In Excess

Last Friday felt like my own personal D-Day. The week hadn’t even ended but the alarms of distress, disintegration and overall degradation of mind and body had already been sounded.

In the past month, I’d taken a few things to the hilt: a new exercise regimen presided over by a personal trainer who acted more like a drill sergeant (no grunts or squeals could save you from two 20-rep sets of military presses); meal management from stocking up on healthy grub from the organic food aisle and enforcing a diet of refried beans, active water and vacuum-packed Salad Time meals; and my consumption of as much information as possible from a backlog of unread books (there were 11 books in waiting, last I checked), the six magazine titles I set an allowance for each month, and the panoply of online news journals and useless rag sites I visited daily. Top that off with nights of complete abandon to quell the post-cold turkey nicotine cravings and to level out the daylight lifestyle choices I made with marathon drinking and fast food binges that I’d only remember after I’d come to with a head-hammering hangover and discovered wrapper-filled McDonald’s plastic bags that had been flung upon a pile of liquor-dribbled clothes. And all that doesn’t even include actual work at the ol’ office cubicle.

So on that fateful Friday evening, I’d found myself at a restaurant battling the urge to hurl on the phad thai, spicy prawn soup, and tilapia with mango basil sauce (the puke shade of the sauce giving the impression the dish had already been hurled on, anyway) my friend and I had hastily over-ordered. It could have been all the hooch and junk I dumped into my body the night before or its combination with the caffeine-heavy Mighty Lean pills the lady at the supplements store guaranteed would carve my beer belly off faster than the green tea pills she first hawked at me. But what resulted after a week of trying to keep up with my whims were all of them catching up on me — via aching muscles and my body burning up; this implacably horrendous feeling of confusion and anxiety that I’d mistaken for hunger; and what felt like an alien sliding down my stomach and ramming my thorax as a means to burst out of it. They were all signs of exhaustion, however — the burnout, something I knew quite well.

Fast Times, Instant Gratification

The rabid sense of immediacy that eventually turns to excess becomes more apparent at the beginning of a new year. I guess even more so when you’re in your early 20s with your first few solid paychecks and a hankering to provide a glimmering answer to the “what’s nexts” after college, at an age when everybody just needs to be somebody as soon as possible. I’ve been known to take things a little too far in the past as well, from my sudden desire to become a vegetarian triathlete with a two-week plan of daily treadmill runs and spinning classes while enduring a crash diet of tofu and natural sterol complex (I fell ill after placing second to last at the actual triathlon and eventually returned to a healthy meal plan of beef burritos and all-meat pizzas) to my need to tick off every illegal drug from experience, spawning a ruptured appendix from bouts with MDMA to a three-day loss of taste and cognition from dabbling with horse tranquilizer.

Excess can be pretty damn fascinating. We’ve all romanticized the exhaustion (LiLo), insanity (Britney) and death (Heath Ledger) it entails. But it’s still the reason why today’s kids like to watch the upper east siders of Gossip Girl and the Bristol teens of Skins reeling in extravagance and excess respectively, why chicks take their cues from Marie Antoinette and Edie Sedgwick and why guys like to cite Johnny Depp’s drug mogul George Jung in Blow and reenact a Tony Montana scene from Scarface every now and then. I myself have had a penchant for Bret Easton-Ellis novels — young, doomed characters filling their emotional voids with luxe resto hopping and coke sprees — and more recently, an interest in the life of fast-living sugar heir Bunker Spreckels, who inspired Bunker Spreckels: Surfing’s Divine Prince of Decadence — a coffee table book I snapped up just to revel in the extravagant shenanigans of a surfer who inherited a multimillion-dollar fortune, splurged it on booze and methamphetamines among other ludicrous things, and eventually died of “natural causes” at 27. 

While decadence and the concept of “you can never have enough” was the purpose of the aforementioned few, it also seems to have become the battle cry of this generation. Technology-throttled media with its ability to flood our airwaves with the glitzy lives of vapid starlets and the flush homes of rappers; our information-saturated lives drowning us in data from all the shows, music and YouTube videos we need to soak up in order to have the conversational upper hand; and the itching need to have as much, do as much, and be as much as you can before you kick the proverbial bucket are what John Naish pinpoints in his book Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More as what could burn out the human race before it burns the world out through global warming.      

With everybody turning into infomaniacs, sneaker collectors eager to stash a fresh pair of kicks in a closet already overflowing with unused Nikes, and tech dilettantes looking to covet MacBook Airs, the overzealous religions de rigueur are consumerism and consumption — both pathways to inevitably consume all “Yeppies” (Young Experimenting Perfection Seekers) or those who choose to buy, try and devour as many things as they can just to find purpose and the “perfect lifestyle.” Burnout from having happiness as one’s ultimate life goal can be disregarded like a ho-hum case of sniffles, especially with status anxiety thrusting you through your days like an Energizer bunny running on the crack of aspiration; wolfing your food down and defecating speedily just so you can get back to work faster; brisk-walking down streets while overtaking slow-walking barricades to get to meetings; talking on your mobile while simultaneously driving and reaching for documents; drinking six pills in the morning just to feel at optimum, and hoping that the future will speed up so you can clone yourself and suck more life out of life.

Truth is, we’re hesitant to tap out of a life of media saturation, “infobesity,” self-expectation, self-actualization and self-indulgence until we go nuts from all the pressure that our modern lives and the race to be happy have cooked up. Naish enumerates all the stuff that contributes to personal warming — our hurried disposition for acquisition and capacious appetite for everything from food to all those seemingly guilt-reducing “eco-products” themselves. Yet he also mentions personal sustainability, the rubber wedge to the revolving door of wanting “more” and becoming “perpetual dissatisfaction machines.” Sure, you don’t have to eat up Al Gore’s tirades or give a rat’s ass about Leo’s 11th Hour. You don’t even have to care about what future your children will inherit, but at least think about the carbon sh*tprint you’re making and about the peace and freedom you can grant yourself from learning to have enough. Basically, if you cool thyself, the world may actually follow.

The Betterment in Being Beta

According to Naish, it isn’t just the earth that’s burning up but its inhabitants. Everyone’s still harboring this primitive, Pleistocene-era way of thinking that decrees we need to hunt, gather and have more in order to survive. Yet we have survived and if it weren’t for billion-dollar marketing campaigns telling us to slip on another pair of overpriced premium jeans or emaciate ourselves with a new miracle diet that’s supposed to push us further into becoming alphas of the human race, we would all be a lot more content with our lives and, subsequently, a lot happier.

Whether it’s indulging in microbreaks (what Naish describes as “modest rapid-fire holiday escapades”), practicing Buddha-on-the-mountaintop mindfulness to direct the traffic in one’s head, or simply whittling down our options to those that give us unadulterated quality, practicing “enoughism” may lead us to what really matters in the long run: time, space, autonomy and true purpose rather than the communal purpose the world wants you to fulfill. At one point in our lives, we just have to stave off the unnecessary, shed the habits and options we don’t need, and invest our time and energy into things that are real and, well, maybe even beneficial to others. ‘Cause it sure as hell ain’t the next wad of cash or sculpted body that’ll produce built-to-last contentment but the realization that you can have a rollicking good time if your personal ecology’s cooler — just by accepting self-limitation, humming a Jack Johnson tune, and taking your own sweet time.

Though Naish even goes as far as predicting that in the future, disconnectivity might actually become some sort of status symbol, at this point, all this is still a bit hard for me to digest. Of course, you won’t be hearing me reciting Sanskrit poems or committing to asceticism anytime soon. But for now though, I can leave the emotional crisis to Britney, take it easy on the body sculpting (thank God), and, for once, choose to go with the flow rather than overflow.