Going hungry is okay.

Not being full after every meal is okay.

Not being full after many meals is okay, even ideal.

You have life to live.

Stay sharp.

Having eaten a meal is no excuse for a nap.

Being made sluggishly full after each meal is no virtue.

Being Perpetually Sated As A Cultural Value

Our eating culture tends to encourage the ability to stuff oneself at each meal. Supersized drinks especially exist for that: sugar for quick energy, caffeine as well, and big fluid for big satiating volume. A few cents of cost to produce, but an afternoon of satiety for you, the satisfied customer.

Those who know no better have that source of satiety as they jump through life from craving to craving. There is a comfort to having a stomach that never lacks being full. There, too, is a comfort to knowing that you do not always need to be full.

Some of us may have a desire to rise above and may even occasionally succeed at rising above jumping through life from craving to craving. Yet, the reality is that, "What itch do I scratch next?" becomes the perpetual question for so many.

Perhaps This Is A Deviation From How Good Life Can Look

If you will permit me a dalliance into the theological dear reader, your writer, a former atheist turn Christian, sees a detail of man's purpose in the Bible that may be useful to anyone reading this— atheist, Christian, or other.

Embedded in it is the idea that more can be had from life than the perpetual question "What itch do I scratch next?"

When man was created, as the Bible tells us "in the likeness and image of God" more was designed to be had. The moral tradition that arises out of that creation story proceeds forth to Moses and Joshua, to the prophets, to Jesus the Son of God, then Peter and Paul, and those who, to this day, walk in their footsteps. This moral tradition is one that says man is designed to be more than one who jumps through life from one craving to the next.

In fact, we are told that man can stop the unchecked pursuit of those cravings. Man can rise above submission to those cravings.

Peter and Paul did not preach self-help. They preached a dependency on God, and also a hopefulness of what man can achieve through God — including how sin can be conquered.