Why I'm Stopping Sugar

I’ve decided to quit sugar — to say no to the baked cheesecakes in the afternoon, late-night Lindt chocolate, and the Pain perdu at my favourite restaurant.

Why? Because it’s a deep craving I’ve carried since childhood.

And, it’s also time I fought back against the noble lie our society keeps selling us — that an easy, sanitised life is the good life.

Last week was a tumultuous one. A family crisis left me shaken. It felt like watching someone vanish into a void of their own making. Powerless. Lost. Gone.

The experience jolted me into remembering something I often forget: I’m here not merely to live or to feel, but to choose — to act, to align, to live well.

But the good life isn’t the easy life. It demands the strength to resist the path of least resistance.

Damon Linker, in his essay “Self-Mastery Is Good”, Actually, argues that our modern world has become a vast experiment in engineered temptation. We swim in it like fish in water — unaware of how completely we’re surrounded by forces designed to weaken our will.

Social media, porn, gambling, instant shopping, on-demand everything — the world is now a machine built not just to satisfy desire, but to create it. Rousseau saw this coming centuries ago when he wrote that modern society manufactures wants that no one originally had.

Today, capitalism doesn’t just sell things; it sells experiences — bursts of dopamine disguised as life.

It’s a perfect storm: endless digital pleasure combined with a culture that dismantled the old supports that once helped us resist temptation. We tore down the “judgmental” systems — religion, duty, tradition, shame, even conscience — and replaced them with slogans like follow your bliss and if it feels good, do it. That revolution liberated us, but it also left us defenceless.

Now, as Linker says, we’re alone with our devices, unable to say no, half-relying on hacks and chemicals to do the job our souls once did — Ozempic instead of restraint, or “digital detox weekend” instead of scaling back our daily phone use.

Reading that, I saw myself. I reach for sugar when I’m tired. I scroll when I’m restless. I rationalise when I should refuse.

But self-mastery isn’t repression — it’s reclaiming dignity. It’s rebuilding muscle in a world that keeps offering us machines to do the lifting for us.

So quitting sugar isn’t just about health. It’s a symbolic act of resistance. If I can say no to dessert, maybe I can say no to distraction, to comfort, to mediocrity. Maybe it’s the small, consistent refusals that forge the unbreakable spine of a man.

The decision terrifies me — the cravings, the withdrawals, the quiet negotiations my mind will invent. But that’s the point. Every refusal reminds me I’m not just an animal chasing dopamine.

Yesterday, I shaved my head and beard. I looked younger, lighter, less “wise,” perhaps — but more alive. That small ritual felt like clearing a path toward something harder, truer.

Maybe that’s what self-mastery really is: stripping away the accumulated softness of convenience until what’s left is essence — raw, direct, capable.

Linker argues that we’ve built a civilisation where every pleasure is a click away, even as we dismantle the inner and social scaffolding that once fortified the will. Pleasure itself isn’t evil; it’s simply too easy now, too frictionless.

Real life is supposed to have friction. A real conversation is messy; a real meal takes time; a real workout burns. Our devices, on the other hand, offer the simulation of satisfaction without the cost — pleasure without discipline.

So we outsource willpower to apps and pills, to reminders and restrictions. But there’s a loss in this outsourcing — a moral and spiritual atrophy. There’s a world of difference between not using your phone for 48 hours and not mastering the urge not to use it. Between taking a drug to suppress appetite and looking at the dessert, wanting it, and choosing to say no.

That’s the muscle we’re losing — the one that lets us act not out of impulse but out of understanding. It’s the same muscle I want to rebuild in every area of my life.

At work, it means leading without rescuing — stepping back to coach, to trust, to stop doing other people’s jobs. Even that is a form of mastery: the discipline not to intervene.

Physically, I need the same rigour. My body feels slower, my stamina weaker. Padel is fun, but it’s not enough. I miss the clean exhaustion of running, the deep breathing that feels like prayer. I’m scared of injury, yes — but more scared of comfort.

Comfort, I’ve realised, is the great sedative. It kills growth, courage, and creativity. Self-mastery is the antidote. Saying no to sugar, or to a screen, or to that second drink, is the same act that says yes to meaning, to work, to love. It’s all one movement — toward coherence.

We live in a world that confuses ease with freedom. But the truth is the opposite: the harder the path, the freer the soul.

That’s the paradox — the hard joy of self-mastery.

So this is where I begin again: no sugar, more cardio, sharper focus, and a weekly rhythm of writing that doesn’t depend on mood. Writing itself is resistance — against distraction, against fragmentation, against forgetting who I am.

Every time I refuse an easy pleasure, I remember what real joy feels like — earned, not given. The cold plunge, the run, the honest work, the stillness after doing what I said I would do.

Self-mastery isn’t about control. It’s about remembering who’s in charge, about living from the inside out when everything around you tries to pull you apart.