I keep landing on the same question. We feel hungry all the time and there is more food on the planet than at any point in human history. We feel overwhelmed all the time and there is more information than at any point in human history. The two are not separate problems. They are the same problem, which is that we crossed out of scarcity and into suffocation somewhere along the way and we did not notice.

I had dinner at a friend’s place last month. Six starters before the main course arrived and I ate all of them because they were in front of me and they were good, and somewhere in the middle I lost track of whether I was hungry. The meal kept arriving and I kept saying yes because that is what we do at dinner. I walked home feeling force-fed, and I kept thinking about Paracelsus, who said five hundred years ago that the dose makes the poison. Nothing is toxic in itself. Water will kill you if you drink too much of it. Oxygen will kill you if you breathe too much of it. The difference between medicine and poison is quantity, and we have built a civilization on quantity without asking when quantity became the problem.

I think about this with sugar. Sugar used to be the most precious thing on the planet. The Greeks called it Indian salt and they would not have known what a croissant was. The British spent centuries at war partly to control its trade. In Bengal where I grew up my grandmother kept a small jar of it on the highest shelf and we used it sparingly because it was expensive. Now the same sugar is in everything. The bread, the cereal, the sauce, the supposedly healthy granola bar that is mostly sugar held together with oats. Diabetes is one of the leading killers of our age. The thing that is killing us was once the most expensive thing we could buy. What was a luxury became a weapon because of how much of it we now eat, and that is what Paracelsus was warning us about, and that is what our grandmothers understood without needing a 16th century alchemist to explain it.

Information is the same story, just faster. When I was growing up in Bengal, the way you learned anything was that someone older told you, or you read a book you had to walk to the library to find. The information had a shape and a weight and a cost. You had to earn it. Now the information arrives in your pocket whether you asked for it or not. Every time I take out my phone the screen lights up with things I did not request. The world is throwing facts at me the way the dinner table threw starters at me, and I have started noticing that the more information I consume the less I retain and the more opinions I read the less I think. The ancient Greeks inscribed the answer at the temple at Delphi. Meden agan. Nothing in excess. They carved it into stone because they understood that absence rarely kills. Abundance does. The body and the mind were not built for overabundance.

Socrates used to say that contentment is natural wealth and luxury is artificial poverty, and the line has lived in my head for years. We were wired by millions of years of scarcity. We do not know what to do with infinite supply. In our evolutionary history, infinite supply meant a tree full of fruit that was about to be eaten by something else, so we gorged and we saved and we kept gorging and saving long after the supply stopped being scarce. We call the gorging lifestyle. We call the saving investment. The body just knows there is food in front of it. The brain just knows there is information in front of it. The rest of the system is screaming because this is not the world it was built for.

Seneca wrote two thousand years ago that the man who craves more is the one who is poor, not the man who has too little. Seneca was writing from a Roman villa with running water and fourteen slaves, which is to say the disease of excess predates capitalism, predates the internet, predates almost everything we blame it on. The Stoics figured out that the problem has always been wanting too much. They built their whole philosophy around the idea that the good life is the life calibrated to the amount of things you can actually use, and the life with the most things is rarely that. I think about this every time I open my phone. Unread notifications, unread emails, unread newsletters. I live in the unread, and the unread is growing faster than I can shrink it.

The Delphic priests had it right. Three maxims at the temple. Know thyself, nothing in excess, certainty brings ruin. The middle one is the one we have completely lost. You can see the absence of it in diabetes, in information overload, in the obesity epidemic, in the attention crisis, in the loneliness epidemic. All of them just different costumes for the same disease of more. The remedy is the same one that worked for the Stoics and the grandmother in Bengal and the Greeks at Delphi. It is not less ambition or less drive or less curiosity. It is the muscle of stopping, and that muscle has atrophied in us because the world punishes stopping and rewards continuation.

Epicurus said something I have been turning over for months. We should remember that what we now have was once among the things we only hoped for. The line reads like a prayer at first, like something a wise man murmured to his friends, and then you live with it and you realize it is one of the most violent sentences in the tradition. The thing you once prayed for is in your pocket. The thing you once walked a hundred miles for is in your refrigerator. You are still not satisfied, and you will not be satisfied, because the capacity for being satisfied got replaced by the capacity for being dissatisfied, and the replacement happened so gradually you did not notice. A kettle does not notice the water is boiling until the steam is in your face.

I have not figured it out. I ate six starters at dinner, I read forty newsletters this morning, and seventeen browser tabs have been open since last week that I will not return to. Moderation is a practice, not a destination. It is something you do today, fail at tomorrow, and do again the day after. The world is not going to get any quieter or any less full. The world is going to get louder and fuller. The only question is whether you will build the muscle to put the phone down before the seventh starter arrives, or whether you will let the abundance eat you. The abundance will eat you if you are not paying attention, and we are not, most of the time. That is the whole problem.

Tell me where you land on this. I am @troysk704.