26. On Spiritual Nutrients

(Epistemic status: Spitballing and stamp-collecting, but like, in a vaguely principled way, and built off preceding work.)

Many things go into a life well lived and a soul in good health, and as far as anyone knows, there’s no list of what a healthy agent needs in order to keep their soul in good working order. A functioning vessel and the food and shelter to protect that vessel are clearly not enough. Perhaps more surprisingly, it doesn’t seem like any broad-spectrum or one-size-fits-all approach to the upper half of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - love, belonging, and esteem, however sincere, high-quality, or plentiful - works particularly well, either. Neither is full self-actualization even strictly necessary for nominal healthy functioning of a soul - if “self-actualization” is even useful as a single undifferentiated reference class. And yet something almost tangible remains to be explained about the emotional and psychological needs of a healthy soul, though the relationship among actions in the world, mindset, and degree and type of spiritual nutrition remains unclear.

This post is a brief attempt to clarify the phenomenon, to point out two disparate people who reached the same initial conclusions, to do a little exposition of my own thoughts, and to provide a very incomplete taxonomy of the titular spiritual nutrients. For the sake of clarity, when I talk about “spiritual nutrients” and “souls”, I’m not gesturing at something esoteric or mystical - I’m speaking under the ground assumption that whatever spark makes a living person different from a boulder is real and worthy of study, and that we might get something more out of examining the kinds of prosaic ups and downs of week-to-week life that seem random if not more carefully contemplated.

First off, what even is a spiritual nutrient? For a rough operationalization, they’re psychological needs or drives that are technically optional to fulfill and which often relate to attitudes about other people or more object-level desires. PR’s installation work, “Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)”, is the point of reference that first moved me to contemplate the concept, with her artist’s statement’s expressed wishes for people to “absorb spiritual vitamins” by existing in the space. More practically, DS’s pilot definition of “eating dirt” as a recommended personal practice is a tantalizingly useful-at-all point of reference here. DS seems to see the same thing I do here, of people’s souls wasting away for the lack of some vital spiritual nutrient. He further points out that just as many animals (humans included) are good at noticing that their bodies lack something vital, they are often quite bad at diagnosing precisely what they lack and especially what around them might contain it. (Humans will die of a lack of salt, and in times of salt deprivation, salty foods will taste especially good to them - but famously, at no point will a human dying of salt deprivation ever specifically crave salt.) This leads to pica, a phenomenon where those same animals seek out all kinds of non-food objects to suck on, chew, or eat, likely due to their lacking anything more than crude heuristics for seeking out the nutrients their bodies need. So too, notes DS, do humans specifically engage in behaviors that can be pica-like - watching sitcoms, playing mobile games, buying trinkets and clothes - which (while sometimes perfectly healthy, just as eating ice intentionally can be perfectly healthy) gesture at some underlying spiritual malnutrition.

The obvious thing to start off trying is to introspect for a while, figure out what exactly you want, and then more precisely target your choice of enrichment activity and other interventions towards fulfilling that narrow need, moving directly to a solution that will actually help. This is an instance of the more general cognitive tool called “goal factoring”. But what do you do if no such avenues present themselves to you, or if you have trouble even clearly identifying which spiritual nutrient you lack? On his model, the thing to do about that is to (metaphorically) seek out dirt to eat instead of ice, with the logic that just as dirt or clay might at least have a little iron in them while ice clearly has none and thus that finding dirt to eat is a better tack to take, you might be best served by explicitly choosing to try something novel that might have more of that nutrient than anything known not to - or at least, to give you a better sense of what it is you’re missing. Even if it turns out to be a safe-but-unpleasant experience, at least you now have some extra data on the shape of your problem.


All that having been said, DS tacitly glosses over as obvious the kinds of more easily factored spiritual malnutrition that can arise from some more prosaic kinds of social privation - a lack, in fairly absolute terms, of simpler things like privacy, affectionate touch, or security. That is, I take cues from more literal nutrition here - I claim that there are both spiritual macronutrients, which are easier to come by, required in bulk, inadequate of themselves, and important for obvious major functions; and spiritual micronutrients, which are harder to find, required in much smaller but still nonzero amounts, are equally inadequate of themselves, are potentially harmful if overdosed on, and are vital for more specific minor functions. More succinctly and more colorfully, spiritual marasmus is not the same thing as spiritual scurvy or spiritual anemia.

So then what kinds of things are spiritual nutrients? It’s clear to me that they’re some kind of psychological requirement, that they need to have something to do with desire, other people, or social activity levels, and that they can’t be strictly obligatory. I lack any better set of organizing principles and any taxonomy more complex than “needed in bulk vs. needed in small and varying quantities”, so instead I’ll list off a few short descriptions to serve as a partial extensional definition: community and fellowship, control over one’s own life or the course of larger events, service to others or to an affinity group, affection (physical or otherwise), ease and relaxation, well-regardedness within a social scene, overcoming obstacles, standing out and showing off talents or finished goods, rambunctiousness and roughhousing, openness/pride/comfort in one’s own skin, belonging in a crowd, mastery of a skill, an “empty minimap”, innocuous surveillance of strangers/”people-watching”, personal change and growth, and progress/accomplishment are a handful of initial possibilities that I’ve catalogued in myself or others to date. Maybe you can think of your own or maybe you think that the listed concepts form no natural category - I want to hear about that in either case.


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