Too little
Let the next turn decide
I will stop as soon as nothing interesting is about to happen.
An open-ended game has quietly taken over the decision about when to leave.
Temperance
Leave your interest ready for a good return.
Readiness to moderate appetites rather than let them dominate judgment.
Temperance gives an absorbing interest a fitting place among the other things you value. Enjoying a game deeply can go together with choosing when to leave it. A deliberate stopping point protects the next activity and the pleasure of coming back.
Temperance gives a rhythm that can sustain enthusiasm
You meant to stop the strategy game after one more turn. Your tiny empire has since acquired a harbor, a diplomatic incident and a very promising road. At your chosen stopping time, you save and leave a note: finish the road, then check the harbor. The game will still be interesting tomorrow. Tonight you get the pleasure of leaving it ready for a good return.
Finding the balance in Temperance
Save an absorbing strategy game at a chosen stopping point and leave a useful return note.
A fitting response
Save a good return
The road can wait. I will save here and note what comes next.
A chosen endpoint makes room for another valued activity while preserving the interest.
Pursued too far
Punish the pleasure
If I enjoy this much, I should never play it again.
Proportion becomes rejection of a worthwhile pleasure instead of a fitting place for it.
An absorbing interest belongs in a life with other pleasures and commitments. A good stopping point keeps both the enjoyment and the invitation to return.
What Temperance makes possible
A return note preserves the thread of play without requiring another turn now. You can leave with anticipation rather than a feeling that everything will be lost if you stop. The interest remains part of a life that has room for more than one pleasure.
Temperance in ordinary life
A late-night theory
Save the question you want to test rather than opening another discussion just as you meant to leave.
An open atlas
Mark the constellation to compare before joining a shared meal.
Nearby virtues, different work
Self-Command
Self-Command restrains a particular impulse; Temperance concerns the proportion given to an appetite over time.
Diligence
Diligence cares for the work within the session; Temperance helps give the session a fitting place.
Temperance and its counterfeits
Joyless regulation
Treating pleasure itself as a moral defect counterfeits Temperance. Choose a proportion that preserves worthwhile enjoyment.
Productivity bargaining
Rest does not have to be earned by finishing an increasingly impossible list.
How to cultivate Temperance
Decide what other valued activity shares this time.
Make a return note before stopping.
Adjust the rhythm when your circumstances change.
Try it today
Before a hobby session, choose a stopping point that fits your plans. When it arrives, save the work or game and leave one short note for your return.
Questions worth returning to
- What else did I choose to make room for today?
- Would I welcome this pattern if it continued for a month?
Quotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists.
Charles Darwin · The Autobiography of Charles Darwin · Written May 1, 1881
Darwin describes novels as a source of relief and pleasure. The passage gives another interest a place in an intellectual life without turning every leisure activity into research.
Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of something else.
Poincaré recounts leaving a difficult investigation and thinking about something else. This is an example of interruption within inquiry, not a promise that a holiday will produce a discovery.
The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work.
Poincaré recalls a change of activity that displaced his mathematical problem for a while. Saving the game likewise leaves a valued interest available without keeping it continuously in mind.
Exclusive interest in the result alters work to drudgery.
John Dewey · How We Think · Some General Conclusions
If the result is the only valued part, a chosen interest can become drudgery. Temperance protects the pleasure of the activity as well as its place among other goods.
And I am the willinger to justify the pleasant part of it, because though it is known I can be serious at seasonable times, yet the whole Discourse is, or rather was, a picture of my own disposition, especially in such days and times as I have laid aside business, and gone a-fishing with honest Nat. and R. Roe; but they are gone, and with them most of my pleasant hours, even as a shadow that passeth away and returns not.
Izaak Walton · The Compleat Angler · To the Reader
Walton remembers the pleasure of laying business aside to fish with friends. His account gives recreation a valued place within a life, as the strategy game can have a place with an enjoyable beginning and ending.
People have to learn sometimes not only how much the heart, but how much the head, can bear.
Maria Mitchell · Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals · Chapter II, diary of October 31, 1853
Mitchell notices the limits of sustained mental effort after a demanding calculation. A chosen stopping point gives attention room to recover without making the interest itself a fault.
Not the thing done but the quality of mind that goes into the doing settles what is utilitarian and what is unconstrained and educative.
John Dewey · How We Think · Activity and the Training of Thought
The quality of attention matters alongside the activity’s label. The passage comes from education; it supports treating a chosen interest as educative without demanding that every moment produce a useful object.
Continue through the catalog
Practice this collection
Choose this approved collection as an optional workbook program, or select individual virtues in My Virtues.