1 Peter 4:3 Meaning For We Have Spent Enough

Kāmataṇhā: Craving for sense pleasure

Thirst running toward whatever tastes, touches, or shines. Lewdness, lusts, binges, carousings: one thirst wearing six costumes down the length of that list. Drinking salt water is the old image for it, and it holds, since each night of carousing left the mouth drier than it found it, which is why there always had to be another.

Kāmesu micchācāra: Sexual misconduct

Harm done through sexual behavior, the third training rule. Lewdness and orgies describe handling people the way you handle a cup, picking them up for the evening and setting them down. Households come apart along exactly those lines, and the wreckage outlasts the night by years.

Surāmerayamajjapamādaṭṭhāna: Drink that leads to carelessness

The fifth training rule. Drunken binges earn their own place in the list because wine loosens the guard on everything else: the man who would not lie or grab or swing at anyone does all three by midnight. Ruin came less from the cup itself than from what the cup made easy.

Pamāda: Heedlessness

Living unguarded, attention adrift. "Enough of our past time" is a man counting up years he cannot get back, the way you look up at dawn and cannot say where the night went. A life goes that way in small installments, and the bill arrives all at once.

Micchādiṭṭhi: Wrong view

Getting it wrong about what leads where. Bowing to an idol is asking help from something with no ears, and the feast is the same act in a different room, a whole life arranged around what cannot keep its promises. To have "walked" that way is to have worn a path to a door that never opens.

Nibbidā: Weariness that turns away

Disenchantment arising once you have seen through a thing. "Enough" is its exact sound, the flat voice of someone finished with a dish he used to order every time. Peter's scattered readers were not argued out of those parties; the shine had come off, and after that walking away cost them nothing.