Too little
Automatic filling
I will check this, then that, then return to the book.
A series of small invitations decides the evening’s shape.
Temperance
Let the evening have something besides the next update.
Readiness to moderate appetites rather than let them dominate judgment.
Temperance moderates appetites so they do not take over judgment. Here the appetite is for another update, clip, purchase or piece of input. A brief empty interval may feel unfamiliar without being a problem that needs solving. Choosing an input is different from accepting it automatically.
Temperance gives choice a turn before the next input
You meant to spend the evening with a book, but each short pause has become an invitation to check the phone. The story keeps losing its place to things you did not particularly want to know. You could tuck the device into a tiny bed, complete with a pillow for its exhausting social life. In practice, you put it somewhere suitable and return to the chapter. Soon the room is quiet enough for the story to become interesting again.
Finding the balance in Temperance
An illustrative everyday situation
Choose an evening’s reading without repeatedly accepting optional invitations from a phone.
A fitting response
Deliberate selection
I want to spend this part of the evening with the story.
You give a chosen pleasure room by declining competing inputs.
Pursued too far
Purity rules
Any use of a screen spoils an unhurried life.
A useful tool becomes the object of a moral purity contest.
The question is not whether the phone is present, but who is choosing.
When the situation changes
If you are waiting for an important message or using a device for access or support, checking can be the considered choice. The practice concerns an optional impulse.
What Temperance makes possible
A pleasure can deepen when it is not continually interrupted by a new offer. You may discover that you wanted the chapter, the conversation or the view from the window more than you wanted another update.
Temperance in ordinary life
An evening’s choice
Choose something you actually want to enjoy rather than moving through recommendations until bedtime arrives. Stay with the chapter or conversation, then let it end.
Leaving room for sleep
You reach the end of a programme and another begins its countdown. You are tired and would rather sleep. Stop there, without finding one more thing to finish first. Enough sleep deserves room in the day; it is not a reward for exhausting the list.
Nearby virtues, different work
Discernment
Discernment distinguishes useful information from apparent urgency; temperance moderates the urge to take in more.
Attentiveness
Attentiveness gives a worthy particular room; temperance can free that room from automatic competition.
Temperance and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: Deprivation as achievement
Making discomfort the goal mistakes self-denial for temperance. The relevant choice is proportionate use, not punishment.
Counterfeit: Aesthetic abstinence
Displaying an unused device while obsessing over the display changes the performance, not the appetite.
How to cultivate Temperance
Name the input you are reaching for.
Ask what you want from it.
Allow an optional check to wait without making a ceremony of refusal.
Try it today
During one ordinary pause, let an optional check wait briefly. If there is a real reason to use the device, use it; otherwise notice that an interval can remain unfilled.
Within the time available
Leave some pauses free from another input.
When you have more time
If you have an evening to arrange, choose what you would enjoy and leave room for sleep as well. Keep optional notifications out of the way while deciding how necessary messages will reach you. When the activity ends and you want to stop, let the last chapter or episode be the last. This is a choice about optional input, not a test of how easily you fall asleep.
Questions worth returning to
What am I seeking from this next input?
Would I choose it if it were not being offered now?
Keep the practice proportionate
Use ordinary optional inputs for this practice. It is not an instruction to restrict food, alter treatment, or treat dependency as a character defect.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
What? may not this that now I go about, be of the number of unnecessary actions?
Marcus Aurelius · Meditations · Book IV, XX · Meric Casaubon translation, 1634 · excerpt
Marcus inserts a question before another action. Before opening an optional feed, ask what the action is for instead of assuming the available moment must be filled.
I love a broad margin to my life.
Henry David Thoreau · Walden · Sounds · English original, 1854 · excerpt
Thoreau values room around activity. An evening without continual optional input can let a chosen pleasure deepen; the reader need not adopt his whole arrangement of life.
It is not so much that they will go, as it is that they cannot stand still:
Montaigne describes activity that has become compulsion. An optional check is different when it is chosen rather than used automatically to escape a pause.
There is more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the amount.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Essays, First Series · Prudence · English original, 1841 · excerpt
Emerson shifts attention from accumulating more pleasure to distinguishing its qualities. The next item is not necessarily the one you most want to give time to.
but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay.
Epictetus inserts an interval before a promised pleasure carries us away. Applied to optional input, the pause creates a chance to choose; it is not a demand for deprivation.
He who stands on his tiptoes does not stand firm;
Laozi · Tao Te Ching · 24 · James Legge translation, 1891 · excerpt
The bodily image exposes an effort to exceed a fitting measure. The application is to needless reaching for more, not to a rule about posture or physical ability.
When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep.
Montaigne gives ordinary activities their own attention. A pause need not carry a second activity merely to justify the first; this is an invitation, not another rule for perfect rest.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the thirteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. A busy life is not a failed practice.