By Allan Stevo
July 4, 2026
There are meals meant to fill; there are meals meant to nourish.
Going hungry is okay.
Not being full after every meal is okay.
Not being full after many meals is okay, even ideal.
You have life to live.
Stay sharp.
Having eaten a meal is no excuse for a nap.
Being made sluggishly full after each meal is no virtue.
Being Perpetually Sated As A Cultural Value
Our eating culture tends to encourage the ability to stuff oneself at each meal. Supersized drinks especially exist for that: sugar for quick energy, caffeine as well, and big fluid for big satiating volume. A few cents of cost to produce, but an afternoon of satiety for you, the satisfied customer.
Those who know no better have that source of satiety as they jump through life from craving to craving. There is a comfort to having a stomach that never lacks being full. There, too, is a comfort to knowing that you do not always need to be full.
Some of us may have a desire to rise above and may even occasionally succeed at rising above jumping through life from craving to craving. Yet, the reality is that, "What itch do I scratch next?" becomes the perpetual question for so many.
Perhaps This Is A Deviation From How Good Life Can Look
If you will permit me a dalliance into the theological dear reader, your writer, a former atheist turn Christian, sees a detail of man's purpose in the Bible that may be useful to anyone reading this- atheist, Christian, or other.
Embedded in it is the idea that more can be had from life than the perpetual question "What itch do I scratch next?"
When man was created, as the Bible tells us "in the likeness and image of God" more was designed to be had. The moral tradition that arises out of that creation story proceeds forth to Moses and Joshua, to the prophets, to Jesus the Son of God, then Peter and Paul, and those who, to this day, walk in their footsteps. This moral tradition is one that says man is designed to be more than one who jumps through life from one craving to the next.
In fact, we are told that man can stop the unchecked pursuit of those cravings. Man can rise above submission to those cravings.
Peter and Paul did not preach self-help. They preached a dependency on God, and also a hopefulness of what man can achieve through God - including how sin can be conquered.
Countering The Compulsion To Always Feel Satisfied
Moses, Jesus Christ, Peter, and Paul all appear to have gone through periods of fasting and prayer. They encouraged others to draw closer to God and live life less dedicated to pursuing one craving after the next.
There are biblical descriptions of prayerfully capturing the cravings of the flesh and subjecting them, rather than going through life helplessly subjecting yourself to them. These patters are repeatedly demonstrated.
And yet, modernity has a different plan for you.
Modernity wishes to fulfill your every craving as cost effectively as possible while assuring you this is a no judgment zone.
The Standards And Tendencies You Choose
Modernity wishes to lie to you, to offer you the lowest of standards.
This is not the widely touted improving standard of living. That is a success of modernity. I speak of the corresponding standard of morality that must accompany the freedoms of a culture like ours in order for it to be able to function and persevere.
This more important standard is being traded for another standard - the standard of living. And it is neither a necessary trade, nor a worthy trade. Yes, modernity wishes to lie to you and to offer you the lowest of standards.
It is a zoo-morphising of you that it wishes to accomplish, a drawing of you closer to ways of animal life and away from human life. "Just jump from craving to craving," you are often assured, "and all will be well."
Tellingly, those clear words are never stated, but remain a core message.
Allies In The Effort - Where Modernity's Endless Pursuit Of Comfort Crosses Party Lines
The libertine branch of libertarians tends to be allied with that effort, as do the anti-nomian branch of democrats and progressives, even the religiously-active among them. Anti-nominian, from the Greek word for law, describes those who want all forgiveness in the Bible, no self-sacrifice. Some conservatives find more significant common cause in this foundation - ultimately being opposed to Christian moral encouragement - than the objection they find in the minor division caused by any political matter.
This larger cause crosses party lines and is a more significant fault line.
The Poster Child Of This Cross-Partisan Movement
Though it may feel like an intellectual leap, abortion then becomes the cause célèbre, even a poster child, for this life lived jumping from craving to craving. Abortion is the pinnacle behavior of this lifestyle. It is the sacrifice of life, actual life, to perpetuate this worldview.
This is not the distant, potential, and diffuse sacrifice of life that empty movements claim, such as the global warming claim that fossil fuels use is murderous to humans. This is nothing so preposterous as that.
Abortion is the actual sacrifice of life and at the most shocking of moments. It is murder done in a situation that one would consider a most precious blessing in the life well lived: the coming of a child into the home, the advent of new life.
Existential Concern And Religious Ritual
Abortion becomes an existential issue in this new morality that modernity feeds into. This "try anything once" and this "follow your heart" new morality is not actually a new morality but is amoral and timeless.
Yet it is sold as a new morality, a new set of virtues. It is progress to follow those virtues we are widely assured.
To those who do not see this, an attack on any one of those virtues feels like a great violation of that new morality, for they do not see the construction they are involved in - a critique that can be levelled against any religion. And this is valuable to recognize: it is a new religion man has built for himself - again timeless and amoral - but nonetheless, in some of the modern specificities of the concept, it is superficially new. It is a paganism, a hedonism, and a worship of the state wrapped into one, which are conceptions that have appeared repeatedly in history.
Abortion has become ritualistic, even a rite of passage, more significant than the blasé notion of losing one's virginity. Divorce is a close second to abortion as both ritual, and rite of passage.
Protecting children and raising them into fully functioning adults is generally less valued by our popular culture than the protection of abortion and expansively so. Promoting healthy marriages and happy homes is generally less valued by our popular culture than protecting divorce and expansively so. To do otherwise would bring limits to the jump from craving to craving.
These are both foundational and pinnacle rituals and practices of this culture of leaping from craving to craving, but there is considerably more as this movement establishes itself throughout Western culture and beyond. Universal practices are widely being encouraged in society - a universal practice of body modification (from piercings, to tattoos, to surgeries), a universal practice of homosexual experience, and a universal practice of transgender experimentation.
These are being normalized as ritual. A new, fervently-followed religion is being brought up in our midst.
Turning To The Free Market For That Which It Was Never Intended
This represents a new level of excess in life lived jumping from craving to craving.
One cannot be shocked that a free market turned to for governing advice will tend to encourage this. The invisible hand was not made to govern.
One cannot be shocked that a free market turned to for moral guidance will tend to encourage this. The invisible hand was not made to guide morality.
Not Seeking To Rise Above Temptation, But Seeking To Delay The Onset Of Consequences
Though not ritualistic, there are other insulating views that are apt to accompany a penchant for the abovementioned.
The banning of guns joins this effort as does cradle-to-grave socialized medicine.
Why?
Because with those two specific views, we, as a society, fool ourselves into believing that we can stop the consequences of life lived craving to craving and usher in an era of the eutopian no judgment zone.
To he who zoo-morphically lives craving to craving, this might be what his unfortunate view of heaven looks like - the ability to endlessly rove from craving to craving, totally unregulated by consequence. When futurists use the term "post-scarcity," this is what they generally refer to.
And each one of us may search for exactly that as we choose to jump from craving to craving. With each jump from craving to craving, we reinforce that way of existence. With every refusal to jump from craving to craving, we reinforce the opposite.
We can choose to prayerfully train ourselves to change. And there is no craving too great for that process to conquer.
The Misuse Of Science To Morally Discourage
Though, a continual lie of modernity is to turn man's specific cravings into any number of inescapable aspects of life, using weak science to fill gaps where their alternate morality has failed: "Your craving is an inborn condition," you might be told, "You have a genetic predisposition," you might be informed, "Your reality is inescapable," you might find out, "It is a way of life this craving of yours," "a culture," "a just decision" to jump from craving to craving, and "The science indisputably proves that," you are assured.
And God may even be mentioned. "Evolutionarily, you were made by God this way," you are assured. "So why do anything else ? Do you not realize this is how God made you?" Aside from a propensity to take the name of the Lord in vain, this idea that you were made by God in a specific way that fits an agenda, tends to be the only brush with the theological by the advocates of the new religion.
*Weak science is used to replace the lack of theology in their flawed morality, just as unlimited access to all of man's desires is used to replace the lack of theology in their flawed morality. What we are left with is a total lack of theology where sound theology is needed, and a total lack of morality where sound morality is needed.
Some tools deal with certain woes of man better than others. As reassuring as scientific research can feel, science is a poor tool for addressing existential questions. Science is the morality of modernity. Its cousin "ethics," is often presented as a counterview to turn to when morality fails to support the agenda of the new religion.
Ethics promises to offer a wise member of a priestly class, trained in the way of ethics, who can tell you all you need to know in order to assure you that you are either correct or incorrect.
It need not be this way.
An Alternate Course Of Action - The Pause Between Impetus And Response
We can prayerfully approach life. We can prayerfully recognize when we are leaping from one craving to the next. Unlike animal life, and unlike machinery, we can prayerfully pause between impetus and reaction. We can repeat that process so reliably that it amounts to prayerfully training ourselves to change. We can prayerfully pause when we would usually just proceed forward and pursue the next craving. That prayerful pause was one of the goals of Paul's ministry, though a distant cause from the central focus of preaching the story of Jesus.
I do not intend to point to overeating as a particularly vile act, but I intend to point to it as an indicative act.
If you can prayerfully take power over this most vital function, then so much else can be put in check just like it: the loose ways of spending that impoverish, the loose sexual lifestyle that leaves you and others a mess, the loose ingesting of the exogenous - not just food - that lays waste to a good life and stops the God-infused potential from being what it was intended to be.
Overeating is but a model. All human sin can be conquered.
The question is whether you will surrender and prayerfully seek better.