Gluttony set me free
Too much virtue is a vice
A few months ago, I decided to take stock of my bad habits. The first item on my list? You guessed it: gluttony. Gluttony, as in I love tasty food and I eat too much of it. Gluttony, as in I will devour almost an entire pepperoni and sausage pizza by myself. Gluttony, as in I love Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes with gravy, Kashmiri food, Mexican food, any kind of food really.
This hasn’t been good for my waistline, but funnily enough, it has been good for my personality and ego. When I was more svelte, I was, to put it in precise psychological terms, Judgy McJudgerson. Obsessed with my weight, monitoring what I ate closely, and a two-scale owner (one for the bathroom and one for the hallway). Sure, my body looked pretty good, but what did that get me? Dates with superficial jerks and friendships with similarly superficial people.
I finally wised up somewhere in my early 30s and realized that outward beauty and charm are no indicators of character or kindness. And that revelation set me free. Free to be me, to eat a little more, to exercise a little less, and to just plain relax. These last few years of pure, unadulterated gluttony have made me a nicer, more compassionate, more forgiving person. Literally and figuratively, I’m a softer, squishier version of my former self. And most importantly, I’ve learned that it’s A-OK to be fully imperfect; that’s where our subtle, vulnerable beauty lies anyway.
So thank you, gluttony, you fifth of the seven deadlies, for showing me that there’s a time and place for indulging, enjoying, and not giving a damn. Now please excuse me while I go devour some chicken tikka masala and German chocolate cake.
Freedom of choice is essential for human well-being, but there is such a thing as too much choice — too much of a good thing. When people have too much choice, they are paralyzed rather than liberated, and end up feeling less satisfied with their decisions.
This “inverted U-shaped curve” relating choice to well-being is not an anomaly in human behavior, as Adam Grant and I wrote in a 2011 article. Instead, we suggested, it’s routine: Some of X is good, but more of it is worse. To support this claim, we cited evidence of an inverted U for many human attributes, including motivation, perseverance and teamwork.
I wish we could take credit for “discovering” the inverted U, but alas, all we did was marshal evidence for a view that Aristotle articulated more than 2,000 years ago. He famously argued that virtue resided in the “mean” (not the arithmetic average, but just the right amount). For example, courage was the mean between recklessness and cowardice.
It follows from this perspective that excess is never a virtue. Indeed, the very word “excess” implies something negative. We can be too courageous, too honest, too persevering, too kind, too empathetic, too perfectionistic, too cooperative. You name it, and “vice” lies in both insufficiency and excess. Think of pretty much any good human attribute, and there can be too much of it.
But there is one exception — what Aristotle called practical wisdom, and what we might call judgment. After all, finding the mean is challenging and can’t be done by mathematical formula. Every situation is different. Honesty in one situation is cruelty in another. Our task is to find the mean — the right amount — and the virtue we rely on to do that is wise judgment. When it comes to judgment, the more the better.