Blue Trident, and my gum-chewing addiction

Why “what’s wrong with it?” isn’t the question

I am, it must be said, an addictive gum chewer. I can go months without chewing gum, but once I get a pack in my hand, I chew through it in less than a day. Especially in moments of concentration – working on a deliverable for a client – I chew through gum like a squirrel through a nut.

And I change it out quickly because it’s the flavor I’m after as much as the chewing itself; when the taste turns bland out goes that piece and in goes a new. Actually to be fully honest, in goes two new pieces, because I usually chew two at a time. One piece doesn’t feel substantial enough in my mouth.

I am known for this in my family, Mom and her gum. Blue (original flavor) Trident is my brand. On my gum days, I’m like a smoker with her Lucky Strikes.

It borders, I’ll be the first to admit, on the comical.

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Why do I tell you about my gum-chewing? Because chewing gum is a great example of a neutral action.

Actions that are neutral are just that, neither good nor bad. They aren’t tied to pursuing a basic good, and they also don’t move you away from something good. They’re just “treading water” behaviors. Most often, they’re enjoyable things you choose to do, something that may fritter away time. Examples: flipping through People magazine, watching the Office, playing SuperMario Cart by yourself after work, scrolling Instagram for a few minutes. Fun. Harmless. You might call them “benign pleasures.”

Chewing gum is a benign pleasure. It doesn’t nourish my body the way eating food does (that would be a good – advancing health). But it also doesn’t damage my body; it’s not like smoking cigarettes or doing drugs (these would be bad – diminishing health). It’s just… there.

If you criticize my frequent Trident chomping, I might say, “Well, what’s wrong with it?” The answer would be: nothing. The implication would be, get off my back. And that’s fair enough. But our culture is addicted to the question, “Well what’s wrong with it?” Problem is, that’s the not the question to ask.

The correct question is: “What’s right with it?” Is it making your life objectively better? Growing you as a person? Bringing you more fully into goodness, truth, and beauty? Because that’s where you thrive.

Actions that cause true flourishing are reasonable actions – things you do to pursue the basic goods (life, knowledge, friendship, beauty, play, practical reasonableness). These are things like visiting a friend, watching a documentary, sitting by a waterfall, strumming your guitar, playing pick-up basketball. Such activities build happiness in the long run.

There’s also, of course, the opposite. Actions that hinder flourishing are referred to as unreasonable actions – things you do that work against the basic goods. These are things like telling lies, shirking or gossiping about your friend, vaping, vandalizing, watching porn. When you do these things, it makes your life worse – and you are damaged in the process.

Neutral actions are OK but they’re not, literally, good. It’s worth saying and worth thinking about… especially because we live a society addicted to them. We specialize in passing time in mildly pleasurable, adds-up-to-nothing ways. And it’s slowly killing us, individually and collectively. Put all the neutral actions together and you get a whole bunch of time you could have been (but weren’t) flourishing. A single neutral action isn’t unreasonable, but a lifetime of neutral actions becomes unreasonable. It prevents growing, becoming better, developing virtue (which emerges as a byproduct of pursuing the good). A lifetime of neutral actions is stagnation that leads to decay.

Bottom line: let’s limit neutral actions and be wary of benign pleasures.

Let’s seek to do things for a reason, and make sure the reason’s good. That doesn’t mean being manic; many things undertaken for the good are slow and quiet (cooking a meal, listening to beautiful music, doing a puzzle, taking a bath). It does mean being thoughtful, and choosing what we do intentionally. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said, and the unexamined action – by extension – is not worth taking.