We are in the first full week of Lent. I want to write about fasting — not primarily as a religious practice, though that is where the discipline comes from — but as something that I think every serious man should understand and practise in some form, regardless of his relationship to Christianity.
The argument is simple: the ancient traditions of fasting, across virtually every major religious and philosophical tradition, converge on a single insight — the man who cannot control his appetites is not a free man. He is a man controlled by his appetites. And the appetites, if never denied, will expand until they consume everything.
What Fasting Actually Is
Fasting is not starvation. It is not self-punishment. In the Catholic tradition, Lenten fasting means one full meal and two smaller meals per day, with no eating between meals. More broadly, fasting means the deliberate, chosen, temporary denial of something you want.
The food version is the most common because food is the most universal appetite. But the logic applies to anything: alcohol, social media, entertainment, the constant low-level noise that most modern people use to avoid silence.
The point is not the denial itself. The point is what the denial reveals.
When you fast from something you consume habitually, you discover its actual weight in your life. You discover whether you are choosing it or whether it is choosing you. And you discover that you can survive — often comfortably — its absence. Which means you were carrying it as a burden disguised as a pleasure.
The Freedom Argument
I write about freedom for a living. Financial freedom, jurisdictional freedom, freedom from the overreaching state. And I hold all of those things as genuinely important.
But there is a form of freedom that no tax structure can provide and no jurisdiction can protect: the freedom that comes from self-mastery. The ability to choose your response rather than simply react. The ability to want something and decide not to have it, not because you cannot afford it, but because you have decided it does not serve you.
This is not asceticism for its own sake. I am not advocating poverty or deprivation. I drink wine. I eat well. I enjoy the pleasures of a good life.
But I believe that the man who has practised denial — who knows from experience that he can go without, that his appetites do not run him, that he is not a slave to comfort — is a fundamentally different man from the one who has never said no to himself.
He makes better decisions under pressure. He is harder to manipulate. He is less likely to make choices he will regret because he was momentarily uncomfortable.
The Practical Application
The Lenten tradition recommends three practices: fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. I find all three useful, whether or not you attach the religious framework.
Fasting: identify one appetite that has too much control over your daily life and deny it for a period. Not forever. For forty days. See what you learn.
Prayer — or meditation, or whatever quiet you have access to: spend some time each day in silence, without input, without stimulation. Most people have not done this in years. The discomfort of silence, when you first reintroduce it, tells you something important about the state of your interior life.
Almsgiving: give something away. Not conveniently. Something that costs you enough to notice.
These are not uniquely Catholic. They are human technologies for building the kind of character that allows a man to be genuinely free.
The culture tells you that freedom is the ability to satisfy every desire immediately. It is lying to you.
Freedom is the ability to choose which desires you satisfy, and when, and why.
Work with Sebastian
No business pitch this week. But if you want to talk about building genuine freedom — financial, jurisdictional, personal — I am here. Book a consultation.