The Tarb Lifestyle
What is Tarb?
My friends took me out to this, now closed, egyptian restaurant one day to make me try one of the ultimate egyptian warcrime foods. Tarb.
Tarb is grilled kofta that is wrapped in lamb fat, and if you're unfamiliar with lamb fat, it usually looks like these thin sheets of fat that end up wrapping the kofta. For the food cultured, variants of this dish are popular in many cultures. Balkan-based Kokoretsi (Kokoreç) comes to mind.
There's a certain irony in how tarb is created. It is wrapped in layers of its own fat.. its own gluttony, and that's what we enjoy it for.
Indulging in the gluttony
As I entered my early 20s, I started being mindful of people around me, and as such I started listening to their problems, and as most people, I started trying to help. And the naivety of the young soul makes you try to solve everyone's life at first. I was talking with a friend of mine from high school that felt that some lay out their lives in a way that feels downright emotionally manipulative.
Having a conversation with your taxi driver, who seems to be in a bad marriage, in a bad economic situation, his kids hate him, he's in debt since 1974, you start to struggle to find light at the end of his tunnel to give him hope, it almost depresses you as well. This is an exaggeration but I think we've all met people or even felt this ourselves where we we start having compound problems where it's hard to see anything that is fixable because of such a complicated depdency chain.
My friend was beginning to feel like these people talk from these dimmly lit lenses to gain empathy from others, even if they feel like they see their own light and hope, but I disagree, I think they live a Tarb life style. Or at least, have lived it enough to reach where they are.
They have coccooned themselves in layers and layers of bad choices that eventually made the light beyond so dim, so dark, that no fire inside can any longer burn bright enough to see the hope around them.
And that is the Tarb lifestyle. Because just like our favourite meal, there's a certain irony as well in how we structure our lives and how we're fine with it. When we're at our lowest we wrap ourselves in layers of bad choices, that make us feel immobilized, down, unable to move, change, or live..
How do I know That I'm living a Tarb lifestyle
The key characteristic of the Tarb lifestyle is a web of bad choices. You are supposed to be able to control your gluttony. I will not pretend that any human can be perfect or even half as perfect we would like to be. After all, every piece of kofta needs some fat. I want to emphasize that the Tarb lifestyle isn't about making choices that you regard as bad. or even questionable. We all indulge in our mistakes and sometimes these things are recurring and we accept them as part of our lives, like scrolling through reels on tiktok for an hour or two after work. Even if you regard it as a bad choice, you might accept it and it might not even affect you negatively, on the contrary it might be beneficial for sustaining your soul and enjoying yourself.
But we should be mindful of the things that we indulge in and be free enough that we know that we could stop them to indulge in others. It's a liquid set of choices that you can make. The Tarb lifestyle starts to manifest itself when you are stuck in a web of bad choices. When changing one thing seems impossible because it's stuck in the middle of other layers of bad decisions. I'll take myself as an example that I think would resonate with a lot of new bachelor university graduates.
When I first graduated I realized that I was sleeping late, waking up even later, not getting much done at work, not being able to do the things that I like or even go out with my friends or do any of the activities or sports that I enjoy regularly. When trying to change that I realized the web of bad choices I put myself in.
Because I cannot change the time at which I wake up, because I have to wake up late since I stay up so late, the reason I stay up so late? because I end up staying late to finish left over work from the morning, why do I have left-over work from the morning? because I am too tired to finish the work in the morning, because I woke up so groggy and late. Which also means that my evenings are busy, and I don't get to join others doing things at times when they're off work, which leads to more burn out, which leads to less work being done and the web solidifies.
How do I break out of the Tarb lifestyle
Like any other web, it's hard to unravel the web layer by layer, although you might explore trying to do that first, because it might be possible.. But if you find that unraveling the web is too difficult, the key is to make the biggest dent you can, the biggest sharpest cut in one spot that ends up cutting the web by structure.
In my example, I started trying to fix my weekends (which is a bit counterintuitive). I forced myself into a routine that forced me to break it. I wanted to play more sports on the weekend, so I had fixed scheduled games/matches in early morning as early as 8AM or 9AM (early for me at the time, maybe late for you) on Friday that would force me to start that one day right. I would be awake in the morning, tired by night, and sleeping well right on time. Making more "major commitments" at times like this forced a structure that essentially acted as a sharp cut that helped unravel the web.
Tear the spider web.
Is there light at the end of the skewer
There's an underlining human optimism, a mark of the indomitable human spirit that is behind
the name. Because the Tarb life style is not the life style of a pig.
Pigs are wrapped in dense layers of their own fat, and by no fault of their own! That is just who they are. They are the representation of gluttony by their very being. but not tarb..
Under all those thin layers of fat there was this once agile lean piece of meat. And the human nature is not that of a pig, it is that of an agile lean soul that wants to be unleashed, but we cover it. Not through dense layers of gluttony that are impossible to carve through, but rather seemingly thin layers of small, yet impactful, bad choices that wrap and wrap around, snowballing until they feel like they consume us. Until we feel like pigs, but the important thing to remember is that we are not pigs, we're just wrapped in fat.