The joy of less and excess

After returning from a cruise in Alaska on one of the premier cruise ships, I got to thinking about the joys of excess—after all the week long trip really was a symphony of excess. The food was excessive, the drinks were pouring all day and night and the sites to be seen were beyond compare in their beauty and grandeur. Even before the cruise ended, talk turned inevitably to the next cruise and the next country we should visit.

According to the latest results of a study that is being carried out by clinical psychologists at York University, as many as one in five persons in Britain are thought to have an obsession with wanting more than they already have, a complex that some of them are calling "excessorexia." Due to a general increase in national wealth, images of flawless faces and perfect bodies, and the promotion of stylish homes, expensive cars and fashionable clothes as must- have accessories, an increasing number of people feel that they simply don’t come up to society’s high standards. It seems that the more you have, the more you want.

The average upwardly mobile, urban Indian too has fallen prey to this. Dil maange more is definitely the rule and not an exception. Conspicuous consumption is no longer derided and ascetic self-denial not a matter of veneration and the desirable ideal worth striving for. As a matter of fact, it is the unabashed pursuit of pleasure and perfection—be it chasing an aspirational lifestyle, resorting to accumulation of goods and commodities that are not necessities but give us immense pleasure, and travel around the world for the next thrilling site — that defines our modern lifestyle. “Give me excess of it; that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and ere die” is the unstated message.

Maslow, in his model of the hierarchy of needs, assumed that when individuals satisfied their lower needs for food, shelter etc, they would automatically move on to the satisfaction of higher needs, such as the need for community service, socialization and graduate to self-actualization. The present middle class, however, seems to defy this formulation. When the universe shrinks to ‘I, me and myself’, within this circumscribed universe, the hankering is for acquisitions and possessions that give pleasure and not joy.

But clearly there has to be more to our life than the Romans of yore, who ate excessively, threw up and then went back to eating again. Or the Epicureans whose philosophy equated pleasure with good and who lived to eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow one might die. Of the perennial traveler who wants to see one more country and one more sunrise. Just one more…It is true that no one perhaps has died of excessorexia, but it can certainly takes the life out of the living.

And then I saw the piece that Pico Iyer wrote on the joy of less which argued that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense.

In the corporate world, there would always be some higher position that you could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, you are guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied. If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies.

“Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either… But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did.”

It seems quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really leads to peace of mind or happiness. It reminded me of a friend who toured a different country every year and took many atlas worth of photographs and continued to be itching to visit another one after he had barely returned from one. Quite different was another friend, who withdrew from his very successful career and took early retirement, to live a life of simplicity and contemplation, visiting various hermitages and mountain retreats in his spiritual quest.

Does happiness lie in incessant motion or does it lie in a retreat from all emotion? Is it to be found in having an excess of everything- food, drinks, sex, travel—or is it to be found in a retreat to an ashram with complete denial and concentration on the life of the spirit? What should one pursue- the path of yoga or of pleasure?

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn’t pursued.