(image courtesy of blackeri)

Gluttony is the untempered drive to consume. 

Gluttony is to consumption as lust is to conquest, greed is to acquisition and wrath is to destruction.

There always seems to be a lot of overlap between Gluttony and Greed. The distinction is subtle. Greed wants to have cakes. Gluttony wants to eat them.

Gluttony is a bit more primal. The greedy one is the pack-rat, the one who tries to have as many Facebook friends as possible. The glutton is the one who wants to consume as much as possible- watch all the movies, read all the books.

I’m a glutton for information. I like to spend hours on the internet, scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, what-have-you. I can never get enough.

Hacking Gluttony

The first thing that we need to realise about gluttony in the conventional “I want to consume everything!” sense is that it is unsustainable. You can never consume everything, the universe is simply too vast for that.

Consumption is affected by the law of diminishing marginal utility, just like acquisition. I think the instinctive drive to consume developed during an age of scarcity, when food and information were both hard to come by. “Eat all the food!” was a simple heuristic that would’ve served our ancestors well.

That’s kind of obsolete now, in our age of plentiful overload. There’s too much of everything, and we simply haven’t quite evolved to cope with our changing environment yet. And businesses, evolving as rapidly as they do, have learnt to exploit the human weakness of perceived scarcity. We keep thinking that we have to consume more, that we need to know more before we can act.

Keep track, and set limits. It’s futile, or at least really difficult to depend on our own discipline and self-control. There is an entire industry working hard every day, devoted to trying to figure out how to break your resolve.

We tend to over-consume when we lose track of how much we’ve been consuming. This applies to food, to time spent online, to the cigarettes and alcohol we consume when distracted by good conversation.

Institutionalize checks and balances ahead of time. Ration the amount of time you spend online, limit the amount of food you eat. This has to happen before the consumption, not during. Tim Ferriss noted that an incredibly effective way of losing weight is to simply take a picture of every meal before you eat it. You don’t actually have to consciously do anything- you’ll subconsciously start eating less, and healthier.

Think about your  Tomorrow-Self. If you keep in mind that there’s another part of you that is competing for the same resources, and that he or she deserves them just as much as you do, it becomes less a matter of disciplined self-restraint, and more a matter of being a decent person- to yourself.

Use tools. When I’m being productive, I use Tomato.es to ration my internet time. Planning your consumption in advance makes a big difference too. Do your homework before you get on Facebook. Go out on that date with your girlfriend before meeting your mates for beer.

Everybody’s schedule and diet is different, but generally, we have similar choices- things we need to do but don’t really want to, and things that we like doing but end up spending too much time on. I think the same applies to food, too- comparing vegetables and candy, for instance. It’s not that complicated.

PREREQUISITE: Heightened level of consciousness. Nobody really makes the enlightened, purposeful decision to be a glutton.  Nobody really enjoys drinking till they puke, or going to school with that uneasy feeling of not having done their homework. (Occasionally we might consciously decide to skip school to go on a great date or something, in which case it feels completely justified- I’m talking about when it isn’t worth it, which is most of the time.) It’s always something that happened when we get carried away, when we lose ourselves.

In comparison, the well-deserved reward- even in much smaller proportion- always tastes so much sweeter.

More: “Hacking The 7 Deadly Sins“, Vanity, Greed.