![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
archershipsI’ve come to believe that this is good advice for some people: the “moderators.” They do better when they try to make moderate changes, when they avoid absolutes and bright lines.
For a long time, I kept trying this strategy of moderation – and failing. Then I read a line from Samuel Johnson: “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.” Like Dr. Johnson, I’m an “abstainer.”
When it comes to food, I'm definitely in the abstainer camp. It's much easier for me not to eat something at all, than to try to moderate my intake.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 01:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-31 01:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-01 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-02 06:01 am (UTC)Definitely a moderator here. I didn't believe in addiction for the longest time (till well into grad school), because it's not really a concept that makes sense to me. It seems incompatible with my intuitive notion of free will. But later I decided there must be something very different neurologically that goes on in some people that causes them to over-do things in some situations (or to completely abstain if they're having trouble with that) rather than chose to do everything with moderation.
I still have trouble empathizing with addiction, but I know enough people now who say that it is a real effect and that it has happened to them, that I believe it.
The most immediate example that stands out for me is smokers.. I just don't understand why someone would want to smoke more than a couple cigarettes a day. There are so many people who smoke a pack or more a day... and the answer is that they don't really want to, there is just something weird that happens in their brain that makes them do it anyway. I've never experienced this that I'm aware of, even though I smoked a cigarette a day for a year or more, before I eventually lost interest (and decided even though it wasn't much, it was still unhealthy). I never experienced the phenomenon people call "quitting" because I never felt like I was addicted in the first place... it was just a fun activity I did for a while, and then got bored with it later. Same thing with cocaine and other drugs I've experimented with.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-02 06:11 am (UTC)-livejournal-
I remember being baffled by several friends who deleted their journals, because they felt like they were spending too much time on lj. It not only felt confusing to me, but also morally wrong in some way to me. I have definitely gone through periods where I feel like I am spending too much time online, and my solution is always to cut back, never to delete my journal. Eventually, a close real-life friend did this and I got pretty pissed off at her, and confronted her on it. I told her she was being completely irrational, and all she had to do was just post less, not to deprive all the rest of us of her presense entirely. As you might expect, she was also pretty pissed at me for saying this, and argued to me that that was what she had to do in order to stop posting as much. I looked at her like she was crazy, and not only that, the latest string of people who had gone crazy. But this post of yours helps put that in perspective, and makes me feel like I owe her an apology... I may have just been assuming that everyone was a moderator, when different people work different ways.