Although I fancy myself a conscientious person, I always have thought "discipline" as a virtue was overrated. Perhaps I have an Epicurean streak, but gratuitous self-denial never made much sense to me, whether in the pedestrian context of premarital abstinence or in the extreme case of ascetics who spend their lives cut off from much of the world and all of its pleasures.
In the latter case, I have suspected that embarking on such a lifestyle was the sort of decision that stemmed from difficulty in coping with traditional life, not an act of strength.
Then the pandemic started, and I found myself, like most others, cut off from the world. Self-denial in the modern day is not a matter of ethical quibbling but a safety precaution. Isolation is a norm, not an esoteric path to enlightenment.
We live in an armchair dystopia, withering away psychologically in the midst of our 21st-century comforts. And while I do not see myself taking up the monastic lifestyle any time soon, I am beginning to understand its core allure — a sense of internal control in the face of external powerlessness.
Take, for example, the ubiquitous habits of eating and sleeping. A lot of people I talk to have taken a "treat yourself" approach to mealtimes and bedtimes during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). If you are going to spend the day inside anyway, why not sleep in? If you have nobody to impress with your physique for the next X months, why not eat what you want?
From a moral perspective, I completely agree. There is no use wallowing in self-guilt if your pandemic sleep cycle is closer to an owl's than to the average human's, or if your pandemic diet sometimes feels like nothing more than a steady stream of junk food.
Yet from a well-being perspective, I find this mindset horribly backward for a simple reason: It reinforces a sense of lost control. The best weeks of the pandemic for me have not been the ones when I woke up at noon and polished off plates of mozzarella sticks that were eaten past midnight. They were the ones when I rose at 7:00 a.m. and limited my mealtimes to an 8-hour window in the middle of the day.
Such practices might not sound like comfortable pandemic living. And I certainly do not want to pretend that these acts of "discipline" are quick fixes or easy habits — I myself spent much of winter break staying up till 4:00 a.m. and succumbing to whatever food craving I experienced from one moment to the next.
But the internal liberation available through sticking to a habit like waking up earlier or engaging in intermittent fasting is quite profound. When getting up before sunrise is your goal, you can begin every day with success just by leaving your bed. When you abstain from eating past dinner time, you stop finding yourself wandering to the pantry in defeated boredom.
It would be foolish to dismiss the opportunity that simple healthy habits offer us to take back some agency in a time when the predominant emotion in most of America's mind is frustration.
I remember an old high school English teacher of mine remarking that rules gave us freedom by setting parameters within which we could act. Granted, he was arguing this in a religious context and I, being a much less religious man than he, thought little of it at the time.
I am still not sure that I buy the entirety of his thesis. But the vacuum of experience that is COVID-19 has afforded me an appreciation for the beneficence of structure in one's daily routine, not just in a practical sense, but as a spiritual anchor.
While you need not become a full-fledged stoic philosopher, I recommend using COVID-19 as an opportunity to take stock of how much your emotional well-being depends on the caprice of the outside world and the fickleness of your own appetites.
Finding ways to exercise a certain modicum of control throughout your day, whether by regulating your sleep schedule, by keeping a meditation practice or by working out regularly, can lift the fog of frustration and ennui that accompanies isolation.
Daniel Bernstein is a School of Arts and Sciences sophomore looking to major in cell biology and neuroscience and mathematics. His column, "Mind You," runs on alternate Mondays.
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