The Purge of Excess
How To Have A Sound Heart (5/7)
Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it. - Marcus Aurelius
This weekend is vapid and frenzied at the same time. I have little to no energy and a crowded to-do list with the ghosts of half-kept commitments knocking all at once. And during this hectic time, you question “Why am I doing this? What will I gain from it? Will that matter for long enough?”. And before answering these I want to hook onto the next distraction and irrelevant attachment that further fogs my mind, time and wellbeing. Case in point: my bed and my phone.
Here’s the problem: I always bite off more than I can chew. I want to be it all, have it all, see it all. In a world with historically the highest amount of options and trajectories and people and possibilities, why wouldn’t your curious mind and longing heart want more? And so, on some days, I end up doing nothing - which deepens the desire for more. What a self-defeating cycle.
If I’ve learned anything from Psychology it’s that our brains can be drastically shaped - but are also constantly hosting internal battles for attention and considering what to shape into. Multitasking even for a short while is counterintuitive. Know that feeling of constantly switching gears mentally and being in a high velocity environment where half of your tasks are pointless additions (aka a soul-sucking job)? Imagine then, if your whole life had that tempo and you were running on fumes - wondering why things are so listless, why the sands of time slip away quicker the tighter you clench your fist, when your life became so suffocating.
Excessive plans, things and people weigh us down. Everything from clothes we don’t wear, spur-of-the-moment purchases, trend-driven upgrades, festering grudges, performative productivity, victim narratives, cluttered rooms - to chasing five identities simultaneously, overthinking scenarios that never happen, comparing timelines, obsessing over the news, scrolling (or 90% of social media, really), stuffing your time to avoid stillness. Can you tell I can go on? Can you tell when you need something as opposed to wanting it?
However, what if preventing overstimulation and misaligned priorities is an ancient practice we can apply in modern ways?
Religions usually appear to endorse some sort of asceticism. Traditional as it may seem, maybe versions of it are all the more necessary in a consumerist, materialistic, distracted and dissatisfied society - despite living in the most comfortable era in history.
The kings and queens of old didn’t have entertainment at the swipe of a thumb, health and medicine was underdeveloped enough for people to die of common flu, ordinary citizens couldn’t taste delicacies from every culture, and yet here we are. These were the marvels of centuries. If we teleported someone from then to this world, they’d probably faint out of happiness then grow restless chasing more… and then realise this still isn’t it?
Because ironically, there’s also more apathy. A fried brain sees novelty in just about nothing. Substituting deep satisfaction with cheap dopamine is a common resort, and then the impassivity brought on by zapping our brains is a common consequence.
Maybe the answer isn’t in more convenience, more options, more stimulation - because there’s always better, finer and higher; there will always be a new version of ‘enough’ - a higher ceiling that slowly makes your life a cage.
Maybe it’s in selective adoption - phased, intentional, aligned.
Maybe it’s in carving life down until it finally fits in your own hands.
Disclaimer: This is one of eight parts in the faith-based series ‘How To Have A Sound Heart’ and can be read as a stand-alone. For more like this - start with the series index here, or navigate to the previous chapter here.
اللَّهُمَّ إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنْ عِلْمٍ لاَ يَنْفَعُ وَقَلْبٍ لاَ يَخْشَعُ وَدُعَاءٍ لاَ يُسْمَعُ وَنَفْسٍ لاَ تَشْبَعُ
O Allah, I seek refuge with You from knowledge that is of no benefit, a heart that is not humble/reverent of You, a supplication that is not heard and a soul that is not satisfied.
Contentment
They say contentment is the paradise of this world, and the first step to that soul-satisfaction mentioned in the dua above isn’t addition - it’s subtraction. Here’s why.
The palace of the heart, as previously mentioned, has to be regularly decluttered by housekeeping. There can’t be stale food stinking the hallways, hogged rooms turning away better guests of the heart, cobwebbed corners that could be turned into a pristine reading nook or a royal greenhouse.
Contentment grows in cleared space, through the intentional limitation of what competes for the heart’s allegiance. Without periodic re-ordering, the heart’s priorities become crowded by what is urgent but not important. Attachments multiply, attention fragments, and your system of values becomes reactive rather than deliberate. Greed turns the palace into a golden exterior and rotting interior. Worries of the future and ghosts of the past further wreck it. But enough with the metaphors.
Practically, excess can occur in our minds and hearts through time, comparison, hedonism and heightened attachments.
It always scares me how time works - our only non-replenishable resource. Also, it intrigues me how pre-modern people mentioned death a lot more - not in a morbid sense - to accept and live more with the awareness of time. In all old sun-dials there was engraved a reminder like ‘carpe diem’ - signifying ‘finitude in temporality’. Take a turn down this rabbit hole and check out this philosophical breakdown for fascinating insights and fancier ways to say YOLO.
With the rise of industrial efficiency, human activities became regimented, calculated, and optimized. Lewis Mumford said “Eternity ceased gradually to serve as the measure and focus of human actions. In it’s place came the dictatorship of the clock”. It was now measurable that ‘time is a sword: if you don’t cut with it, it will cut you’ - meaning it costs you if not spent wisely.
As a free bird with a mammoth amount of choices and the consequential analysis paralysis, what to do with my time is my biggest concern, and probably yours (if you’re still reading). However, if you are ruled by malignant distractions and insignificant concerns, you’re on autopilot - not able to think or choose at all - good or bad. With anything to do, to be and to consume we need to deliberately ask, how much is too much (hustle culture alert)? Which people are just distractions (sorry not sorry)? How much free-time isn’t actually free? (Answer: all.) Which words I use are just clutter in speech? How much of my digital consumption is pointless and how do I decide that? Which endeavours are done for an artificial concept of ‘enough’ with an inertia I can’t seem to shake off? Track three days of your life and observe what answered these or moved the needle. Reduce, replace, remove.
Seems like there are more questions than answers in this series, but the point is our self-audit anyway.
A prime reason we don’t wish to reduce, though, is because our bar was set by others. Comparison is the gasoline of excess. Of course, my singular and finite life should equate to selected highlight reels of a hundred other people or I haven’t fulfilled my purpose, have I?
This is how the quest for more robs us of the current joy of good enough.
With the infinite possibilities comes infinite exposure and desire is born from knowing about other people - while previously only travelling could give you that and in a way that showed both high and low states of people. Then we start delaying our contentment, “when I will be living in xyz then I’ll be happy” - a certain job, a certain lover, an arbitrary age, a socially acceptable bank balance - these are the conditions of giving ourselves permission to be happy. I’ll hold my ears for how cliché this is but, you don’t even know if you’ll have the permission to see tomorrow.
It’s built in our psyche to have moving targets and to keep progressing towards the next thing, but there is a point the ambitious music turns eerie and haunting - crossing into greed instead.
That deserves a whole article of its own, but for now, it reminds me of a story. Abdur Rahman Ibn Awf was one of the wealthiest men of his time (with 700 camels - each equating to the worth of a modern-day supercar). Surprisingly, he used to pray:
اللَّهُمَّ قِنِي شُحَّ نَفْسِي
O Allah, protect me against the miserliness and greed of my soul.
There must be something he thought of when acknowledging that hoarding attitude within us. But for him, wealth didn’t delete the hoarding instinct; it magnified the need to restrain it and fence hedonism.
There is work involved in counting your own good before comparing to others’ apparent good, in simply minding your business and in realising ‘no one is beneath me, and no one is above me except my awe-inspiring God’ and to wish well regardless of the natural comparison. Everyone can, once a while, feel they are chasing smoke - but to turn that awareness into an act of minimalism and grounding is rarer.
This incessant need to fulfil needs is a spiral, and its awareness isn’t only meant for sages. Knowing when that soul’s line blurs into ego territory is incumbent upon any ‘mindful-hearted’ individual.
All of this is a non-issue if you live like a wayfarer, of course. If you treat your worldly stay like an interim hotel on a transit instead of your permanent abode with heightened attachments. If you’ve lost someone, if you’ve been struck with severe health issues, you finally halt and conclude - at the end of this finite time, not much matters, genuinely.
So before saying yes to anything, ask: “If I were passing through (because I merely am), would I carry this?” Pack light, but pack essentials - what strengthens the journey: character, skill, sincerity, health, community. At least once a month, remove three things: one physical item, one digital input, one limiting mindset. Train your muscle of attention and curate your knowledge, heart, desires and soul while making that dua from the start.
Let’s understand this clearly because I’ve seen it being blown out of proportion with a cultural lens. Being religious and spiritual is not about leaving the world/dunya - it’s about living in the dunya with Allah in our heart. Untethering isn’t severing. You don’t get to heaven by going around the world, you get to it by going through it - and that means viewing everything through reflection, intention and moderation. It means passing your life through a Quranic filter for alignment, and understanding that what you give attention to expands.
What you focus on grows.
Try not to think of an elephant and that’s all you can picture. It’s probably not a revelation that the more attention you give to the negative chase of excess, the further it sucks you into the vortex, and all you notice is how much you still don’t have (as if it’s emphasised in real life too).
Maybe it is only later we realise that both what we have and what we don’t are tests for us. There will be times you will feel deprived when in reality you were spared of that thing. As my friend recently said, you need to have something go wrong to highlight how many things were going right in the first place.
Provision and deprivation aren’t opposites in the way we think, but are paired tests. Ease can test arrogance. Lack can test trust.
What arrives measures your gratitude and what leaves measures your surrender. Both reveal where your heart leans when it is not performing for anyone.
Gratitude, then, is not naïve optimism. It is a calibrated scale to balance life’s swings between increase and decrease - so you don’t become inflated by gain or hollowed out by loss.
This is perhaps why a believer is advised to stay between shukr and hamd - gratitude and praise - when things are looking up and when they aren’t. Whether it’s a feedback loop, a law of attraction or an approach to internal equilibrium, it’s a Quranic principle that works by grounding you and your attention.
This divine knowledge is why despite the back-firing plans, inferiority or deprivation, the heart settles on appreciating His unrequitable gifts and praising His infinite wisdom.
وَإِذْ تَأَذَّنَ رَبُّكُمْ لَئِن شَكَرْتُمْ لَأَزِيدَنَّكُمْ
And ˹remember˺ when your Lord proclaimed, ‘If you are grateful, I will certainly give you more [Quran, 14:7]
وَءَاتَىٰكُم مِّن كُلِّ مَا سَأَلْتُمُوهُ ۚ وَإِن تَعُدُّوا۟ نِعْمَتَ ٱللَّهِ لَا تُحْصُوهَآ ۗ إِنَّ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ لَظَلُومٌۭ كَفَّارٌۭ
And He has granted you all that you asked Him for. If you tried to count Allah’s blessings, you would never be able to number them. Indeed humankind is truly unfair, ˹totally˺ ungrateful. [Quran, 14:34]
ۗ وَنَبْلُوكُم بِٱلشَّرِّ وَٱلْخَيْرِ فِتْنَةًۭ ۖ
And We test you with evil and with good as trial [Quran, 21:35]
The internal root
Let’s also address a psychological elephant: the quest for more, the blind-sighted comparison, chasing external validation, quickly panicking over the loss of blessings - all stem from a deep insecurity. These are downstream effects of a hollow self-esteem. And for that, here’s another story.
There was a Bedouin companion called Zahir who was deeply loved by the Prophet ﷺ, but he struggled with low self-worth regarding his poverty and appearance. He’d come to Medina, sell his goods, and exchange gifts with the Prophet each time. Once, while he was calling out to the buyers, the Prophet ﷺ had snuck up behind him to hug him, covering his eyes. Unable to see who it was, Zahir said, “Let me go! Who is this?” but then relaxed upon recognising him. The Prophet joked “And who will buy this man?” and while Zahir understood the jest, he despondently expressed “O Messenger of Allah, you’ll find that no one will buy me; I have no value.” This is when he was met with the Prophet’s soft and profound reassurance, “To Allah you are priceless. To Allah you’re invaluable.”
For a man who thought he wasn’t looked up to in any category by the society, this was paramount. He learned value and self-esteem are internal and from Allah. And living this is not possible if we continue keeping up with the Joneses and hand others our self-esteem.
مَن كَانَ يُرِيدُ ٱلْعِزَّةَ فَلِلَّهِ ٱلْعِزَّةُ جَمِيعًا
Whoever seeks honour and power, then ˹let them know that˺ all honour and power belong to Allah. [Quran, 35:10]
Another flipside is when you do realise you’ve been blessed, when you are praised. There is a reason the sunnah/practice of praying when looking in the mirror helps in reorienting each time, acknowledging Who made us, however He did (because standards keep changing anyway) and praying for the things we can control, that count more:
اَللَّهُمَّ أَنْتَ حَسَّنْتَ خَلْقِي فَحَسِّنْ خُلُقِي
Oh Allah just as You have made my external features (or creation) beautiful, make my character beautiful as well.
Internal work and the chase of refining our soul is the only constant endeavour that doesn’t end in gluttonous hoarding. Superficial and societal trophies are substitute sources, much like the substitute dopamine we want to subtract.
And at the end of the day, definitely not a shocker, but all these people we try to please - no one really cares. They are busy managing their own insecurities. It’s a very ‘I am what I think you think I am’ world.
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