Excess can lead to growth and progress
Aristotle said that virtue is the mean between the extremes of deficiency and excess. When someone steals your parking spot, you’re virtuous if you’re neither a milquetoast nor a madman, but something in between — maybe you honk or display a well-chosen digit. Being virtuous, Aristotle thought, is a matter of being temperate, moderate, balanced.
Moderation is great advice for keeping body and soul together. You shouldn’t seek out unnecessary conflict when it means risking life and limb; you shouldn’t be a glutton because that may lead to painful disease; and you shouldn’t be a spendthrift if you can’t pay your utility bill.
But moderation is terrible advice for that part of life concerned with living — that is, making something out of your life. Once you’ve got the basics covered, being virtuous is a matter of committing to something and putting yourself behind it. It can be anything (except the illegal or immoral!): Raise a family, learn how to pilot an airplane, be crackerjack at your job, create a beautiful garden. Once you commit to doing something, your pursuit of it is not a matter of pinched, careful allotment of your time and energy, but of decided excess — of giving yourself over to it wholeheartedly.
It is only through meaningful and purpose-driven excess that you can get into what psychologists call “flow,” the idyllic state when you are so focused on what you’re doing that the rest of the world fades from view. It is only through excess that you can grow and deepen as a person. And it is only through excess that a society can progress: Think of the Internet, literature, mapping the human genome, and space travel. Without individual excess, the advancements of modern society we tend to take for granted — not to mention this forum for discussing the virtue of excess — would not exist.