The Impossibility of Moderation

From alcohol to Oreos, it's just a no.

Both of my therapists told me to try moderation, but I don’t want to. Moderation feels like a made up thing, and anyone who does it is either lying or the human equivalent of a saltine cracker. It feels like something that’s only achievable by a person with no passion for anything. People just have a single cookie? I don’t buy it. They buy a thing of Oreos, or Thin Mints and eat one, and then leave the rest, and maybe two days later eat another one and then maybe they continue this until their friends drop by because these hypothetical people are also imaginary enough that they also have friends who come over to their houses. Maybe their friends help them finish off the thing of cookies by each having one or the cookies sit in the cupboard until they’re stale and have to be thrown away. Why did they even buy the cookies if they don’t like cookies enough to eat them until they feel so unwell they never want to see a sweet treat again? They should have bought an apple or a bag of oranges if they have so much command over their impulses.

When AI trapped me in a fleece jacket that’s also a blanket that’s also my arm.

You ever have a friend that smokes cigarettes in moderation but says they aren’t addicted? It confuses me. If I’m smoking, I want cigarettes for breakfast. I want to leave every social event that doesn’t welcome smoking early, so I can puff the magic nicotine dragon. I want to tuck myself into a patio chair and chain smoke until my fingers turn yellow and my lungs hurt. The first time I quit drinking in 2011, I also quit smoking, but kept having a cigarette every Friday night. That was the closest to moderation I had come, but I thought about that cigarette all week. It was like a touchstone to my addiction—keeping my toes in the water, and kept me just slightly hooked enough that when it came, the cigarette gave the illusion of stress release.

When I tell people I’ve quit sugar they feel bad for me. I kind of feel bad for myself too, but when I’m on it, I turn into an addict. There’s a snowball effect that has me increasing the calories I take in from sweet treats until I look back and can’t remember a day when I had a vegetable or substantial amount of protein. I’m trying to approach it with less sadness, taking advantage of everything I’ve noticed about the ease of quitting drinking when you think of it less as something you’re giving up and more as making room for good things. There’s a finite amount of time to spend with addictions. Moderation feels like drawing the addiction out across the days and weeks, stretching it so that you’re always considering whether to say no or yes.

A thing that really turned me off to my bad therapist, Dr. Chad

Break-up With a Therapist

was that when I tried to dive into the subject of device addiction, he acted like it was a trippy thing he’d never considered. I had just finished reading Stolen Focus, a book by Johann Hari about how our devices are destroying our ability to get into flow, and was in a panic about the future of everyone.

Dr. Chad had no practical advice except that it takes 21 days to form a habit and that his kids won’t watch a show unless all the episodes of the season are available to binge. Ha. Tell your own family to try moderation, Sir. Putting my phone in the lockbox that was suggested by Hari for hours did not reveal anything to me that I didn’t already know. I’m addicted to the simple act of picking it up and looking at it. I can’t even concentrate on my big screen (TV) or medium screen (laptop) when my little screen is in the room. I have fantasies about getting a flip phone, but there are so many things I have outsourced to my phone that I feel keep me in good habits too: the down-dog app that has me stretching, my podcasts that get me laughing or optimizing, my running tracker that helps me get a faster mile, my protein tracker where I log my protein once every two months to make sure I’m taking in enough to keep muscle, my Juxtaposer photo mash-up app where I cut and paste my face onto the body of a worm, my bank app that alerts me when I’ve spent all my vacation money on getting my nails done,

find my friends that tells me the location of my most precious people. I would have to carry around notebooks of charts and graphs and CDs and pens that inevitably explode in the bottom of my purse if I replaced my smart phone with a flip phone.

What was I talking about? Moderation. Yeah I think there are some of us who can’t quite master that skill, but what I’m finding is that I can get myself hooked on better things. I read my journal entries from January 2 and in it, I was beating myself up for losing one of the most rewarding things of my life when I stopped writing. Now I’ve gotten in the habit of writing daily, everything is truly becoming a story. I have to fight to stay in the moment instead of letting my mind weave the moment into some meaningful quilt that can be put up for consumption on the internet. I committed to publishing every Wednesday, and writing a book, so I have to put the phone down to get into flow. Because of Substack, I’ve gotten hooked on the quick pace of publication and gratification. I might be putting out ideas that haven’t fully formed yet, but that’s okay. I can get caught trying. Is someone going to unsubscribe, call the cops, say I’m a bad writer? It doesn’t matter. It’s all 0’s and 1’s on a medium, small, or large screen after all.

What I mean to say is that I’m sorry about this. I binged on publishing Sunday and Monday, and I could just not today, but also I must because I’ve gotten myself hooked on Wednesdays. Also tell me if the embeds are annoying. Substack told me they’re a fancier way to include links, but they seem kind of distracting. Stolen Focus strikes again.