Don't finish what you started

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Good morning, everyone. First of all, I'd like to wish you a good week. I hope that Mother's Day was spent in good health and joy. Some of the mothers we know may no longer be alive, others may still be expecting a baby, or still others, who will be in the future, but don't know it.

Today I want to share with you an idea that came to me while I was listening to a podcast.

“We shouldn't finish everything that we start”

And this idea, before settling in my mind, still caused me some strangeness.

We've all heard from the most renowned commentators, influencers and mindfulness masters that we should finish what we've started.

So what's the point of doing the opposite? No, it's not a fancier form of procrastination, nor is it simply facing up to life's tasks. Imagine a simple situation:

You're eating a meal, and that particular meal has a lot of calories, and it's not even one of the most interesting nutritionally... Not enough vitamins, not so much protein from good sources and with high biological availability, and a source of fat that isn't vegetable, comes from unnatural sources and is highly processed... And that may well taste good to you, but you're already satisfied with what you've eaten so far. There's no point in finishing what you have on your plate, just so that nothing is left behind and there's less waste.

As a child, I was taught by both my parents and my grandparents not to play with my food and not to waste the food on my plate. These teachings were passed on to my parents by their parents, who in turn went through some difficult times. When food was not as accessible and available as it is today.

In those days it was unthinkable for anyone to have too much food in front of them. Some foods weren't as readily available as they are today, and the prices weren't affordable for most wallets.

Times have changed, fortunately... But the scarcity that our great-grandparents and grandparents may have experienced over an extended period of time, coupled with the occurrence of World Wars and economic recessions, has given way to a completely different picture.

Nowadays, food processing companies are forced to add more and more sugars or sugar substitutes, flavor enhancers, preservatives, coloring agents... Not to mention the ever-increasing quantities of food per package... Lifestyles have changed a lot. From a society in which we ate a lot more meals at home with the rest of the family, we now only share one meal a day with some of the other people in our household or our group of friends.

Work has become something that conditions the free time we have during the day, and in some cases, weekly shifts have even messed with our daily rest cycles! So much has changed. We come home, tired from a job we often don't enjoy doing, without the patience to prepare a basic meal with fresh produce, and we simply go to the pantry and look for what's literally in front of us and ready to eat! We're not even choosing what would best suit our nutritional needs... We just want to feel that our immediate needs are being met at that very moment.

We make these decisions and actions in such a way that, even though we are no longer hungry, the information that should be coming from our stomach that we are full, and which takes some time, has already been started many bites ago by the time it reaches its destination. In conclusion: we eat food of poor nutritional quality, with a high calorie concentration, and which will not satisfy our needs for trace elements.

This is just one of the examples I can give of things we start that are not worth finishing! Let's take, for example, and following on from the topic of the conversation, the following situation: We go to the fridge, and because of the boredom we feel, or other personal factors, we think that by eating something, we'll be fulfilling that need to fill something in our “life”. And what do we do, we certainly open the freezer and take out the family-sized carton of our favorite ice cream. At this point, we're obviously not limited to one scoop of our favorite ice cream. We'll probably even almost finish the carton that was halfway through when we opened it today. It's our system. We seek comfort, and the dopamine that comes with it, immediately when we find something we like.

The way we are “connected” conditions us and companies and brands know this very well.

With algorithms fed by an increasingly trained AI, it will be very difficult to get off the “living wheel” they want to put us on.

I hope you enjoyed my little reflection today.

Cheers

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