Empty Calories

It feels to me that nearly everything we consume these days is not only empty calories, meaning none of it adds nutritious sustenance, but in fact is detrimental to physical, psychic, and spiritual health.

But, for the moment, let’s just stick with the empty calorie idea—meaning nearly everything we take in is like eating sawdust.

Think about it. TV, movies, video games, YouTube crap, AI slop, TikTok, Facebook, X, Quarter Pounders, Big Macs, Pepsi, Pizza, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, football, basketball, pickleball, on and on and on and on. Sure, here and there might be an inspiring football game that isn’t just about moving the ball across the field, but about teamwork, camaraderie; maybe you could say the same about a pickleball game, an activity with a close friend, out in the air, the sun, etc. And maybe you find a decent film, about something meaningful and moving. But it isn’t often, my shrew friend, it isn’t often.

There was a time when people entertained themselves with art, not just sensory stimulation. Composers of symphonies, ballets and operas were the superstars of the day. Their work was adored and revered. People found meaning and deep insight from the works of Beethoven, Stravinsky, Monet and Picasso.

The biggest difference in the way people approached such things back then was that they stimulated something more than the body. We’ve all heard the phrase “mind, body, spirit.” Today we are only concerned about feeding the body—bodily sensations. There was a time when people also stimulated the mind and spirit. The body is easily satisfied with sensation. Eating a pizza, or a Big Mac, hits certain sensate points that eating a cauliflower does not. Leave that up to sugar, carbs, and other “stimulating but not healthy” substances. We obviously see the same in drugs and alcohol. Stimulate, stimulate—that is the name of the game.

The body also responds radically to thrills, danger, and physical risks. Although most people will now avoid anything that may cause harm or suffering, they are still attracted to things that may appear to create harm and suffering—like video games, horror and action movies, virtual reality games, and live sporting events.

There is currently very little interest in anything that stimulates the mind or the soul. There is a bit more attention paid to the mind than to spiritual endeavours, but not much more. Both are largely ignored. But what is ignored almost entirely are things that don’t seem to fit in any of these categories. Things that may be labelled superstitious, ritualistic, or just plain odd.

I just recently read about tying ribbons around piano legs in Victorian times. For whatever objective reason this happened, it seems to be an example of a ritualistic action that happened “just because.” The reason I find this important is because this action, and many more similar to it, would stimulate an inner system that lay somewhere between the mind and the heart.

That system doesn’t run on dopamine hits or on arguments. It runs on participation—on doing something that is older than you, slightly unnecessary by modern standards, and aimed at a layer of experience that is neither pure sensation nor pure thought. The piano-leg business, even if the popular story of sexual panic turns out to be mostly satire that got out of hand (that the bare legs of a piano is sexually inappropriate), still points at the habit of treating ordinary objects as if they carried a little more meaning than their function required. You drape the furniture, or you don’t. Either way, the gesture itself is the thing.

Consider a few others that used to occupy the same territory. In parts of Britain and New England, when someone in a household died, a person would go out to the beehives, knock gently, and tell the bees. Sometimes they draped the skeps in a scrap of black. The formula was short and almost domestic: the master is dead, but don’t you leave. Fail to do it, and the bees might swarm, or stop making honey, or simply die. No one needed a peer-reviewed study to justify the walk to the hives. The act acknowledged that the bees were part of the household’s continuity, not just livestock, and that the boundary between the living and the dead was worth a small ceremony. It was neither a thrill nor an analysis. It was an attention paid to something intermediate.

Or take the old shoes found bricked into the walls, chimneys, and eaves of houses from the late medieval period well into the nineteenth century. A single worn shoe—often a child’s—placed where it would never be seen again. The later rationalizations talk about trapping witches or evil spirits that couldn’t reverse once they entered the shoe. Whether anyone still believed that literally by the time the practice was common is almost beside the point. The gesture was the concealment itself: an ordinary object enlisted to hold a threshold. You didn’t do it for the sensory pleasure of the act, and you didn’t do it because a logical proof demanded it. You did it because the house, and the people in it, seemed to require the mark.

Stopping the clocks when someone died belongs in the same family. The hands were halted at the hour of death; the mirrors were covered or turned to the wall. Practical reasons existed—recording the time, preventing vanity during mourning—but the deeper register was the deliberate pause. Time and reflection were suspended not to create a spectacle and not to solve a problem, but to mark that ordinary sensation and ordinary thought were, for a while, insufficient. The house itself was put into a different mode.

None of these acts were free of fear, status, or exclusion. Sin-eating, in which a poor man was paid to eat bread and salt that had rested on the corpse and thereby take on the dead person’s sins, is an example that makes the darker edge plain. Yet even there, the community treated the physical gesture as capable of carrying a spiritual load. The point for us is not that we should revive any of these things. The point is that they once occupied a category modern empty-calorie culture has largely abandoned: actions whose value lay in the doing, the continuity, the enigmatic, and the recognition of an intermediate layer rather than in immediate sensory response or rational, mind, justification. Or doing them for some unknown, mysterious satisfaction they may have brought. This is more coming from a consciousness of the heart rather than a consciousness of the intellect, or even more base, a consciousness of the body and sensations.

That layer I am talking about—call it the psyche’s need for enacted meaning, or simply the space between mind and heart—does not get fed by scrolling, by the next quarter-pounder, or by another round of simulated danger. It gets fed, when it gets fed at all, by gestures that are slightly unnecessary, slightly traditional, and aimed at something that cannot be fully reduced to either the body or the mind, or even the spirit. We used to have more of them. We have fewer now. The intake of empty calories keeps coming.

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