Maybe You Should Do Some Heroin

Against a balanced life

Apr 01, 2025

If this is your first time here, read this short introduction first to know what to expect from these posts and the approach I’m taking to write them.

If you want to follow the advice of ‘all things in moderation,’ ‘balance,’ or ‘the golden mean’ and you are not doing any heroin, maybe you should do some. You know, ‘balance.’ Sounds ridiculous, and that’s the point; it shows us a crack in the premise. Abstinence or close to it can’t be reconciled with moderation. If moderation is a middle point, then zero or near it falls in one extreme.

Those recommending a ‘balanced life’ or ‘all things in moderation’ would say that obviously there are things we should avoid or do as little as possible. But if that’s so, wouldn’t it also mean that some other things would be ideal to do as much as possible (and with as much intensity as possible)?

“Well, it’s nuanced,” they would argue. Then be nuanced! If everything is on a case-by-case basis, the moderation/balance premise breaks down and we are left with ‘it depends.’ In that case, we don’t need indiscriminate balance, that’s useless, what we need is judgment—to be imbalanced and tip the scale (sometimes to the extremes) depending on what our individual lives and circumstances call for. And you can’t teach that with a soundbite. I

Let’s consider drinking as an example. The advice is “drink in moderation,” but that doesn’t take into account the specifics of your life or the particular situation you are in. What moderation is for one person can be different for another and even different for the same person at different times.

It would be more useful to say, ‘Learning how much to drink is personal, requiring trial, error, and introspection to find out what works for you. Sometimes, you’ll undershoot or overshoot—that’s part of finding out how drinking affects you. Also, your range can change over time. Circumstances or personal preferences might call for more or less drinking (sometimes getting messed up is the goal). Some people are predisposed to develop alcohol dependence, so that needs to be taken into account. If that is your case, abstinence could be the right option. So, there is no one approach that works for everyone. You have the responsibility—but also the empowerment—to find out what’s best for you at any given time and to reevaluate it as needed.’
But this last version is not as catchy and can’t be turned into a one-liner.

Drinking seems like an inconsequential, out-of-proportion example, but the larger principle applies to everything else. “Aim for work/life balance,” according to whom? For some, there is no work and life, but Work-Life (fused, not separate),1 meaning they see work as an integral and rewarding part of life, and trying to reach an arbitrary balance by working less would hurt their life satisfaction. II

It’s strange that we call people workaholics, and no one calls those who make family their biggest priority ‘familyholics’. Somehow, one is acceptable, and the other one is not, though they are both imbalanced. III

If you take the most satisfaction out of work, a craft, or hobbies, lean into that.2 If you take the most satisfaction out of family, lean into that. Lean into whatever moves you. And if what moves you changes, then change where you lean. It’s your life, subjective and specific, there is no objective ‘golden mean’ that works for everyone.

And there lies one more problem, we look outwards to what others are doing instead of inwards to what works for us.3 It’s as if we are taking a test with no right answers but still look at what the person next to us is doing because we are afraid of getting it wrong. We think there is a right answer and that others have it, so we ignore where we want to go and instead we follow someone else—or worse, everyone else. IV

As an alternative to aiming for a generic balance, we can search for harmony. Harmony is about things going well together regardless of amount or frequency, while balance is about putting things in equal weight. Harmony is selective and judgment-based, encouraging us to pour ourselves into what we value most without pressure for equal distribution. Balance, on the other hand, is indiscriminate. V

We can find harmony even in tipping the scale completely to one side in some areas and to the opposite in others. But balance asks us to counterweight for the sake of an unjustified equilibrium. That would mean tempering down some of the best parts of our lives (a lot of what’s great about us and our lives is found in the imbalances) to chase a bland middle point.

Instead, we should strive for an imbalanced life, one that moves across the spectrum and sometimes plays with extremes (abstinence and indulgence). One that is built on our specific circumstances, with all its nuances and colors. One that searches for depths of experience instead of a leveled experience. One that finds harmony in its imbalances and leans into what we find meaningful.
One that we can call our own.4

Encore?

Digressions

(You can find matching numerals in the main post to know where these connect)

I. A counterargument that comes up is “everything in moderation, including moderation,” a catchy one-liner. But moderating moderation means allowing deviation from the middle depending on your own discretion at a given time, deciding when it applies and when it doesn’t. That’s not moderation, that’s judgment.

II. Living in Japan changed my perspective on the relationship between work and life. For the Japanese, work and life go together. They don’t view work as something to endure until their ‘real’ lives begin in their free time. Instead, work is an integral part of life from which they derive purpose, pride, and a sense of contribution to society.

You can see it in the high standards they have at work. From cashiers to cab drivers to ‘salarymen’, everyone does their best because how they do their job speaks as much (or more) about their identity and self-respect than the nature of the job itself.

Approaching work without a similar attitude would mean spending a large portion of our limited time in this world on something we see as merely a chore to put up with. Work—whether a formal job, a personal project, a craft, or an art—is life, too.

III. The family-obsessed person is even looked up to, while the work-obsessed one is sometimes thought of as avoiding unresolved psychological issues through excessive work. No, some people like to work, a lot. Just because others don’t get the same satisfaction and meaning from work or other personal projects doesn’t mean the ones who do have a problem—it is a possibility but not a certainty.

The work-obsessed person could make a similar accusation to the ‘familyholic’ and think of them as having a deeper psychological issue that they are trying to escape from: ‘Maybe your failed personal aspirations made you turn to family so it feels like a change in priorities rather than accepting the disappointment of individual projects (work, hobbies) falling short of your expectations. Family life would be an easy win against the backdrop of broken dreams, undeveloped potential—or the recognition that you didn’t have any to begin with—and the reality that your best efforts fall crushingly far from everything you thought you could be.’ —it is also a possibility but not a certainty.

IV. That’s where the “gurus” try to prey on us. They claim to have the answers, and they promise to save us from doing the hard work to find them ourselves. Our need for certainty and the fear of missing out on a better life that is only a course, seminar, or retreat away lure us toward them. We hope someone can tell us what to do and how to live because we are terrified that we are getting it all wrong. But there are no right answers. Your life is unique, and no one else can tell you how to live it. You have the freedom but also the responsibility to create it.

“Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.” —André Gide

The hard part is that when we choose to live our lives independent of what everyone else is doing, we become accountable for how that choice unfolds. We are left with nowhere to hide and no one to blame—which we could do if we followed others. Choosing our own way requires trusting ourselves and having the willingness to accept the consequences of doing so, probably two of the most daunting but empowering propositions we’ll ever face.

As much as we wish someone could give us certainty on how we are supposed to live, the absence of objective right answers leaves us in a dark forest, having to trust only ourselves to make our own path. And even if we found someone else’s, would we want to follow it? That was their path, not ours.

V. We choose or build characters in video games or RPGs aiming not for balance but for harmony in the imbalances. If you play Diablo, for example, you choose between Paladin, Sorcerer, Barbarian, Necromancer (the clear choice)—each with unique features, strengths, and weaknesses that appeal to different playing styles and strategies—and allocate skill points thinking of how things complement or go well together for your character (harmony), not how to give them equal weight (balance).

Who wants to play ‘average generic person’ or distribute all available skill points equally? We know this intuitively, and for some reason, when it comes to our lives, we doubt it.

Related Quotes

“What have you up to now truly loved, what has drawn your soul upward, mastered it and blessed it too? Set up these things that you have honored before yourself, and, maybe, they will show you, in their being and their order, a law which is the fundamental law of your own self.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (Schopenhauer as Educator)

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (attributed)

“Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”
—Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”
—May Sarton

“There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way.”
—Christopher Morley (Where the Blue Begins)

Behind the Exploration

(Notes on the Writing)

The origin of this thinking exploration was a disagreement with Stoic ideas on temperance and their approach to the passions (read “emotions,” as the term was not used until recent history), as well as with Aristotle’s golden mean, which is often parroted without closer inspection.5 It’s the nature of writing to let it guide you as much as you guide it. I ended up cutting the temperance section, even though it was the initial idea (I’ll leave it for a future exploration). Having it in was strangely making the post repetitive while also diluting the message.

The undercurrent of the piece—and of much of what I’m writing these days—is about taking ownership of our lives; making our lives ours. Another constant I keep in mind is the original interest of philosophy: how to live. So I’m always thinking, “How does this translate into something applicable to the way we behave or see the world?” I approached my old writings as applied psychology, and these new ones as applied philosophy.

A short post like this one can take me about a week or two to write, edit, and polish. Once I think I’m done, I let it cooldown for a few days—to get distance and come back to it with fresh eyes. Then I do the final changes.
I still find things wrong with it that I can’t fix without unraveling the whole piece. At some point, I have to let it hold together with its imperfections.
“Art is never finished, only abandoned.” —Leonardo da Vinci (attributed).

As I work on a post, I constantly make compromises between length and depth. There are additional points I would like to include, but doing so would make the piece too long and lose focus. That’s why I created the digressions section under ‘Encore’ at the end. There, I can add extra comments for those who want more, while keeping the main post focused and concise.

Thank you for joining me in this exploration.

Links

Great book on mimetic desire (wanting what others want)
Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

Excellent course on existentialism (for more on freedom and responsibility)
Existentialism and the Authentic Life

Soundtrack (main song I had on repeat during most of the writing)
The Search by NF

Notes

By ‘work,’ I also mean a craft or art.

Most of what makes us go “wow!” was created by so-called workaholics who put their craft, art, or work at the center of their lives and poured themselves completely into them.

Referred to as ‘mimetic desire.’

Many of the ideas in this exploration can be traced to core concepts of existentialism: Authenticity, freedom, and responsibility.

You can come up with examples where the golden mean is not a virtue, or even desirable. i.e., the mean between carelessness and perfectionism: mediocrity. Between obsession and indifference: half-assed engagement. I think the examples people (including Aristotle) give for the golden mean come from picking a virtue and then finding two arbitrary points to make it look like the middle point between vices. And if you think that’s what I did with my counterexamples, you would be right. And that’s the problem with the whole concept—it’s easily turned into whatever we want it to be. The golden mean concept seems like a case of making examples fit a hypothesis instead of taking a hypothesis, testing for examples, and seeing if any disprove it.