The Darkness You Choose, The Darkness that Chooses You
You close the refrigerator door at 6 AM and decide not to open it until tomorrow. The hum of the compressor fills the silence. Your stomach gurgles its mild protest. This is what agency sounds like: the click of a voluntary boundary, the calm satisfaction of choosing your own constraints. Apparently, you're the kind of person who finds power in saying no to perfectly good cheese-and-meat poetry.
When you choose to fast, you're conducting an experiment with your own machinery. The metabolic switch flips from glucose to fat, from immediate fuel to stored reserves. Your brain shifts into a different gear — sharper, quieter, less cluttered by the constant background noise of digestive processing. This is voluntary darkness: closing the shutter to make the picture clear.
But scarcity will either steady the shot or shatter it.
Starvation is the shutter sealed shut.
Picture two fridges in the frame: one crammed to bursting, one stripped bare. In which scene does dinner feel like a ritual — and in which does it feel like a hunt?
The difference isn't just philosophical — it's written in your biochemistry. Chronic food scarcity hijacks your cognitive bandwidth, creating what researchers call the "tunneling tax". Your IQ drops temporarily because all available mental resources get conscripted into the immediate crisis of survival. The future becomes a luxury you can't afford to think about. Your social connections fray because the animal inside recognises only one imperative: find sustenance, now.
Short-term voluntary scarcity sharpens focus.
Chronic involuntary scarcity demolishes it entirely.
Your forager brain doesn’t distinguish between chosen and imposed hunger — it just issues a primal alarm. These are the same neural pathways that once helped our ancestors endure real famines, the ones that now drive us to panic-buy toilet paper and obsess over restaurant menus. Old survival instincts in a modern pantry, still firing off its outdated warnings.
But here's the twist: perceived control predicts your stress response more than the actual scarcity itself. When you fast, you're the author of your own restriction. When you're starving, you're a character in someone else's plot.
Try this: Notice how hunger changes your language. "Maybe I'll eat later" becomes "I must eat now". Future tense collapses into immediate imperative. Pay attention to this shift — it's scarcity's grammar taking over, rewriting your sentences with increasing urgency. Fast for twelve hours and observe what happens to your decision-making. Then remember what it felt like the last time you were genuinely food-insecure, even briefly.
The paradox runs deeper than physiology. Historically, the ability to refuse food was often a luxury — monks fasting in abundance, nobles demonstrating restraint as a form of spiritual superiority. Sometimes less becomes a signal of having more. The poorest person hoards; the richest person practices voluntary scarcity as a form of discipline.
We live now in a world where abundance creates its own problems. Choice overload paralyses us in grocery aisles. The tyranny of infinite options can make us less decisive than scarcity ever did. Sometimes constraints liberate us from the exhausting democracy of having to choose everything, all the time.
Ask yourself:
- When does limitation feel like freedom, and when does it feel like prison?
- How often do you mistake imposed limitations for chosen boundaries?
- Where in your life are you confusing voluntary discipline with involuntary deprivation?
Fasting is a chosen darkness — you pull the curtains to concentrate the light that remains. Starvation is a darkness that chooses you, leaving you fumbling for switches that were never connected to begin with. One is a practice, the other is a condition. One signals control, the other demolishes it entirely.
The moral response differs accordingly. We admire the person who chooses temporary scarcity as a form of discipline or spiritual practice. Yet, all too often, we look away — or worse, mistake our own luck for virtue, and someone else’s desperation for choice.
Your unreasonable self knows real power is not in denying yourself, but in denying the world the right to deny others.