avoid water for fear of drowning. The greatest fear of our time is “sensory deprivation,” not the consequences of excess: addiction, despair, inattention, and early death.
Change does not lie in “nothing”, but in “not demanding”
If you give up sweets or TikTok for a month, you’ll find some benefits in not having these things in your system.
But that’s not the main reason for doing it. In my experience, real power lies in restraint itself, not just in avoiding the negative aspects of something. When you voluntarily defeat Oreos in a face-off, you’ll feel a sense of relief, a new level of agency.
In other words, you gain far more from not voluntarily watching TikTok than from not being able to watch TikTok at all. You’re gaining the ability to get out of it on your own, and your newly strengthened will can be applied to other areas of your life.
Abandoned experiment
In December, except on Christmas Day, I don’t eat anything before 6pm, except for plain oatmeal for breakfast and two boiled egg soups for lunch. I had to eat raw, unseasoned vegetables at every meal.
I want to do this precisely because some part of me really No want to. A timid dwarf in my brain believed that I was such a fragile being that I could only tolerate complete hedonistic freedom. To survive, I need the guaranteed right to eat any random cookie or Lindt chocolate ball that passes my sight.
That part of me either dominates me or is my master. It drives or I drive. I wanted to build up the strength to keep the imaginary Oreo on my plate from ever being eaten.
But first let’s see if I can eat just oatmeal. If this sounds crazy or weird to you, I urge you to consider how weird it is to live in a culture where denying yourself is a taboo anything You might want to.
About 98% of people will not be able to have three meals a day throughout their lives. People will travel across the desert in search of food security level opportunities and I will still be enjoying those opportunities this December. Many of them still practice fasting and other forms of formal sacrifice, believing it to be necessary to maintain integrity and focus on important matters.
If you also want to do something like this
I invite those who like the idea to give something away in December. Take something that appeals to you with some level of appeal, and then ditch it entirely:
- Fried food
- talking about others when they are not around
- caffeine
- complain
- A troublesome mobile app, or several
- Alcohol
- white lie
- Certain types of bad websites
- Meat
- information
- political content
It’s not necessarily what you think you should do no way Get addicted to it. It just needs to become troublesome in some way, something you need to fight or bargain with. You will sacrifice it for a month to build your inner strength to fight its effects on you. (If it’s hard to give up, it does have some power over you.)
You do need to give it a difficult No. It is much better to choose an easier sacrifice and give up completely, without compromise, for a full 31 days, than to choose a harder thing only to give up halfway.
Of course, you’ll want to avoid replacing what you’re giving up with something equally troublesome — Instagram for TikTok, sugary snacks for fried snacks. You want to feel the absence of things and enjoy the higher but subtler pleasures of steadfastness and moderation.
Rapture Forum
For the first time I will be opening a discussion forum for this experiment rather than just keeping my own log. This way people can post their abandoned projects and their progress. This is an experiment in itself – if it works, I’ll probably do all Raptitude experiments this way.
If you enter your email address on this page, I will put it together over the next few days and email you instructions on how to post in the forum.
In the meantime, think about what you don’t want to do in December—the things you want to free yourself from its puppets.
Tim Schell!
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