Indulgent Asceticism

Indulgent asceticism is a common but horrible vicious cycle that primarily affects people who are trying to change something they dislike about themselves. I’ve noticed it in people who struggle with eating disorders, screen time issues, going to the gym, social anxiety, or any other self-improvement-type issue. I myself have fallen for it a million times!

A basic outline of the cycle:

1. You identify a recurring problem of some kind, and you’re sick of having to deal with it. Bonus points if you’ve been struggling with it for a really long time, if you have a lot of feelings of guilt and shame about that struggle, and if the problem is in some way a part of your personal identity.

2. You decide to go all out and use the nuclear option, go cold turkey, whatever you want to call it. The key feature is your desire to fully eradicate some problem by white-knuckling your way through the pain.

3. You succeed for a little while. Maybe you go on a crash diet and lose some weight. Maybe you manage to complete a 30-day workout challenge. Maybe you do a dopamine detox and delete all of your worst tech indulgences for two weeks.

4. The tipping point arrives. You can’t possibly live up to the insane expectations you’ve set for yourself. And because you “succeeded” in step 3, you no longer have the guilt and shame to motivate you. The initial excitement fades and the new lifestyle that you’ve chosen for yourself starts siphoning off your energy and enjoyment of life.

5. You fall off.

6. Your “failure” causes you to feel a lot of new guilt and shame, especially in the forms of feelings of inferiority or other self-esteem issues. Your failure is more than a simple failure: it’s a stain on your moral character, proof of your fundamental weakness, a vice you can never get rid of, yadda yadda.¹

7. Instead of scaling back your goal and trying again, you think “I’ve lost! It’s over!” and go back to your old ways. But your old ways suck: after all, they were the problem.

8. You wallow in your misery. The shame and guilt and frustration and powerlessness build up again.

9. The buildup reaches a peak. Enough is enough: THIS time, you’ll really change. You’re about to show yourself who’s boss.

10. Repeat from step 2.

If the cycle describes you, you understand exactly how it feels.² You know how the feeling of self-flagellation can propel you to try and make up for lost time, to try and nuke your old habits, to say “enough is enough, I’m going to be a different person now” and then commit to a path that is doomed from the start.

You don’t want to face the fact that your prior “indulgences” exist for a reason. You don’t want to face the truth of who you are and why you are this way. So instead of trying to figure out your problems and your pathologies with a patient, kind, and compassionate mind, you blow up all of your previous history and start over from scratch. You try to become someone who you don’t really believe you’re capable of becoming in your heart of hearts. In the back of your mind, you don’t believe you can change, but you desperately want to try anyway, so you set unrealistic, pointless, or just flat-out crazy goals for yourself and beat yourself up when you fail.³

Forget about slow progress without a strict end date.⁴ Forget about finding a plan that grows and adapts to fit shifting motivations and changing capabilities. Forget about your prior successes or knowledge of what does and doesn’t work for you. Forget it all: your new plan is to go cold turkey and go all-in on this next attempt to change. The only acceptable stakes are all or nothing.

And when the stakes are all or nothing, you usually end up with nothing.

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As with many of my self-help posts, many of these ideas come from the Buddha, who described this issue to his fellow monks millennia ago. Obviously hedonists⁵ are on the wrong path: excessively indulging in worldly pleasures is probably a bad idea. Ascetics try to avoid the issue by renouncing all worldly pleasures, sometimes even looking down on those who don’t. But their path cannot be integrated into normalcy: it requires complete and insane commitment. If a normal person were to try walking their path, they’d probably just fail.

But for the truly committed ascetic, it gets even worse. “Successful” asceticism means forever uprooting and changing your life—possibly for the worse—all under the guise of “self-improvement.” Even if you succeed in your asceticism and manage to cease all indulgence in worldly pleasures, you have to ask yourself: what exactly are you gaining from it?

Funnily enough, the Buddha himself fell into this trap.

The story I’ve heard⁶ goes something like this:

Determined to reach enlightenment, the Buddha decided to master every spiritual teaching he could find. First, he worked on meditation and mastered it—but he deemed it unsatisfactory. Then, he found five ascetic wanderers, and decided to travel with them in order to master self-mortification and denial. As he would later recount to some of his disciples, he grew so lean that when he scratched his belly, he could feel his spine through the hollow flesh.

image from study.com. This article contains a gnarlier image in the form of a golden wall carving, but it’s definitely too much for a thumbnail. Still, I wanted to include it in this post somehow, so consider yourself warned!

But the ascetic approach didn’t work for him either. Instead of offering insights into the nature of the mind, it made his body weak. Worse still, it locked his mind into a harsh attitude, constantly seeking to deny the body. Meditation gave him nothing but avoidance, but asceticism taught him nothing but suppression. Neither of these took him to a free place. Neither unified his body with his mind.

After the Buddha reached enlightenment—a story for another time—he returned to the five wanderers and gave them his first teaching. He said:

“Bhikkhus, these two extremes should not be followed by one who has gone forth into homelessness. What two? The pursuit of sensual happiness in sensual pleasures, which is low, vulgar, the way of worldlings, ignoble, unbeneficial; and the pursuit of self-mortification, which is painful, ignoble, unbeneficial. [emphasis mine]

Without veering towards either of these extremes, the Tathagata has awakened to the middle way, which gives rise to vision, which gives rise to knowledge, which leads to peace, to direct knowledge, to enlightenment, to Nibbana.

The truth is that asceticism and hedonism are two sides of the same coin. They both take sense-input to the extreme in the hopes that it will bring them happiness. They are both sorely mistaken. Hedonism may be low and vulgar, but asceticism is just as ignoble and unbeneficial: for ascetics, asceticism is its own indulgence. The solution to hedonism isn’t to starve yourself of all pleasure and waste away knowing that you’ve “conquered your desires” or whatever: it’s to figure out what you really want and pursue that instead.⁷

So when you want to make a change in your life, maybe start thinking about the kind of person you want to be and why. What core values of yours are you not living by? Why is the change actually all that important to you?

On the pathology side, as long as you don’t really understand why you indulge in your problematic cycles, you won’t be able to think about how to fix them. So treat yourself compassionately and truly try to understand why you haven’t changed. If you can just let go of your desire to be perfect, you might realize that you actually have a good reason for being the way you are. And if you don’t find a good reason, well, you’ll at least find an understandable one.

Once you’ve begun figuring that out, the specifics will naturally begin to follow.⁸

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In my personal life, I’ve found that good execution stems from introspecting and thinking about who I am and what I want. The less I’m driven by feelings of shame and insecurity and self-doubt, the more sustainable my life changes are, and the easier it is to stay consistent. And the better I am at untangling competing desires, the easier it is to prevent negative impulses from cannibalizing positive ones (e.g. letting audience capture eat my excitement to write for fun.)

The rest of the steps, though important, are relatively straightforward. Once you align your goals with your values, the next steps are to find a plan, do some experimenting, create contingencies for failure, etc, etc. But these are topics for another time.⁹

So watch out for the cycle of indulgent asceticism. If you know this is something you struggle with, you should carefully examine your motivations to change—and be wary of the zeal to cut out your impurities or punish yourself for your sins or all those other uselessly self-flagellating constructions. Change doesn’t have to come from a place of despair, so be kind to yourself!

EDIT FEB 24, 2026: Otto the Renunciant left a really great comment about the potential benefits of going cold turkey in the comments:

I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but I think the issue is more precisely with the shame than the goal. Cold turkey goals can be great so long as you acknowledge up front that you will likely fall off and you make sure that you have a plan to pick up where you left off. I’ve heard this referred to as not failing with abandon: https://mindingourway.com/failing-with-abandon/

Their comment made me realize that I had some lasting resentments over all the times I had gone cold turkey and failed. I think I was a little too harsh—perhaps even ascetic—about the idea of “limit testing,” which I generally like and will probably write about at some point.

Anyway, I’ve pinned their comment and highly recommend you read the rest of the thread!

1. I know this is ChatGPT’s favorite grammatical construction but I’m tired of avoiding it when it’s the right tool for the job!

2. If the cycle doesn’t describe you, congrats. Not quite sure why you’re still here but thanks for reading anyways!

3. I don’t have anything against 30-day challenges per se. What I do have a problem with is the idea that a 30-day challenge will fix you. Unless you integrate the challenge into your own personal life and tailor it to your own current level of abilities and capabilities and motivations, of course you’re going to fail. In the grand scheme of things, 30 days is nothing compared to the rest of your life!

A counterpoint here is this great article by Nir Eyal on short-term routines, which are fine so long as you’re intentional about it. The point is just to stop assuming that the challenge will fix you if only you complete it! It’s entirely possible to complete a hard challenge and derive nothing from it!

4. My hatred of SMART goals will probably have to be its own article, but for now I’ll just say that SMART goals should only be used after you have done a lot of introspection and know exactly what it is you want and why.

5. Or should I say Cyrenaics? Shoutout to Hume Hobbyist for informing me of the distinction.

6. as recounted in Turning the Wheel of Truth by Ajahn Sucitto

7. The Buddha probably wouldn’t endorse this conclusion but I’m not properly a Buddhist anyway so whatever

8. It doesn’t actually have to be linear: you can start doing things and reflect in situ. Just be warned—self-reflection can undermine single-minded stubbornness, particularly if you realize that a goal wasn’t really all that important to you anyways.

9. Oh, and revisit and alter your goals and plans at semi-regular intervals. Don’t fall into the “if I downscale I’m losing!” trap. Relatedly, don’t fall into the “I missed a day so it’s over!” trap. It’s okay! Just keep going!