Doing without

I’m not a chocoholic, if only because I haven’t been trying hard enough. If I see, remember, deduce, sniff, or otherwise sense that chocolate is lurking somewhere around the house, its days are numbered. Unwrapped, defoiled, it’s a goner, soon to become a victim of the Mastermind mantra “I’ve started so I’ll finish”. However, if I know with certainty that there is none, it won’t be long before I forget all about chocolate, even when I see advertisements for it or visit shops selling it.  It’s not an addiction; addictions are different.

An appetite denied may subsequently wither away and be lost, though not necessarily permanently. It’s the result of a process commonly called “doing without”. We’re not a society that likes to do without, but in these strange times of lockdown and imposed denial many appetites – for socialisation, travel, leisure activities, “retail therapy” – have to be put on hold, and done without. The desire for safety takes over, at least until boredom demands relief.

Which raises the whole question of the effects of coronavirus upon appetite-driven behaviours. Is the enforced isolation the perfect passion killer, the ideal appetite suppressant? Is our involuntary requirement to step back from the daily tussle likely to engender new distastes, new cynicisms, as we realise how unnecessary or even harmful are some of our routine “normal life” habits and behaviours, personally or globally? Will new kinds of “functional anorexia” be one eventual outcome of this outbreak? New disinclinations, more things we are happy to ignore and to forget about; will they rise to the surface as we learn to be content with less? To have less stuff, less noise, less angstiness, to adapt in the longer term to “doing without”; will that be part of the infamous “new normal”?  And if so, will this be beneficial, and to whom? Or will we just lapse back into the lazy old ways?

Appetite, in a fundamental sense, is crucial to our well-being and to our development as happy, interesting, creative, well-balanced personalities – and societies. Too much appetite – whether for chocolate or anything else – is of course harmful. Similarly, doing without can be taken too far, leading to an etiolated kind of personality which, from the outside, looks like a depressed one, although the individual concerned may claim to be not unhappy. And for personality read nation. The sweetspot of Goldilocksian just rightness – here as in other situations – can be a tricky one to identify or adhere to. Meanwhile, a society financially and - in fact existentially - dependent upon well-developed consumer appetites and upon learned desires to be constantly busy and bustling, is one very vulnerable to a crisis such as the one we have at present. As we are discovering.

At its most basic, when as human beings we are starved of food, water and most acutely – as recently witnessed so devastatingly – oxygen, we die. In the last few weeks Abraham Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs has been up-ended for so many unfortunates; rather than striving for self-fulfilment too many people have been left gasping for air. Rather than reaching for the self-actualising summit they’ve been struggling to breathe on the baseline of that hypothetical structure of human needs and satisfactions. Even the Prime Minister, someone who might  be perceived as having self-actualised more than most, has been brought down to the biological bare necessities of life, plunged down the side of the Maslowian pyramid to its very foundations.

Even without catching it, awareness of what this dreadful pandemic is doing to our world, and of its sheer awfulness can, any day of the week, hurl anyone down into the depths of sadness, anger, anxiety and despair, but then the next day that same individual can be overjoyed from hearing about the brave activities of those battling to save lives, or rendered ecstatic by the simple things of life - newly rediscovered - like a clear blue sky, the warmth of the sun on one’s back, a bunch of flowers, or indeed, chocolate. Forget algorithms and being “smart”; this is humanity at its most marvellous; this is what mankind is really all about.

Not that we always need a life or death crisis to determine the direction of our appetites, positive or negative, although this current catastrophe may be exacerbating our mood swings more than usually. Even in normal times, we’re all affected by physical influences and invisible rhythms, whether biochemical, meteorological, or factors more subtle – not just the “time of the month” but the time of day, time of the week, time of year, time of our lives. One doesn’t have to be diagnosed as bipolar to have ups and downs; stress tends to exaggerate the peaks and the troughs.

The lower one’s mood becomes the lower it is likely to get; the less appetite there is for the world, less is found to be interesting, fewer things connect or make much sense or have much meaning. Ultimately, life closes in and can be very bleak. Conversely, the greater our appetites become, the greater still they grow. Appetite feeds upon appetite until there aren’t enough hours in the day, as more and more things are found to be interesting, more things connect and are perceived as having personal meaning - findings which in some cases lead to creative insight and activity. Again, this tendency can go too far, towards the pathological states of mania, schizotypal thought processes, psychosis, and the death of meaning. 

Let us keep hopeful, that in our enforced seclusion, in our prolonged period of having to do without, we haven’t lost our appetites permanently - the useful and healthy ones anyway. With the eventual release of the pause button, with availability returned to us, we can anticipate that they will return, hungrier than ever.

Be patient. Stay safe.