A Fag and a Bag of Cheese Twisties
Image: A woman sits on a counter, blazer slightly open, gold-rimmed glasses, holding a gold bag of crisps, puffing on a fag. This isn't the deal she wanted for herself. I think this is where I ended up.
Greece still smokes, with the full commitment of a culture that has not yet decided that pleasure should be rationed. On any given terrace in Athens (and some indoor venues still), at any hour that could reasonably be called morning, afternoon or evening, someone will light up with the satisfaction of a person who has earned this moment. The pause, then the exhale, is the point. For thirty seconds, nothing is required of them.
I don’t smoke, never did. I loathe it, if I’m honest, and the science backs my disgust. But watching friends, I understand the gesture. I recognised it in myself at times, the last time at the weekend, back in Australia as I was trying to get a handle on being in the country that is also still home, and reaching for a bag of cheese Twisties (it’s Aussie, look it up) at the servo (also Aussie lingo). I was famished, nostalgic, and briefly convinced that this was exactly what I needed.
It wasn’t, of course. Twisties have the nutritional content of a dirty tissue, and the colour alone does a great job reminding us of this.
But that’s not really the interesting question. The interesting question is what on earth was my system trying to regulate when I dived for a pack, and why did it reach for that particular thing to do it.
The Greeks had a concept for the broader practice that this moment belongs to. The care of the self (epimeleia heautou). Philosophers have written about it extensively, tracing how the ancient understanding of self-care was an ongoing practice. Rather than a state you achieve (optimal health, perfect habits, a fridge full of the right things), they positioned the care of the self as something you tended to continuously, imperfectly, with curiosity rather than judgement.
The cigarette on the terrace is an attempt at epimeleia heautou. A poor one, physiologically. But an attempt nonetheless. The person lighting up is doing something the Greeks would have recognised, pausing, attending to themselves, taking a breath in the middle of whatever the day has demanded.
The Twisties are doing the same job and are also a physiologically poor choice. Neuroscience says that under stress or depletion, the brain’s reward circuitry prioritises immediate, familiar comfort over longer-term benefit. Dopamine, which is less about pleasure and more about seeking and anticipation, drives us toward known rewards when we’re running low. The brain, under pressure will prioritise known comfort now over uncertain benefit later. It’s merely an attempt from our nervous systems to settle.
Roy Baumeister, a social psychologist who has worked extensively on self-control, found that self-regulation draws on a finite reserve of mental and emotional energy. When that reserve runs low, say for example when you are weighed down by one of life’s difficult stretches, our capacity to choose the harder, better thing genuinely diminishes. It is not that we stop wanting the better thing. It is that the gap between wanting and doing becomes temporarily too wide to cross.
Back to the philosophers, and Aristotle who called this akrasia, acting against your own better judgement, and he genuinely puzzled over this notion. His conclusion was that in the moment of weakness, our perception of the good actually shifts. We temporarily see the immediate comfort as the greater good. Hypocrisy? Far from it. It’s a genuine, if temporary, reordering of our values under pressure.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a neuroscientist who argues that the brain is essentially a prediction machine, continuously monitoring your body’s internal state and anticipating what it needs before you are aware of needing it. A craving is the brain filing a request for regulation. The Twisties are its proposed solution. The question is simply whether you sign off on it automatically, or pause long enough to ask if there is something that would serve that need better.
These folks even had a word for it: kathêkon, which simply means the fitting response to the situation in front of you, not some ideal version of it. In the Twisties moment, that fitting response is not automatically reaching for a green smoothie next time. It is actually a pause, a small act of curiosity that asks what does my system actually need right now, and what would genuinely serve it.
The fridge full of the right things is great, but it’s not everything when it comes to the care of the self. It is the practice of asking the question. Continuously and imperfectly, on a terrace in Athens or at a servo outside Sydney, dragging a fag or demolishing a bag of Twisties and the understanding that tending to yourself is never a place that you will reach one day, it’s just something you keep doing.