Choosing Enough
Temperance is not a popular word. It sounds old, restrictive, maybe even judgmental. In a culture built on abundance, the idea that restraint might be a virtue can feel out of step with the times. We live in an environment designed to encourage more. More food, more drink, more convenience, more outrage, more things. Our phones vibrate with ads tailored to our desires before we even realize they’re there. Social media platforms are engineered to hold attention by amplifying what provokes us most. The goal is not nourishment or clarity. It is engagement. And engagement thrives on excess.
This abundance is not evenly shared, and I am keenly aware of that. Through my work in the community and in social justice spaces, I am often reminded of how fortunate my life has been. This is not a story about deprivation or self-pity. It is a story about reassessment. When everything is available all the time, the question is no longer what we can have, but what we should choose to take in. Temperance enters precisely here. Not as denial, but as discernment. Not as moral purity, but as self-possession.
For most of my adult life, I lived with the quiet assumption that abundance was harmless, even deserved. Food was plentiful. Portions were generous. Convenience was everywhere. I did not think of myself as indulgent. I thought of myself as normal. But, over time, “normal” began to show its cost. Just two and a half years ago, I was overweight, pre-diabetic, and managing high blood pressure. At my age, the path forward was not ambiguous. If nothing changed, the later years of my life would be narrower, more painful, and increasingly constrained.
For the Stoics, this kind of restraint had a name: temperance. It was not a minor virtue, nor a private preference. It was one of the four pillars of a well-lived life. Temperance (reasoned self-command over desire) meant mastery over impulse, moderation in pleasure, and steadiness in response. It was the capacity to pause before acting, to choose rather than react. In a world that constantly tugs at our desires, temperance was how a person stayed free.
When the Stoics spoke of appetite, they were not talking only about food. Appetite meant desire in its many forms. The pull toward comfort. The urge to consume. The craving for approval, stimulation, certainty, or outrage. Imagine scrolling endlessly through social media, not out of interest, but in search of a fleeting sense of validation, each like and comment a shallow yet addictive affirmation. Picture the sudden urge to purchase yet another item online, promising satisfaction but often delivering only a temporary thrill. Appetite is what reaches for more before we have asked whether more will actually serve us. Food is one expression of it, but hardly the only one. We have appetites for possessions, for attention, for reassurance, for being right. Temperance is the discipline that teaches us to notice those hungers before they quietly begin to run our lives.
Seen this way, temperance has very little to do with deprivation. It is about discernment. About learning the difference between what satisfies and what merely distracts. The Stoics understood that unexamined desire does not make us happier or more fulfilled. It makes us restless. We move from one indulgence to the next, mistaking motion for progress and stimulation for meaning. Temperance interrupts that cycle. It asks a simple but difficult question. Is this enough?
This insight is not unique to Stoicism. Eastern traditions arrived at a similar understanding through different paths. Buddhism, for example, identifies craving as a central source of suffering, not because pleasure is inherently wrong, but because attachment keeps the mind unsettled and dissatisfied. The object of desire may change, but the pattern remains the same. Wanting intensifies. Satisfaction fades. The mind reaches again. Across centuries and cultures, the same warning appears. A life driven by unchecked appetite, whether physical or mental, becomes harder to inhabit with calm or clarity.
We live in a time of unprecedented abundance, and not just of material goods. We are surrounded by choice, convenience, and stimulation at a scale no previous generation has known. Supercenters stock aisles with more options than a person could meaningfully compare. Restaurants offer portions large enough to dull hunger long before they satisfy it. Our phones place endless entertainment, news, and commentary in our pockets, available at every idle moment. None of this is accidental. Abundance has become the baseline, and excess is quietly normalized.
What has changed most dramatically is not how much we can consume, but how precisely our appetites are targeted. Social media platforms are designed to capture and hold attention because attention is the commodity being sold. Algorithms learn what provokes us, what reassures us, what angers us, and what keeps us scrolling. Outrage is especially effective. It sharpens focus, creates urgency, and makes disengagement feel like moral failure. In this environment, temperance is no longer just about resisting temptation. It is about recognizing when our attention is being pulled away from us, one click at a time.
The Stoics warned that a person ruled by appetite is easily controlled, and that warning feels newly relevant. When desire is constantly stimulated, the capacity for judgment weakens. We react more than we choose. We consume more than we need. We confuse intensity with importance. This applies as much to information as it does to food or possessions. A steady diet of alarm and indignation leaves the mind tired and brittle, convinced that everything is urgent and nothing is enough.
Temperance offers a way through this noise. Not by retreating from the world, but by choosing what we allow to shape us. It asks us to notice when abundance stops serving life and starts eroding it. When more choices bring less clarity. When constant engagement leaves us less present. In a culture that treats attention as fuel, restraint becomes a quiet act of self-respect.
To practice this, consider a simple Stoic exercise called the “evening review.” Each evening, take a moment to reflect on the day. Identify instances in which abundance contributed positively and instances in which it may have detracted. Ask yourself if there were moments when excess distracted or overwhelmed you. By actively recognizing these patterns, you cultivate temperance as a tangible skill, realigning your daily life with clarity and intention.
For me, the first place this reckoning became unavoidable was in my own body. For years, I lived with the assumption that abundance was harmless, even deserved. I did not think of myself as indulgent. I thought of myself as normal. But normal began to show its cost. Just two and a half years ago, I was overweight, pre-diabetic, and managing high blood pressure. At my age, the trajectory was clear. If nothing changed, the later years of my life would be smaller and more constrained.
What surprised me when I finally made changes was not how hard restraint was, but how reasonable it felt. I did not adopt a life of denial. I learned how to eat better, eat less, and still feel satisfied. Hunger became a signal rather than an enemy. Fullness stopped being a goal. I was not forcing myself to do without. I was discovering what enough actually felt like.
That lesson did not stay confined to food. Once I learned to recognize appetite in the body, I began to see it elsewhere. The same impulse that reaches for another helping reaches for another purchase, another headline, another hit of reassurance or outrage. The patterns repeat. Excess promises satisfaction and delivers restlessness. Moderation promises less and delivers clarity. The body was simply the first place I was willing to listen closely enough to notice.
That recalibration deepened when my work situation changed. A job loss later in life has a way of quickly stripping away comforting assumptions. Not just about income, but about identity and security. I was not suddenly without resources, and I do not dramatize that moment. But I was forced to look more honestly at what I actually needed to live well, rather than what I had grown accustomed to carrying along.
The question turned out to be freeing. When spending slows, and purchases are no longer automatic, desire becomes visible. You notice how often want disguises itself as a necessity. How comfort turns into clutter. Temperance enters here not as austerity, but as clarity. It separates what sustains from what merely fills space.
What emerged was not loss, but relief. Fewer purchases meant fewer decisions. Fewer possessions meant less mental noise. Enjoyment sharpened rather than diminished. Meals tasted better when they were simpler. Experiences mattered more than objects. I was not learning to live with less dignity or less joy. I was learning to live with less distraction.
Western religious traditions echo these concerns. In Christian ethics, the danger is rarely pleasure itself, but excess dulling the soul. The warning is not against having, but against clinging. Abundance becomes hazardous when it leads us to believe that comfort is the goal or that security can be purchased. The language differs from Stoicism, but the concern is familiar. A life ordered around more quietly erodes attentiveness and responsibility to others.
Modern science reaches similar conclusions without moral language at all. Research in nutrition, psychology, and neuroscience shows how abundance overwhelms systems designed for scarcity. Highly processed foods bypass satiety cues (see the Yale 2019 study). Endless novelty fragments attention, and digital platforms exploit reward pathways that evolved for survival, not constant stimulation. The result is not satisfaction, but fatigue. Not freedom, but compulsion.
Temperance, seen this way, is not a nostalgic virtue. It is an adaptive skill. It restores balance between desire and judgment in conditions where that balance is constantly disrupted. It protects attention, preserves energy, and reestablishes choice where habit has taken over. Science does not contradict the ancients. It confirms them.
Temperance does not announce itself loudly. It shows up in small, uncelebrated decisions. What you choose not to buy. When you stop scrolling past midnight. What you allow yourself to want, and what you let pass. In a culture that treats appetite as something to be endlessly fed, restraint becomes a quiet form of strength. Reflect on your day and consider a gentle challenge: skip one purchase you don’t truly need or avoid one late-night scroll. Let this small experiment open a window into the kind of freedom and clarity that choosing enough can offer, even within the next 24 hours.
This is why the Stoics placed temperance alongside wisdom, courage, and justice. Without it, the other virtues exhaust themselves. Wisdom becomes cleverness in the service of desire. Courage hardens into recklessness. Justice burns hot and then burns out. Temperance steadies them all.
What I have learned is that temperance does not shrink the world. It clears it. When excess recedes, what matters comes into focus. Food tastes better when it is not endless. Attention deepens when it is no longer scattered. Joy, when it arrives, feels cleaner and less anxious, because it is no longer competing with a thousand other wants.
Temperance is not about becoming austere or detached. It is about becoming present. About choosing enough, and discovering that enough is not a compromise but a relief. In a world built to keep us reaching, temperance teaches us how to stand still without fear. It returns us to ourselves. And from that place, life becomes not smaller, but more honest, more inhabitable, and more fully our own.
*Full disclosure: I literally wrote Choosing Enough on my tablet while in the cathedral of More (A Walmart Supercenter). Fluorescent lights. End caps screaming deals. Aisles engineered to keep you drifting. If the essay needed a silent field test, I couldn’t have picked a better one. I was waiting on the installation of a new set of much-needed (not wanted) tires, and couldn’t help but at least wander around a bit.
