Pages & Perspectives

A trompe-l’oeil vanitas still life

The idea that everything should be enjoyed in moderation sounds sensible. For the most part, you’d be correct to say that moderation is good. We are encouraged to eat enough but not too much. Every person will tell you to work hard without exhausting yourself, to save money without becoming miserly, and (most importantly) to enjoy pleasure without letting it become a dependence. Moderation lives by protecting us from our own tendency to go too far, and it offers a middle path between neglect and obsession. Yet the phrase commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Everything in moderation, including moderation,” complicates the scene a little. The implication here is that even a sensible rule becomes foolish when followed too seriously, because if moderation governs everything, then moderation itself must occasionally be set aside.

This most certainly contradicts the idea of moderation, as we are taught that the person with the highest control over their life is often the most successful. We are taught that a life in which every pleasure is measured, every impulse controlled and every risk carefully limited may be orderly. However, no one teaches that it may also become strangely lifeless. The phrase is therefore not really about indulgence; it is about judgement, and whether a good life can be reduced to rules or whether wisdom sometimes requires us to know when a good rule should be broken.

The Appeal of Moderation

Moderation has a strong moral attraction because excess carries obvious dangers. Too much food harms the body, too much pride distorts judgement, too much ambition damages relationships, and too much pleasure eventually weakens the pleasure itself. Since human beings are not always good at stopping once something feels rewarding, the ability to say “enough” is an important form of self-control. Wanting has no natural stopping point, and there is always more money to earn, more status to acquire, more entertainment to consume, and more approval to seek, so without an internal limit, desire simply continues. In that sense, moderation is not dullness but a form of freedom, because it releases us from appetites that would otherwise direct our lives.

Aristotle developed a similar idea in his doctrine of the mean, in which virtue often lies between two extremes. Courage sits between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between stinginess and waste, and confidence between self-doubt and arrogance. His point was not that virtue occupies an exact midpoint, but that good judgement depends on proportion. This is useful because qualities are rarely good or bad in themselves and their value depends on how far they are taken. Caution protects us until it becomes fear, loyalty is admirable until it asks us to defend what we know is wrong, and hard work is valuable until it consumes everything around it.

When Moderation Becomes Excess

Problems begin when moderation stops serving life and life starts serving moderation. Modern life makes this easy, because we can monitor almost every minute of our lives and control it. We can monitor the time we work, but also the time we rest. We can monitor even when we are not awake, under the influence of sleep. Even leisure becomes another task to manage efficiently. None of this is necessarily harmful, but measurement can gradually replace experience, and a person can become so committed to balance that balance itself becomes an obsession.

Consider someone who refuses a piece of birthday cake because it disrupts a diet, another who leaves a family gathering early because tomorrow’s training plan allows no flexibility, and a third who saves every spare pound while repeatedly refusing experiences that would enrich the present. All three appear disciplined, yet each has reached the point where discipline begins to resemble fear. Each has allowed their strictly moderate lifestyle to be the assassin of experiences or moments they could have shared, but never did. Moderation was meant to free us from excess, but when control becomes the central aim of life, it becomes an excess of its own, and the person who controls everything may discover that control is now controlling them, as moderation should be a tool and not a master.

The Value of Occasional Excess

Many of the experiences that give life colour do not arise from perfect restraint. People stay awake longer than planned, spend more than they intended on a special occasion, travel further than expected, or lose track of time in conversation. These moments are not always failures of self-control, and sometimes they are examples of complete involvement in life. What matters is the distinction between habit and exception. Someone who spends recklessly every month may have a problem, while someone who spends generously on a rare and meaningful experience may have made a sensible choice, and in the same way eating too many ice creams every evening may damage health while eating too much on a special occasion reveals no deep moral weakness.

Context changes the meaning of behaviour, which is why rules can guide us but cannot think for us. A rule is general while life is particular, so mature judgement includes understanding when a rule applies and when it should temporarily give way, so moderation is worth more when it is understood than when it is obeyed blindly.

Treatment of Pleasure

This also bears on how we think about pleasure, which is often treated with suspicion. Restraint appears serious and purposeful, while enjoyment can seem frivolous, as though it must justify itself. Yet not every enjoyable thing needs a productive outcome, since a long meal with family does not have to improve efficiency, a holiday does not have to make us more focused afterwards, and a walk can simply be a walk. Modern culture has become particularly good at converting ordinary life into a series of projects, so that exercise becomes performance, reading becomes a target, sleep becomes optimisation and hobbies become possible businesses. The result is that we may grow more efficient at living while becoming less capable of experiencing life, and occasional excess interrupts this logic by allowing something to matter simply because we enjoy it.

Where Intensity Belongs

Almost every good rule becomes absurd when treated as universal, and “everything in moderation” is no exception. We would not want to oppose cruelty moderately, love our children moderately, or ask a scientist to pursue truth with moderate interest, and an artist who cared only moderately about their work would probably produce little of value. Some things deserve intensity, because integrity may require stubbornness. Discovery often depends on someone caring about a question long after everyone else has lost interest. In these cases, moderation would not be wisdom but indifference.

The same is true of achievement in demanding fields, where musicians practise for years, athletes organise their lives around training, and scholars devote enormous time to problems most people barely notice. From the outside, such behaviour may look excessive, and sometimes it is, but without some form of excess extraordinary achievement would be difficult to imagine. The real question is whether the intensity serves something worthwhile or merely consumes the person.

Better Kept Unmoderated

Certain emotions make this especially clear. We would never tell a child to be moderately curious about the world, and we would never ask someone mourning another to feel the loss in carefully measured proportions. Grief refuses to fit inside neat boundaries because its intensity reflects the importance of what has happened. A person who avoids deep attachment to escape grief may succeed in reducing pain, but they also reduce love. Moderation can protect us from suffering, yet if taken too far it also protects us from experience, and a life shielded from strong feeling may be safer but is likely to be smaller.

Why Exceptions Need Judgement

Rules are valuable because they reduce uncertainty and save us from making a fresh decision every time a familiar situation arises. Do not lie, save money, sleep properly, exercise, and treat people fairly are all useful principles because they are usually right. Maturity begins when we take the word “usually” seriously.

Telling the truth may sometimes place someone in danger, spending savings may be exactly what savings are for, and there are nights when sleep matters less than staying with someone who needs us. In such cases, following the rule mechanically defeats the purpose it was meant to serve, so wisdom requires interpretation, since no rule can contain every circumstance in advance. The beauty of “Everything in moderation, including moderation” is that it stops itself from becoming absolute, offering advice while also warning against blind obedience to that advice.

Our own age often disguises excess as self-improvement. There is an ideal diet, an ideal morning routine, an ideal number of hours of sleep and an ideal way to organise work, and although the search for improvement can help, the pursuit of the ideal can become more stressful than the problem it was meant to solve. Someone lies awake worrying about not getting enough sleep, another ruins a holiday over missed workouts, and a third cannot enjoy a meal without calculating what it contains, until healthy behaviour becomes unhealthy.

The deeper problem is that optimisation changes the standard by which we judge life: instead of asking whether something is good, we begin asking whether it is perfect, and good enough starts to feel like failure. Yet most of life is good enough, with its imperfect friendships, unexpected career turns, failed plans, ageing bodies and complicated families, and a person who cannot tolerate imperfection will eventually struggle to tolerate reality. Moderation should make life more flexible, not more rigid.

Kant put it better than I could have in the book Idea for a Universal History:

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Why Excess Still Has a Price

None of this means that excess is automatically wise, because the idea can easily become an excuse for poor judgement. Human beings are skilled at turning attractive principles into convenient justifications, and another drink, another purchase, another night staying up late or another reckless decision can each be defended as an occasional exception. Once the exception becomes routine, however) the philosophy collapses. Occasional excess works partly because it remains occasional, since a feast is enjoyable because we do not feast every night, a holiday matters because it interrupts ordinary life, and staying awake until dawn feels magical once in a while but becomes plain exhaustion when repeated. Pleasure depends partly on contrast, and if every day is treated as exceptional then exceptional moments lose their meaning. Moderation therefore protects pleasure as much as it restricts it.

This is why moderation requires self-knowledge, since the correct limit differs from person to person. One person can have a single drink and stop while another finds that one leads naturally to five, one can check social media for ten minutes while another loses an hour without noticing, and one can work intensely for several weeks and then recover while another lets work expand until it occupies everything. We therefore need to understand what tends to capture us and to recognise the difference between pleasures we control and pleasures that gradually begin controlling us. This is harder than following a rule because it demands honesty, as it is easy to say we could stop whenever we wanted but more difficult to notice that we never seem to want to stop. True moderation is not about proving how disciplined we are but about recognising where our discipline begins to weaken.

Balance Over a Lifetime

We often imagine the good life as a perfect balance between work, family, health, money, pleasure and rest, but real life rarely stays balanced at every moment. A student preparing for an important examination may study far more than usual for several weeks, a new parent may sleep badly for months, someone caring for an ill relative may temporarily neglect other areas of life, and a new business may demand unusual attention. These situations are not necessarily failures of balance, because sometimes temporary imbalance is exactly what the moment requires. Balance may be better judged across years than across days, and the important question is whether we can return. Healthy imbalance has an exit, while unhealthy imbalance gradually forgets that an exit was ever supposed to exist. The practical lesson is to allow yourself to become intensely involved in something without losing the ability to step away from it.

A Life With Room in It

The real attraction of moderating moderation is that it leaves space for surprise. A completely regulated life leaves very little room for anything unexpected to enter. Some of the most important experiences arrive without permission, as when a conversation lasts far longer than planned. That could never have been planned, nor can any of this be organised in advance. A good life therefore needs structure, but it also needs openings in that structure. This means that it needs rules and the judgement to know when they have reached their limit. As well as discipline and the confidence to set discipline aside occasionally. That is why the phrase survives, because it contains its own warning against certainty.

Most of the time restraint protects us by keeping desire within sensible limits, and stopping temporary pleasure from causing lasting damage. But there are moments when restraint becomes the greater mistake. Some nights are worth staying awake for. Certain causes deserve unreasonable commitment. Some friendships justify long journeys, and some ideas are worth years of obsession. A good life cannot be built entirely on excess, but neither can it be built entirely on avoiding excess. Perhaps the real art lies in knowing when enough is enough. Knowing when, just for once, enough is not quite enough.