Moderation

The one thing I never learned.

Carlos E. Santos
Aug 28, 2017 · 3 min read

My step-dad, Orlando, was one of the greatest people I’ve ever known. I looked up to him, much like my biological father. He was smart, funny, wise; almost every trait I was eager to obtain.

Orlando practically raised me. He walked into my life when I was around seven or eight years old and walked out when I was turning fourteen. But even so, I admire him. Knowing their marriage wouldn’t last, Orlando made it his mission to try to teach me all the things he knew.

It wasn’t easy. I was a stubborn child and the concepts he would try to teach me weren’t necessarily difficult to understand, but it was hard for me to pay attention in the busy and crowded subway that was my mind. Nevertheless, there was one concept I never quite grasped despite Orlando’s relentless attempts: moderation.

“Todo en exceso es malo.” he would say.

Everything in excess is bad.

What a simple concept, don’t you think? Watching tv once in a while is fine, but if you sit in front of a tv for 24 hours, the consequences wouldn’t be desirable. You can apply this to almost anything in your life. Sure working out sounds fun (to some people), but saying “working out for more than 2 hours is insane”, is an understatement.

Moderation is the key to success. And although I haven’t quite mastered it (at all), I’ve slowly began to realize its importance and how my life would’ve been different had I learned moderation when I was younger. In case you don’t know, I’m the developer of Writer, a minimalistic writing tool for authors, bloggers, and writers alike. I created Writer at around the same time my mother and Orlando divorced. Writer turned out fine, but I think I’ll always regret the stupid decisions I made that led to its publication. I would spend countless hours on the computer, back arched, drinking coke and gazing at some StackOverflow answer about callback functions. There were nights where I wouldn’t even sleep just so I could have more time to resolve a problem concerning export conversion algorithms from HTML to other forms of readable text like Markdown.

This and a handful of other mindless events led to some terrible psychological and physiological issues that are not only incredibly rare, but also difficult to revert. Aside from the anxiety and depression that were amplified by the consecutive sleepless nights, I suffered from self-image issues, personality disorders, bipolar disorder, ADHD, and a handful of other problems I’d rather not even say. All while I developed a nice kyphosis and a patulous eustachian tube disorder.

If you haven’t heard of PET, I don’t blame you. It’s an extremely rare disorder in which the Eustachian tube stays open, causing autophony. I’ve had it for 3 years straight non-stop, all while my vision deteriorated. Knowing all of this could have been avoided by simply restricting my time on the computer and allowing my self to improve on other things bothers me and it haunts me everyday.

Nonetheless, the moral of this story is as follows: it’s important to integrate moderation into every aspect of your life. Doing so will allow you to keep a healthy, balanced brain. Consequently, everything else will fall into place.

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