I used to think stoicism was great. But now I think that it’s not so great. In retrospect I should have focused on changing my situation in stead of learning to live with it. Compared to Aurelius - I am not living around 0 bc - in today’s world I can change a lot of things.
Accepting the things that you cannot change does not mean assume you cannot change things then accept it. It’s predicated on an accurate assessment of what you can and cannot change. In my view such acceptance is for optimizing application of effort by not wasting effort on things that actually cannot be changed. “Don’t go tilting at windmills”
This prayer bothers me because it punts the "hard part" to the Lord when it doesn't need to. The exact same sentiment which has been rediscovered over and over for at least 2000 years and is far more actionable is, "you can't control others*, you can only control your response to them."
It gives you a blueprint of what kinds of things you can expect to be able to change and the limitations you'll face in the attempt.
* Which more in the context of the 12 step program the other person can be yourself. You will have thoughts, impulses, emotions, urges that you can't control but you can control your reaction to them.
Fair enough, but I've always interpreted it differently. I don't view it as "punting" so much as acknowledging what the hard part is. But I agree that "you can't control others, you can only control your response to them" is certainly the rule.
I use the prayer as a framework when I have to take a mental break and find the discernment between a situation I truly can't change and one I can influence (or, like you pointed out, a response you can control).
I was thinking about the meaning of "acceptance" recently. It means you feel some injustice or frustration about something. Morally, you think the problem should be fixed, but strategically you think you shouldn't try.
Everything we do has limits and obstacles. If you don't feel frustrated, then that's a completely ordinary situation and there's no point in highlighting your "acceptance", is there?
I suppose in tech terms it could be equivalent to "won't fix", but such matters should be swiftly forgotten. If you're experiencing ongoing acceptance, consciously, that's suboptimal and implies you'd still be right to complain.
Thus recommending acceptance to somebody is recommending defeat. The term acceptance entails bottled-up frustration or injustice. It may still be strategically right, but it's a twisted, contingent choice.
I have genetic chronic fatigue and I’m limited in what I can do about it, there is a component of making peace with loss, a radical acceptance of one’s own situation. And there is a component of extreme experimentation, I have done just about all that can be done about it. I have to give up on my dreams of athleticism. Life isn’t fair, it’s life, but I wouldn’t call it an injustice. I think the modern conflation is part of making the personal political.
I put "frustration" in there for a reason. There are situations that are nobody's fault, which we shrug about. Then there are other situations that are nobody's fault, about which we think "something should be done", even though it's nobody's particular duty to fix the problem. That lingering frustration is a moral opinion. It's informed by expectations and realism, which it is often beyond our grasp to even determine accurately.
> But preemptive surrender is no sign of wisdom. Any reality made by human beings can be remade by them. The price of this power is mutual obligation: we can never let ourselves off the hook. The things we can accomplish together are, by definition, within our sphere of control, even if we have to act through structures that are bigger than any of us alone to achieve them.
Stoicism doesn't answer the question "what can and can't we control" and doesn't claim to. I think the modern neostoicism trend is to make the reader believe that they have little control over daily life, encouraging an almost narcissistic-nihilist response to ongoing events.
At its core stoicism is about having the best possible judgement and taking the best possible actions. Sometimes acting makes a situation worse and so patience or restraint are what's best. It seems you've confused this situational wisdom with a universal principle.
Everything I've learned about stoicism has taught me to not waste energy on things I can't control so that I can spend it on making my life and the lives of people I care about continuously better.
This is why the OP calls pop-Stoicism vacuous. It isn't really helpful to know you should always take the best action, or not waste energy on things you can't control. The challenge is knowing what the best action is, or what is or isn't in your control.
The comment I responded to didn't refer to pop stoicism or use the word vacuous. The word vacuous also didn't appear in the article.
Stoicism is the study and reflection of what is and isn't in our control and what are virtues. It doesn't just stop at declaring the goal, it's literally the practice of pursuing the goal.
Both you and the comment I replied to seem like opinions based on a very shallow understanding of stoicism.
Does it give you tools to change what you can change, though?
I’ll be reading “Meditations” soon enough, but emphasis on the means to accept things you are helpless about, and not the opposite, can lead to learned helplessness.
If young people take up on these ideas, they just can’t know better at their stage in life, one where they can be, for the most part, helpless.
I always thought that instead of learning to meditate in the snow and brave the cold, or learning to be zen despite a punishing heatwave, is helpful but still greatly inferior to inventing fur jackets, insulation, heating, and air conditioning.
One needs mental toughness. However it's better to solve problems for good and then have a higher technology base for the next generation to build on.
He studied the greek classics with a mentor before he became Emperor. His Meditations reflect his study. He didn’t want to become Emperor because he viewed it as a life of strict duty and tasks that he didn’t want to do, like going on military campaigns.
His stoicism was mostly turned outward. He believed that the powerless man should accept his place below the powerful man. That submission was not shameful for the man born to submit, and that he ought to submit willingly. Stoicism does not bind the powerful, only the powerless.
I didn't even get 2 pages I to meditations before I could tell it was the philosophy of a very powerful man.
Huh? How so? In most of his writings, he's introspecting. They're basically reflections about himself and his own thoughts about things. I don't recall a passage where he's focused on anything other than internal dialogue (not saying they don't exist, but none are coming to mind).
> He believed that the powerless man should accept his place below the powerful man.
Maybe, but so did everyone else. Although, we do have Diogenes the Cynic, who heavily inspired the founding of Stoicism. Diogenes... The stories about him are quite intense. Feel free to look them up. In short, he mocked social conventions, wealth, and so-called "power".
> I didn't even get 2 pages[...]
In the first two pages, Marcus wrote about the good qualities of people throughout his life e.g. his teachers, parents, etc. Did you actually read it?
What about "no single mindset works all the time" instead? Sometimes you need to bite the bullet and just learn to live with something, sometimes you need not to, and instead fight until you can't, to get out of the situation. Different moments call for different ways of seeing situations, and maybe learning to identify what moment calls for what mindset is something we need to focus on more, rather than digging into one position that should always work.
Yes I agree with all that and for the record, I was being a bit cheeky.
Personally, I think it's dogma that belongs in the bin, rather than ideology.
I can't really say it's based on anything empirical, but to me, ideology is almost meant to be critically analyzed where as dogma is based on strict acceptance.
I'd summarize my feelings by saying ideology is presented whereas dogma is dictated, if that makes any sense.
I love that and it does make sense to me, thanks for sharing.
Dogma is what you follow blindly and don’t question, whereas ideology while still rigid you can examine and shape according to your own personal values.
Reminds me of that one scene in Equalizer. It's cheesy and I will never admit to liking the movie in real life. But it's one of those scenes that's really stuck with me over the years.
Robert: "I think you can be anything you want to be."
Teri: "Maybe in your World, Robert. Doesn't really happen that way in mine."
> the idea that nothing matters has gained significant purchase
An example of an increasingly popular trend that conflates what I'd call "value nihilism" with "action/effort nihilism". There's a huge difference. Value-nihilism is kind of soul-sickness that's probably super rare in the general population and usually comorbid with stuff like dark triad or clinical depression. Action/effort nihilism, or the POV that nothing can be done to improve things, is just realism or pragmatism in a party mask.
Value-nihilism cannot be disproved or even argued with, because there's no place to stand. On the bright side(?), action/effort nihilism is a pretty simple thing to cure if you're in a leadership position. Reward effort, intentions, results, and keep the promises you make so that people can plan for their future and have agency. Stop playing corrupt and counterproductive games with politics, optics, nepotism
I think people stop at nothing matters or there is no meaning. So either one can be depressed about it or if one takes a step further, if nothing matters/things don't have a meaning, great, then I can focus on stuff that matters to me, gives meaning to me and people around me at large.
I was attracted to Stoicism for a long time and still believe it has some good ideas, e.g. recognizing what you cannot control and not letting those things destabilize you easily. But overall I find it a pretty depressing philosophy. I’m sure that is a reflection of me, but what I’ve found much more compelling (as it leaves me actually feeling positive about life rather than indifferent) is absurdism. In particular, the idea that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” profoundly changed how I approach and enjoy life.
Books are same as TV shows - more about sounding weird to catch the fish (audience). I don't read any of those self-help books or seemingly philosophical notes.
The Western world has invented too much of self-awareness and social reflection. People smile too much, smile at strangers, worry about social acceptance, worry about self, go crazy about all thing cosmetic in life and at work.
You don't need to think too much about anything or have too much of self-awareness. Just be real, with neutral expression, relaxed, not emotional etc.
The worst thing is having happiness as a goal. It should be a side-effect, not a goal. Infact, you shouldn't have any goals. Any incremental achievement is nice to have, and down-side is business as usual. Just deal with it.
You get angry or emotional because reality is too different from your expectations. That's the fault of your expectations, not of reality.
Expectations do not spring sui generis into hearts and minds. I don’t know about you, but AFAICT approximately sane and rational folks (ha! Ha!) at least try to derive their expectations from reality.
When most people’s reality is substantially human-defined and abstracted from nature - including a global advertising industry exists to create mass expectations, of economic significance for its clients, often enough to the detriment of their target markets - you can absolutely point the finger at “reality” for pissing on your leg while varieties of Stoic, Buddhist, and HN poster tell you it’s raining.
It’s good to start with ourselves when trying to create change, as that is where the locus of control should lie… but sometimes “reality” is absolutely the reasonable and proximate cause of negative emotion. Saying otherwise feels like anticipatory victim-blaming.
If you are american you'll probably never notice how off-putting is the american niceness. And it's not natural if you ever traveled and seen the world a little bit.
I disagree. I'm not American but I've travelled extensively around the world and in America. Niceness is widespread, it's not a particularly American thing. And it's always appreciated and positive, the alternative is miserable.
Genuine question as an American- why would niceness be off-putting? What would you prefer? I'm guessing neutrality or formality, as opposed to outright rudeness... is it because it feels too familiar, and a bit of arms-length distance is more your custom?
In most cultures, smiling at someone means, you know them personally. So, when you smile at a stranger, the stranger gets confused. They might think you are crazy. Also it could make them uncomfortable about how to respond. If they smile back, it means they know you, which is not true. Infact, if you smiled at a stranger of opposite gender, it could lead to other complications depending on who are with them, and they could get angry as well.
No. It is lack of reason. Not long ago, if you went for morning jog in a village, you might be stopped and asked - I don't see a dog chasing you, why are you running? Same, if you give away some useful thing for free.
Some societies think the default position between strangers is seriousness, not niceness. The usual example is Russia if you would like to read more. In Russia, if a stranger smiles at a Russian, stereotypically the Russian would think either the stranger is crazy, or is planning some evilness and is happy about it.
I’ve travelled and lived abroad extensively and I’d say American niceness goes over well in 90% of the world. And where it doesn’t, boo hoo, they can handle a smile.
> You don't need to think too much about anything or have too much of self-awareness. Just be real, with neutral expression, relaxed, not emotional etc.
“What a creep”
“Is everything alright?”
“Why are you so gloomy all the time?”
It’s easy to not care about others opinion when your life wellbeing doesn’t depend on it, for most people it’s not a luxury they can afford.
Life’s pretty good, guys. It’s been good when I was a little child playing in the mud. It was good when I was on my one hour ride to school. It was good when I first cut my flesh to the bone and watched my dad sew it up. It was good when a girl I had a crush on didn’t feel that way about me.
It was good when I nearly failed Algebraic Geometry because I didn’t have what it took. It was good when I almost didn’t get an internship out of uni because I procrastinated till Jan of the year. It was good when I moved to SF with $25 in my bank account.
It was good when I lived on a couch off Air Bed And Breakfast. It was good when a car hit me on my motorcycle. It was good when I was robbed.
Life is just good. Because the alternative is oblivion.
It's nice of evolution to imbue some people with these false views. I hope your kids inherit the earth so people with more realistic outlooks don't have to be born and suffer through it.
I believe an answer to this is just temperance. Finding balance can be difficult if you have lost it for a long time, but in general not letting things outside your ability to influence impact your overall psyche is a healthy choice. How do I know if something is out of balance in my life? Usually I know this because it’s negatively affecting how I treat others or dominating all of my conversations. Hysteria doesn’t actually solve anything, and in fact it will usually cause problems of its own.
I have a particular disdain for the profanity-laden slop that is works penned by Mark Manson. He's not alone as most "self-help" books are trash reads that only serve as some form of cathartic release to their readers.
That's not to say all books in the genre are useless. I have recommended Cal Newport's works before but they very much suffer from "this 300 page book could have been a blog post" levels of verbosity.
The need to sell, forces one to be as weird and vulgar as possible. Most books are selling focused. Selling has spoiled many art forms. The extreme antics you see on stage for a music show has nothing to do with music either.
Every biology textbook I've ever read tells us the purpose of life in plain black and white: to reproduce. If you have children, especially a lot of children, you will see the purpose of life.
> When those expectations include owning a vacation home or winning a Nobel Prize, letting go might be healthy — but doing so is tragic when they include stopping a genocide or ending homelessness.
I don't understand such analysis when there are opposing "blob" forces trying to push the world into worse state. Forget about people dying in earthquakes, consider current wars, we are using resources (human, capital, tech) to destroy resources (uprooting human lives, destroying buildings, blowing up infrastructure) while those very resources could be used to create more resources which solve problems and create wealth. World is not a closed system, there are forces operating which for whatever reasons are not aligned for humanity's flourishing.
The Bush/Cheney wars were peak evil of modern times of sending our children off to die just to make Cheney’s cronies at Halliburton rich. Bush and Cheney should be considered mass murders. Not to mention your point about all the funds that could have been spent elsewhere.
Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War. The US is an oil exporter and doesn't have any oil contracts in Iraq. In fact, no one makes money from any wars, and defense contractors profit less during wartime than peacetime.
One universal principle about US politics is that many people try to sound savvy by claiming X thing is obviously about the money, or that some secret evil competent person did something and successfully profited from it, and then if you look their explanation is always wrong. In fact there are no competent evil people and bad ideas are simply just bad for everyone.
…Also, Bush's PEPFAR program was so good that I think he's clearly saved more lives than any other president even if you count the wars against him.
“Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War.”
This seems wrong?
Halliburton secured a 7billion dollar contract where they were the only allowed bidders, their subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root (KBR) was estimated to receive at least 39.5billion dollars in federal contracts.
Halliburton experienced a 80% increase in revenue by the first quarter of 2004…
Most of these contracts were “cost-plus” which meant they were guaranteed reimbursement for their costs + a guaranteed profit on top of that.
As a result of the war many oil companies including BP were awarded access and development contracts to the oil fields, with BP extracting well over 15billion dollars worth of oil.
Over 150billion dollars in oil money apparently just went missing or was “stolen”.
Also the US has maintained control over Iraqi oil revenue since the beginning of the war in 2003.
It would seem to be almost rewriting history to make such a statement…
No, we didn't do a war so that Blackwater could secretly profit from it. We did it because Cheney felt like doing one for emotional and ideological reasons.
That’s backwards. Our fight isn’t against “blob forces, but instead against human nature and regression to the mean. My dad’s village in Bangladesh is the default state of humanity. The life you have in San Francisco or wherever is a bubble of order and flourishing in a hostile world, like the inside of a single cell organism.
The state of nature would have been preagricultural and nomadic, not a village with permanent buildings. I don’t like this over-application of an entropy metaphor to human society. Cosmopolitan cities are centers of production because they’re as disordered as they are ordered. They constantly reorganize their production processes, which is why they’re always the places discovering the new source of economic growth. A farming village is ordered by contrast. It’s only a “bubble of flourishing” because, like any process of experimentation, the city produces waste products which have to be handled somewhere, and it shunts them off to get them out of the way of its continual reorganizations.
The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south" as can be coerced into lopsided agreements, and much more generally the possible futures available to humankind. Cell membranes externalize entropy in the same way, the difference is they are good enough at working together, and working with the world around them, which is perhaps frequently hostile but also nutritious and useful, that higher-order life emerges nonetheless.
Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.
> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else"
This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere. The world in this view is a finite pie that can only be sliced up differently. Nothing is ever created. Wealth can only be redistributed.
This ignores the fact that the past 200 years have seen insane wealth creation that has enabled more people than have ever lived to live better than most people have ever lived. Look at how many have risen out of poverty globally in just the last 25 years.
Someone will inevitably bring up climate change, etc., and argue that it’s all bound to come crashing down. Maybe it will, but asserting that it must as some law of nature is a fatalistic ideology.
It’s a fatalistic ideology that some people seem to like and be emotionally attached to for reasons that aren’t clear to me. I tend to think it’s a big cop out. If everything is doomed, doomed, doomed, then there is no point in even trying. Eat, drink, and be merry while the ship sinks.
> This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere
To some degree this is true, in the sense that human flourishing implies some degree of suffering for e.g. the ants we accidentally step on, animals we eat, bacteria in our guts, etc. But Jains do their best not to step on the ants, many people refuse to eat flesh, and so on. Plants and bacteria will have to fend for themselves for now. We can certainly do better with each other.
I am proposing no version of fatalism, besides the fact that, at least in our living substrate, organisms have not all learned to do each other no harm, if this is even possible, and even if it isn't, fatalistic hedonism is not the inevitable response to this fact.
> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south"
San Francisco is not rich because Bangladesh is poor. This idea is not only wrong, but dangerous. I’m stuck in America because my parents and grandparents in Bangladesh were infected by such stupid thinking. Other people in the “global south” that rejected such victimhood leapt ahead. When we came to America in 1989, China’s per-capita GDP was a little higher than Bangladesh, but a little lower than India. Since then, China has become a livable place, while Bangladesh and India remain impoverished. Your mindset is a roadmap for the global south to remain poor and backward.
I'm not endorsing victimhood or saying that Bangladesh is poor because the US is rich. It was badly phrased if that is how it reads, for that I apologize.
I'm saying the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means. It is not unique in this. This is not the only reason the US is rich or the only reason any other is not.
I'm also saying that this is a really bad strategy if the goal is humankind flourishing on this planet. People already enrich one another in many ways. We have to stop warring on one another and nature, thoughtlessly dumping entropy where we can't see it, etc.
>the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means.
I don't believe that.
Like most countries, the US has a community of professionals in government dedicated to the country's national security and this class of professionals has often done harm around the world by trying to increase the US's national security when it is already more secure than most countries are. For example, the US's overreaction to 9/11. For example, the US's overthrowing of Communist governments in the third world during the Cold War.
And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.
> And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.
We did that for ideological reasons. The U.S. was already one of the richest countries in the world per capita at the time of the founding. It was about as rich per capita in 1800 as India is today (in nominal dollars).
It does: but the US did those things for national security goals, not to make the US richer.
Often those things made the US considerably poorer, e.g., the US intervention in Vietnam, e.g., when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.
During the Cold War, the US encouraged international trade to show the world the benefits of trade and of capitalism and as a bribe to try to get and to keep countries in our military coalition against the Soviets. Often the encouragement and the bribe included Washington's opening up the US consumer market to imports (i.e., without tariffs). But it did those thing for national security reasons (i.e., stopping the spread of communism) not because the US needs to import anything or to export anything or to steal anything from overseas to be the richest country.
Yes, international trade makes the US richer than it would be without the trade, but the US would still be the richest country even if it did zero international trade: its not like China or Germany whose economies are highly reliant on international trade.
The Iranian coup d'état was literally about allied control of oil to secure control of global flow of oil and energy related wealth.
Security and being rich are part and parcel of the same coin.
> when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.
Or, alternatively, recirculated trillions of US taxpayer dollars into US weapons, US mercanaries, US personnel, and fed pork barrels where directed by US lobbyists.
> Security and being rich are part and parcel of the same coin.
No the two things are quite different. There are many rich countries (Singapore, Denmark, Taiwain, etc.) that don't have extensive security operations around the world. The U.S. uses its wealth for ideological reasons, not to become richer. This is something that people with a third-world mindset have the hardest time understanding about the U.S.
Yes, the US was involved in the coup in Iran, but again not as part of some plan to enrich the US. (They didn't want the Communists in control in Tehran and they didn't want Soviet warships and Soviet shipping in general to be able to operate from Iranian ports.)
Since the world is complicated and people are creative and opportunistic about how they try to make money, certain American individuals and certain small conspiracies of Americans probably tried to make money off of the US's interventions in other countries, but the US government as a whole basically never has -- at least not in the last 100 years.
While the US economy was dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf (approximately from 1957 to 2020) it used military force and pressure on governments to ensure American companies could buy Persian Gulf oil, but those American companies always paid the going price for the oil: Washington never tried to arrange so that any American interest got oil from overseas for free or for less than the fair price for the oil.
So I still haven't seen any example in this thread of Washington's extracting any wealth from the rest of the world other than through free trade, i.e., trade in which the non-American half of the trade entered into the trade voluntarily. (And again the US economy doesn't even need to engage in any free trade with the rest of the world for the US to be the richest country.)
This article is a soup of concepts. And the worst part: most of them are not contradictory at all.
Nothing matters as in there is no purpose given to us from above is true (at least according to Nietzsche). That means we have the option of inventing our own purpose. Or not - it's still good to enjoy life as is.
I've read hope is fucked some long time ago. It touches the stoicism with: don't get too invested in things outside of your control, it's not good for you. Yes, but Mark forgets that living like this is not pleasant at all. But having the skill of acceptance is good as we're not omnipotent, so there are things we can't do anything about.
That brings me to manifesting (ugh). We all know we won't get everything by wishing hard. It's still good to try and by thinking about positive result we have better probability of figuring out a plan and sustaining motivation to see the plan through.
Next we move on to terrible people listening to philosophy. Yes, they can do that and it doesn't take away from the teachings. And no, e.g. stoicism has a strong moral component which they are purposefully ignoring.
Also, to respond to title directly: accepting your life is shitty and understanding it doesn't take away from your character doesn't mean not trying to improve your situation. Yes, it means feeling good if your attempts fail. You still have the option of trying again.
I give the article author massive props for being honest with themselves. But no, books cannot save you. Only you perhaps can, but you might fail. And that's ok.
To end positively, I agree with the call to action. And the article is a nice historical overview.
While I get the surprising modernness of Aurelius' writing, I don't get the fascination with him since he ultimately failed at his most important task: choosing a reliable heir. Maybe he should have cared more and be more attached. Maybe the lesson here is that leaders should actually be engaged. Caesar may have committed a genocide and caused a civil war but he hit his KPIs with the state of Rome and Octavian.
Meanwhile Trump's "You do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter" is a tremendous insight for someone in a relatable position. A production system is down, some deal is falling apart, company going bankrupt, someone clowned on you live on tv? These matter but we're not in the ER here, no one's dying, and certainly not 400k people, keep perspective.
The problem with self-help "philosophy" in particular in the case of Stoicism — but also when it borrows piecemeal from Eastern traditions — is that it's completely divorced from its metaphysics.
Stoic ethics of 'living according to nature' was underpinned by an idea of a natural, rational cosmos (the "Logos") to which living up to is worth it. Nietzsche fairly devastatingly (expressed well in this comic[1]) pointed out that in an irrational and chaotic cosmos it's not the stoics living with nature, it's that the Stoics desperately attempt to project their own philosophy on the cosmos. A kind of psychological self-delusion and neutering.
And while most people who are fed up with self-help Stoics likely haven't read Nietzsche directly, I think they can intuitively smell that. The hollowness of self help gurus comes from trying to practice the ethics of a philosophy of antiquity without the metaphysics of antiquity that underpinned it. If you find yourself in a Lovecraftian universe living in accordance with nature does not sound so good any more and the Stoic self help guy seems more like a shoddy salesman.
IIRC stoicism was written by rich people (and advisors to rich people) who didn't focus at all on improving the system. It's on-brand for the self-help influencer phenomena where you disregard disadvantages to others and systemic problems.
Bro one of the most prominent Stoic writers was a literal slave. This idea that it's a philosophy only for the rich and powerful couldn't be further from the truth.
I don't understand why so many people focus on Trump and Left and Right and all the theater of politics in general. Subtract the politics from TFA and it is really, really good.
The author and I agree on some "pop-stoicism" critiques and disagree on others. Well reasoned and articulate arguments to support or dismiss "teachings" from the neo-pop-stoic culture.
The we get to passages like this; "It is, I suppose, strictly speaking accurate that if the approximately 8.6 million people who die each year due to a lack of access to quality healthcare were to wish their fate, their desires would not be frustrated, but tautological truth does not make for philosophical profundity."
Yes it does. How does this person know the 8.6 million people that died did not live meaningful lives while they were able bodied and healthy? How does the author know what is "right" for them? Whether I agree/disagree with the aspects of the authors POV; any sober and/or objective reading of this just reeks of ego and "holier than thou" attitude.
I suspect this type of attitude is a large reason why people that devote large amounts of time to thinking about politics end up categorizing "justice" into politically ideological boxes.
Edit to add;
I am reading the comments and not many are talking about this point either which I think is profound.
I hit ctrl-f inside TFA and did not find a word used in Stoic literature that I have read; Virtue.
You would think a critique on Stoicism would at least cover the basics, no?
Here is a reminder for everyone that cares;
Stoic virtue is the highest good and the only true path to a flourishing life, encompassing four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance (or self-control), and justice.
> Subtract the politics from TFA and it is really, really good.
I thought it was far too many words to express the core ideas, although perhaps there is value in taking that time to meditate on them. I suspect that an introduction like this is second nature to the author, though. The expressed views presumably play well to the author's intended audience, and among those who spend lots of time bashing the POTUS (whichever group, and whichever POTUS, at the time of bashing), it seems to be largely a form of socialization. In this specific case, the author clearly knows a lot of uncommon trivia about Trump, and was furthermore able to segue from that trivia into the main point, demonstrating linguistic skill.
Which creates at least two layers of irony:
1. (probably intentional, I think) Despite the distraction and effort, this shows a way in which the fact of Trump's political career has benefited the author.
2. (probably unintentional, I think) In a piece nominally about the virtue of apathy and the author's experience with that, the author comes across as compulsively seeking approval and commiseration.
(Once I'd gotten through the intro and understood the general topic, I ended up glossing over the rest, so on an initial read I completely missed the bit about healthcare. Another irony, perhaps, if the communication of that idea was actually a sincere and primary goal?)
> Apparently catching a brief glimpse of the abyss during the 2020 campaign cycle, Trump expressed his wish to “hop into” one of his supporters’ trucks “and drive it away.” As he mused, “I’d love to do it. Just drive the hell outta here. Just get the hell out of this.”
Damn. Trump dropping some serious truth pills here frfr
I used to think stoicism was great. But now I think that it’s not so great. In retrospect I should have focused on changing my situation in stead of learning to live with it. Compared to Aurelius - I am not living around 0 bc - in today’s world I can change a lot of things.
Accepting the things that you cannot change does not mean assume you cannot change things then accept it. It’s predicated on an accurate assessment of what you can and cannot change. In my view such acceptance is for optimizing application of effort by not wasting effort on things that actually cannot be changed. “Don’t go tilting at windmills”
The Serenity Prayer has been around for about 100 years now. I find myself repeating it fairly often, especially now that I've got young children.
This prayer bothers me because it punts the "hard part" to the Lord when it doesn't need to. The exact same sentiment which has been rediscovered over and over for at least 2000 years and is far more actionable is, "you can't control others*, you can only control your response to them."
It gives you a blueprint of what kinds of things you can expect to be able to change and the limitations you'll face in the attempt.
* Which more in the context of the 12 step program the other person can be yourself. You will have thoughts, impulses, emotions, urges that you can't control but you can control your reaction to them.
Fair enough, but I've always interpreted it differently. I don't view it as "punting" so much as acknowledging what the hard part is. But I agree that "you can't control others, you can only control your response to them" is certainly the rule.
I use the prayer as a framework when I have to take a mental break and find the discernment between a situation I truly can't change and one I can influence (or, like you pointed out, a response you can control).
> "you can't control others*, you can only control your response to them."
Like it or not, but you __can__ control others. This is what advertising is based on, for example.
I was thinking about the meaning of "acceptance" recently. It means you feel some injustice or frustration about something. Morally, you think the problem should be fixed, but strategically you think you shouldn't try.
Everything we do has limits and obstacles. If you don't feel frustrated, then that's a completely ordinary situation and there's no point in highlighting your "acceptance", is there?
I suppose in tech terms it could be equivalent to "won't fix", but such matters should be swiftly forgotten. If you're experiencing ongoing acceptance, consciously, that's suboptimal and implies you'd still be right to complain.
Thus recommending acceptance to somebody is recommending defeat. The term acceptance entails bottled-up frustration or injustice. It may still be strategically right, but it's a twisted, contingent choice.
No moral or injustice component needed.
I have genetic chronic fatigue and I’m limited in what I can do about it, there is a component of making peace with loss, a radical acceptance of one’s own situation. And there is a component of extreme experimentation, I have done just about all that can be done about it. I have to give up on my dreams of athleticism. Life isn’t fair, it’s life, but I wouldn’t call it an injustice. I think the modern conflation is part of making the personal political.
I put "frustration" in there for a reason. There are situations that are nobody's fault, which we shrug about. Then there are other situations that are nobody's fault, about which we think "something should be done", even though it's nobody's particular duty to fix the problem. That lingering frustration is a moral opinion. It's informed by expectations and realism, which it is often beyond our grasp to even determine accurately.
A good point is made at the end of the article:
> But preemptive surrender is no sign of wisdom. Any reality made by human beings can be remade by them. The price of this power is mutual obligation: we can never let ourselves off the hook. The things we can accomplish together are, by definition, within our sphere of control, even if we have to act through structures that are bigger than any of us alone to achieve them.
Stoicism doesn't answer the question "what can and can't we control" and doesn't claim to. I think the modern neostoicism trend is to make the reader believe that they have little control over daily life, encouraging an almost narcissistic-nihilist response to ongoing events.
That doesn't sound like stoicism to me.
At its core stoicism is about having the best possible judgement and taking the best possible actions. Sometimes acting makes a situation worse and so patience or restraint are what's best. It seems you've confused this situational wisdom with a universal principle.
Everything I've learned about stoicism has taught me to not waste energy on things I can't control so that I can spend it on making my life and the lives of people I care about continuously better.
This is why the OP calls pop-Stoicism vacuous. It isn't really helpful to know you should always take the best action, or not waste energy on things you can't control. The challenge is knowing what the best action is, or what is or isn't in your control.
What do you mean by OP?
The comment I responded to didn't refer to pop stoicism or use the word vacuous. The word vacuous also didn't appear in the article.
Stoicism is the study and reflection of what is and isn't in our control and what are virtues. It doesn't just stop at declaring the goal, it's literally the practice of pursuing the goal.
Both you and the comment I replied to seem like opinions based on a very shallow understanding of stoicism.
> In retrospect I should have focused on changing my situation in stead of learning to live with it.
Stoicism doesn't tell you to just learn to live with things that you can change. That's only for things that you cannot change.
Does it give you tools to change what you can change, though?
I’ll be reading “Meditations” soon enough, but emphasis on the means to accept things you are helpless about, and not the opposite, can lead to learned helplessness.
If young people take up on these ideas, they just can’t know better at their stage in life, one where they can be, for the most part, helpless.
I always thought that instead of learning to meditate in the snow and brave the cold, or learning to be zen despite a punishing heatwave, is helpful but still greatly inferior to inventing fur jackets, insulation, heating, and air conditioning.
One needs mental toughness. However it's better to solve problems for good and then have a higher technology base for the next generation to build on.
You will never have as much power as Aurelius.
Why was he nevertheless a stoic?
He studied the greek classics with a mentor before he became Emperor. His Meditations reflect his study. He didn’t want to become Emperor because he viewed it as a life of strict duty and tasks that he didn’t want to do, like going on military campaigns.
His stoicism was mostly turned outward. He believed that the powerless man should accept his place below the powerful man. That submission was not shameful for the man born to submit, and that he ought to submit willingly. Stoicism does not bind the powerful, only the powerless.
I didn't even get 2 pages I to meditations before I could tell it was the philosophy of a very powerful man.
> His stoicism was mostly turned outward.
Huh? How so? In most of his writings, he's introspecting. They're basically reflections about himself and his own thoughts about things. I don't recall a passage where he's focused on anything other than internal dialogue (not saying they don't exist, but none are coming to mind).
> He believed that the powerless man should accept his place below the powerful man.
Maybe, but so did everyone else. Although, we do have Diogenes the Cynic, who heavily inspired the founding of Stoicism. Diogenes... The stories about him are quite intense. Feel free to look them up. In short, he mocked social conventions, wealth, and so-called "power".
> I didn't even get 2 pages[...]
In the first two pages, Marcus wrote about the good qualities of people throughout his life e.g. his teachers, parents, etc. Did you actually read it?
What about "no single mindset works all the time" instead? Sometimes you need to bite the bullet and just learn to live with something, sometimes you need not to, and instead fight until you can't, to get out of the situation. Different moments call for different ways of seeing situations, and maybe learning to identify what moment calls for what mindset is something we need to focus on more, rather than digging into one position that should always work.
Ideology belongs in the trash.
But yea you can pick and choose parts of some ideologies as they are useful in the moment.
Not to split hairs but isn't the phrase "ideology belongs in the trash" itself somewhat ideological?
Definitely. In a way ideology is what shapes our reality so you can never be fully free of it.
It’s like saying “I’m not political”, it’s also a political statement/stance.
Personally I came up with my own flavour of practical Taoism as ideology; something like Konrad from the bridge trilogy
Yes I agree with all that and for the record, I was being a bit cheeky.
Personally, I think it's dogma that belongs in the bin, rather than ideology.
I can't really say it's based on anything empirical, but to me, ideology is almost meant to be critically analyzed where as dogma is based on strict acceptance.
I'd summarize my feelings by saying ideology is presented whereas dogma is dictated, if that makes any sense.
I love that and it does make sense to me, thanks for sharing.
Dogma is what you follow blindly and don’t question, whereas ideology while still rigid you can examine and shape according to your own personal values.
“All models are wrong but some models are useful.”
Stoicism doesn’t mean accepting one’s situation as unchangeable.
Totally agreed. There's a great "Philosophize This!" episode I recently listened to precisely about this topic [0].
[0]: "Episode #237 ... The Stoics Are Wrong - Nietzche, Schopenhauer" <https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/h48mld6lelcfrts-c55...>
Reminds me of that one scene in Equalizer. It's cheesy and I will never admit to liking the movie in real life. But it's one of those scenes that's really stuck with me over the years.
Robert: "I think you can be anything you want to be."
Teri: "Maybe in your World, Robert. Doesn't really happen that way in mine."
Robert: "Change your world."
Spoilers ahead
“Change your world” said retired elite corps officer, and all-around badass Denzel Washington, to a young trafficked sex-worker without passport.
Marcus Aurelius was an emperor. Presumably you have less control over your life and other people than he did.
Yeah, after a lifetime of internal prompting I settled on "worry about shit you can do shit about"
Yes but the psyop was a stalwart success and continues to be. This is just the latest revision.
Imagine how you’ll feel about things tomorrow.
> the idea that nothing matters has gained significant purchase
An example of an increasingly popular trend that conflates what I'd call "value nihilism" with "action/effort nihilism". There's a huge difference. Value-nihilism is kind of soul-sickness that's probably super rare in the general population and usually comorbid with stuff like dark triad or clinical depression. Action/effort nihilism, or the POV that nothing can be done to improve things, is just realism or pragmatism in a party mask.
Value-nihilism cannot be disproved or even argued with, because there's no place to stand. On the bright side(?), action/effort nihilism is a pretty simple thing to cure if you're in a leadership position. Reward effort, intentions, results, and keep the promises you make so that people can plan for their future and have agency. Stop playing corrupt and counterproductive games with politics, optics, nepotism
Great comment.
I think the trump quote is more value-nihilist:
> "You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.”
I think people stop at nothing matters or there is no meaning. So either one can be depressed about it or if one takes a step further, if nothing matters/things don't have a meaning, great, then I can focus on stuff that matters to me, gives meaning to me and people around me at large.
I was attracted to Stoicism for a long time and still believe it has some good ideas, e.g. recognizing what you cannot control and not letting those things destabilize you easily. But overall I find it a pretty depressing philosophy. I’m sure that is a reflection of me, but what I’ve found much more compelling (as it leaves me actually feeling positive about life rather than indifferent) is absurdism. In particular, the idea that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” profoundly changed how I approach and enjoy life.
Books are same as TV shows - more about sounding weird to catch the fish (audience). I don't read any of those self-help books or seemingly philosophical notes.
The Western world has invented too much of self-awareness and social reflection. People smile too much, smile at strangers, worry about social acceptance, worry about self, go crazy about all thing cosmetic in life and at work.
You don't need to think too much about anything or have too much of self-awareness. Just be real, with neutral expression, relaxed, not emotional etc.
The worst thing is having happiness as a goal. It should be a side-effect, not a goal. Infact, you shouldn't have any goals. Any incremental achievement is nice to have, and down-side is business as usual. Just deal with it.
You get angry or emotional because reality is too different from your expectations. That's the fault of your expectations, not of reality.
Expectations do not spring sui generis into hearts and minds. I don’t know about you, but AFAICT approximately sane and rational folks (ha! Ha!) at least try to derive their expectations from reality.
When most people’s reality is substantially human-defined and abstracted from nature - including a global advertising industry exists to create mass expectations, of economic significance for its clients, often enough to the detriment of their target markets - you can absolutely point the finger at “reality” for pissing on your leg while varieties of Stoic, Buddhist, and HN poster tell you it’s raining.
It’s good to start with ourselves when trying to create change, as that is where the locus of control should lie… but sometimes “reality” is absolutely the reasonable and proximate cause of negative emotion. Saying otherwise feels like anticipatory victim-blaming.
“ People smile too much, smile at strangers…”
How dare they.
If you are american you'll probably never notice how off-putting is the american niceness. And it's not natural if you ever traveled and seen the world a little bit.
I disagree. I'm not American but I've travelled extensively around the world and in America. Niceness is widespread, it's not a particularly American thing. And it's always appreciated and positive, the alternative is miserable.
Cool, stay in your other country and I’ll keep smiling with my fellow Americans.
I can tell you _haven't_ meaningfully traveled a lot because you're making assertions about "correctness" on cultural differences.
Some places smile, some don't. That's all fine. But thinking your way is the one right way is kind of sad.
Genuine question as an American- why would niceness be off-putting? What would you prefer? I'm guessing neutrality or formality, as opposed to outright rudeness... is it because it feels too familiar, and a bit of arms-length distance is more your custom?
Again, genuinely curious as an outsider.
In most cultures, smiling at someone means, you know them personally. So, when you smile at a stranger, the stranger gets confused. They might think you are crazy. Also it could make them uncomfortable about how to respond. If they smile back, it means they know you, which is not true. Infact, if you smiled at a stranger of opposite gender, it could lead to other complications depending on who are with them, and they could get angry as well.
The phrase “low trust society” comes to mind.
No. It is lack of reason. Not long ago, if you went for morning jog in a village, you might be stopped and asked - I don't see a dog chasing you, why are you running? Same, if you give away some useful thing for free.
Some societies think the default position between strangers is seriousness, not niceness. The usual example is Russia if you would like to read more. In Russia, if a stranger smiles at a Russian, stereotypically the Russian would think either the stranger is crazy, or is planning some evilness and is happy about it.
I’ve travelled and lived abroad extensively and I’d say American niceness goes over well in 90% of the world. And where it doesn’t, boo hoo, they can handle a smile.
Being nice is natural at least in the Nordics, across Europe, Japan and other Asian countries.
Where is being nice unnatural? Russia?
Man, are you going to hate Canadians.
> You don't need to think too much about anything or have too much of self-awareness. Just be real, with neutral expression, relaxed, not emotional etc.
“What a creep”
“Is everything alright?”
“Why are you so gloomy all the time?”
It’s easy to not care about others opinion when your life wellbeing doesn’t depend on it, for most people it’s not a luxury they can afford.
> The anesthetizing pleasures of disengagement seem especially seductive these days
Authoritarians always want you to embrace a nihilistic apathy. It makes you easier to rule and guarantees their continued power without challenge.
It's what happened to Russia. And now we see the Russification of America.
Life’s pretty good, guys. It’s been good when I was a little child playing in the mud. It was good when I was on my one hour ride to school. It was good when I first cut my flesh to the bone and watched my dad sew it up. It was good when a girl I had a crush on didn’t feel that way about me.
It was good when I nearly failed Algebraic Geometry because I didn’t have what it took. It was good when I almost didn’t get an internship out of uni because I procrastinated till Jan of the year. It was good when I moved to SF with $25 in my bank account.
It was good when I lived on a couch off Air Bed And Breakfast. It was good when a car hit me on my motorcycle. It was good when I was robbed.
Life is just good. Because the alternative is oblivion.
life is good. without it, you'd be dead
[flagged]
It's nice of evolution to imbue some people with these false views. I hope your kids inherit the earth so people with more realistic outlooks don't have to be born and suffer through it.
suffering is part of life. if you do not accept suffering, you just suffer more.
I believe an answer to this is just temperance. Finding balance can be difficult if you have lost it for a long time, but in general not letting things outside your ability to influence impact your overall psyche is a healthy choice. How do I know if something is out of balance in my life? Usually I know this because it’s negatively affecting how I treat others or dominating all of my conversations. Hysteria doesn’t actually solve anything, and in fact it will usually cause problems of its own.
I have a particular disdain for the profanity-laden slop that is works penned by Mark Manson. He's not alone as most "self-help" books are trash reads that only serve as some form of cathartic release to their readers.
That's not to say all books in the genre are useless. I have recommended Cal Newport's works before but they very much suffer from "this 300 page book could have been a blog post" levels of verbosity.
The need to sell, forces one to be as weird and vulgar as possible. Most books are selling focused. Selling has spoiled many art forms. The extreme antics you see on stage for a music show has nothing to do with music either.
A huge amount of nonfiction work is overlong. Many nonfiction works could be condensed to an essay or even just a blurb.
A wasted opportunity to explore related ideas.
Every biology textbook I've ever read tells us the purpose of life in plain black and white: to reproduce. If you have children, especially a lot of children, you will see the purpose of life.
This assertion relies a bit much on overloading the definition of “life”, and I for one care more about spreading my ideas than my genes.
Why?
Can’t say; this set of genes didn’t produce a consciousness that cares to pass them along, I suppose
> When those expectations include owning a vacation home or winning a Nobel Prize, letting go might be healthy — but doing so is tragic when they include stopping a genocide or ending homelessness.
I don't understand such analysis when there are opposing "blob" forces trying to push the world into worse state. Forget about people dying in earthquakes, consider current wars, we are using resources (human, capital, tech) to destroy resources (uprooting human lives, destroying buildings, blowing up infrastructure) while those very resources could be used to create more resources which solve problems and create wealth. World is not a closed system, there are forces operating which for whatever reasons are not aligned for humanity's flourishing.
The Bush/Cheney wars were peak evil of modern times of sending our children off to die just to make Cheney’s cronies at Halliburton rich. Bush and Cheney should be considered mass murders. Not to mention your point about all the funds that could have been spent elsewhere.
Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War. The US is an oil exporter and doesn't have any oil contracts in Iraq. In fact, no one makes money from any wars, and defense contractors profit less during wartime than peacetime.
One universal principle about US politics is that many people try to sound savvy by claiming X thing is obviously about the money, or that some secret evil competent person did something and successfully profited from it, and then if you look their explanation is always wrong. In fact there are no competent evil people and bad ideas are simply just bad for everyone.
…Also, Bush's PEPFAR program was so good that I think he's clearly saved more lives than any other president even if you count the wars against him.
“Noone made any money or got any oil from the Iraq War.”
This seems wrong?
Halliburton secured a 7billion dollar contract where they were the only allowed bidders, their subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root (KBR) was estimated to receive at least 39.5billion dollars in federal contracts.
Halliburton experienced a 80% increase in revenue by the first quarter of 2004…
Most of these contracts were “cost-plus” which meant they were guaranteed reimbursement for their costs + a guaranteed profit on top of that.
As a result of the war many oil companies including BP were awarded access and development contracts to the oil fields, with BP extracting well over 15billion dollars worth of oil.
Over 150billion dollars in oil money apparently just went missing or was “stolen”.
Also the US has maintained control over Iraqi oil revenue since the beginning of the war in 2003.
It would seem to be almost rewriting history to make such a statement…
Yes, Erik Prince famously donated his company's time during that era.
No, we didn't do a war so that Blackwater could secretly profit from it. We did it because Cheney felt like doing one for emotional and ideological reasons.
like preventing sadam hussein from selling oil in euros.
This is not an unpopular opinion. No one on the right or left defends the second Iraq War anymore and few defend the war in Afghanistan.
That’s backwards. Our fight isn’t against “blob forces, but instead against human nature and regression to the mean. My dad’s village in Bangladesh is the default state of humanity. The life you have in San Francisco or wherever is a bubble of order and flourishing in a hostile world, like the inside of a single cell organism.
The state of nature would have been preagricultural and nomadic, not a village with permanent buildings. I don’t like this over-application of an entropy metaphor to human society. Cosmopolitan cities are centers of production because they’re as disordered as they are ordered. They constantly reorganize their production processes, which is why they’re always the places discovering the new source of economic growth. A farming village is ordered by contrast. It’s only a “bubble of flourishing” because, like any process of experimentation, the city produces waste products which have to be handled somewhere, and it shunts them off to get them out of the way of its continual reorganizations.
What's the difference? Surely this is worth fighting in both instances.
Also I struggle to see San Francisco as "flourishing" so much as "the very hostility choking the world out for no particular reason".
The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south" as can be coerced into lopsided agreements, and much more generally the possible futures available to humankind. Cell membranes externalize entropy in the same way, the difference is they are good enough at working together, and working with the world around them, which is perhaps frequently hostile but also nutritious and useful, that higher-order life emerges nonetheless.
Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.
> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else"
This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere. The world in this view is a finite pie that can only be sliced up differently. Nothing is ever created. Wealth can only be redistributed.
This ignores the fact that the past 200 years have seen insane wealth creation that has enabled more people than have ever lived to live better than most people have ever lived. Look at how many have risen out of poverty globally in just the last 25 years.
Someone will inevitably bring up climate change, etc., and argue that it’s all bound to come crashing down. Maybe it will, but asserting that it must as some law of nature is a fatalistic ideology.
It’s a fatalistic ideology that some people seem to like and be emotionally attached to for reasons that aren’t clear to me. I tend to think it’s a big cop out. If everything is doomed, doomed, doomed, then there is no point in even trying. Eat, drink, and be merry while the ship sinks.
> This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere
To some degree this is true, in the sense that human flourishing implies some degree of suffering for e.g. the ants we accidentally step on, animals we eat, bacteria in our guts, etc. But Jains do their best not to step on the ants, many people refuse to eat flesh, and so on. Plants and bacteria will have to fend for themselves for now. We can certainly do better with each other.
I am proposing no version of fatalism, besides the fact that, at least in our living substrate, organisms have not all learned to do each other no harm, if this is even possible, and even if it isn't, fatalistic hedonism is not the inevitable response to this fact.
>> The world in this view is a finite pie
But it is. The physical world is finite, with finite resources, human greed not so.
Finite, but sufficiently abundant for any human to be clothed, housed, fed, taught, married, and succeeded by offspring as well-protected as they.
It doesn't matter because the capacity to increase efficiency is virtually endless and we have a free source of power just 9 light-minutes away.
> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south"
San Francisco is not rich because Bangladesh is poor. This idea is not only wrong, but dangerous. I’m stuck in America because my parents and grandparents in Bangladesh were infected by such stupid thinking. Other people in the “global south” that rejected such victimhood leapt ahead. When we came to America in 1989, China’s per-capita GDP was a little higher than Bangladesh, but a little lower than India. Since then, China has become a livable place, while Bangladesh and India remain impoverished. Your mindset is a roadmap for the global south to remain poor and backward.
I'm not endorsing victimhood or saying that Bangladesh is poor because the US is rich. It was badly phrased if that is how it reads, for that I apologize.
I'm saying the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means. It is not unique in this. This is not the only reason the US is rich or the only reason any other is not.
I'm also saying that this is a really bad strategy if the goal is humankind flourishing on this planet. People already enrich one another in many ways. We have to stop warring on one another and nature, thoughtlessly dumping entropy where we can't see it, etc.
The US hasn't done anything to prevent Bangladesh from being as rich as, let's say, Singapore. Rather the opposite.
With respect to Bangladesh specifically, the U.S. has helped much more than it has hurt.
>the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means.
I don't believe that.
Like most countries, the US has a community of professionals in government dedicated to the country's national security and this class of professionals has often done harm around the world by trying to increase the US's national security when it is already more secure than most countries are. For example, the US's overreaction to 9/11. For example, the US's overthrowing of Communist governments in the third world during the Cold War.
And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
etc.
> And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.
We did that for ideological reasons. The U.S. was already one of the richest countries in the world per capita at the time of the founding. It was about as rich per capita in 1800 as India is today (in nominal dollars).
It does: but the US did those things for national security goals, not to make the US richer.
Often those things made the US considerably poorer, e.g., the US intervention in Vietnam, e.g., when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.
During the Cold War, the US encouraged international trade to show the world the benefits of trade and of capitalism and as a bribe to try to get and to keep countries in our military coalition against the Soviets. Often the encouragement and the bribe included Washington's opening up the US consumer market to imports (i.e., without tariffs). But it did those thing for national security reasons (i.e., stopping the spread of communism) not because the US needs to import anything or to export anything or to steal anything from overseas to be the richest country.
Yes, international trade makes the US richer than it would be without the trade, but the US would still be the richest country even if it did zero international trade: its not like China or Germany whose economies are highly reliant on international trade.
The Iranian coup d'état was literally about allied control of oil to secure control of global flow of oil and energy related wealth.
Security and being rich are part and parcel of the same coin.
> when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.
Or, alternatively, recirculated trillions of US taxpayer dollars into US weapons, US mercanaries, US personnel, and fed pork barrels where directed by US lobbyists.
> Security and being rich are part and parcel of the same coin.
No the two things are quite different. There are many rich countries (Singapore, Denmark, Taiwain, etc.) that don't have extensive security operations around the world. The U.S. uses its wealth for ideological reasons, not to become richer. This is something that people with a third-world mindset have the hardest time understanding about the U.S.
Yes, the US was involved in the coup in Iran, but again not as part of some plan to enrich the US. (They didn't want the Communists in control in Tehran and they didn't want Soviet warships and Soviet shipping in general to be able to operate from Iranian ports.)
Since the world is complicated and people are creative and opportunistic about how they try to make money, certain American individuals and certain small conspiracies of Americans probably tried to make money off of the US's interventions in other countries, but the US government as a whole basically never has -- at least not in the last 100 years.
While the US economy was dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf (approximately from 1957 to 2020) it used military force and pressure on governments to ensure American companies could buy Persian Gulf oil, but those American companies always paid the going price for the oil: Washington never tried to arrange so that any American interest got oil from overseas for free or for less than the fair price for the oil.
So I still haven't seen any example in this thread of Washington's extracting any wealth from the rest of the world other than through free trade, i.e., trade in which the non-American half of the trade entered into the trade voluntarily. (And again the US economy doesn't even need to engage in any free trade with the rest of the world for the US to be the richest country.)
This article is a soup of concepts. And the worst part: most of them are not contradictory at all.
Nothing matters as in there is no purpose given to us from above is true (at least according to Nietzsche). That means we have the option of inventing our own purpose. Or not - it's still good to enjoy life as is.
I've read hope is fucked some long time ago. It touches the stoicism with: don't get too invested in things outside of your control, it's not good for you. Yes, but Mark forgets that living like this is not pleasant at all. But having the skill of acceptance is good as we're not omnipotent, so there are things we can't do anything about.
That brings me to manifesting (ugh). We all know we won't get everything by wishing hard. It's still good to try and by thinking about positive result we have better probability of figuring out a plan and sustaining motivation to see the plan through.
Next we move on to terrible people listening to philosophy. Yes, they can do that and it doesn't take away from the teachings. And no, e.g. stoicism has a strong moral component which they are purposefully ignoring.
Also, to respond to title directly: accepting your life is shitty and understanding it doesn't take away from your character doesn't mean not trying to improve your situation. Yes, it means feeling good if your attempts fail. You still have the option of trying again.
I give the article author massive props for being honest with themselves. But no, books cannot save you. Only you perhaps can, but you might fail. And that's ok.
To end positively, I agree with the call to action. And the article is a nice historical overview.
While I get the surprising modernness of Aurelius' writing, I don't get the fascination with him since he ultimately failed at his most important task: choosing a reliable heir. Maybe he should have cared more and be more attached. Maybe the lesson here is that leaders should actually be engaged. Caesar may have committed a genocide and caused a civil war but he hit his KPIs with the state of Rome and Octavian.
Meanwhile Trump's "You do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn’t matter" is a tremendous insight for someone in a relatable position. A production system is down, some deal is falling apart, company going bankrupt, someone clowned on you live on tv? These matter but we're not in the ER here, no one's dying, and certainly not 400k people, keep perspective.
The problem with self-help "philosophy" in particular in the case of Stoicism — but also when it borrows piecemeal from Eastern traditions — is that it's completely divorced from its metaphysics.
Stoic ethics of 'living according to nature' was underpinned by an idea of a natural, rational cosmos (the "Logos") to which living up to is worth it. Nietzsche fairly devastatingly (expressed well in this comic[1]) pointed out that in an irrational and chaotic cosmos it's not the stoics living with nature, it's that the Stoics desperately attempt to project their own philosophy on the cosmos. A kind of psychological self-delusion and neutering.
And while most people who are fed up with self-help Stoics likely haven't read Nietzsche directly, I think they can intuitively smell that. The hollowness of self help gurus comes from trying to practice the ethics of a philosophy of antiquity without the metaphysics of antiquity that underpinned it. If you find yourself in a Lovecraftian universe living in accordance with nature does not sound so good any more and the Stoic self help guy seems more like a shoddy salesman.
[1]https://existentialcomics.com/comic/69
IIRC stoicism was written by rich people (and advisors to rich people) who didn't focus at all on improving the system. It's on-brand for the self-help influencer phenomena where you disregard disadvantages to others and systemic problems.
Bro one of the most prominent Stoic writers was a literal slave. This idea that it's a philosophy only for the rich and powerful couldn't be further from the truth.
Western philosophy is so depressing. Unnecessarily.
Why so political?
I don't understand why so many people focus on Trump and Left and Right and all the theater of politics in general. Subtract the politics from TFA and it is really, really good.
The author and I agree on some "pop-stoicism" critiques and disagree on others. Well reasoned and articulate arguments to support or dismiss "teachings" from the neo-pop-stoic culture.
The we get to passages like this; "It is, I suppose, strictly speaking accurate that if the approximately 8.6 million people who die each year due to a lack of access to quality healthcare were to wish their fate, their desires would not be frustrated, but tautological truth does not make for philosophical profundity."
Yes it does. How does this person know the 8.6 million people that died did not live meaningful lives while they were able bodied and healthy? How does the author know what is "right" for them? Whether I agree/disagree with the aspects of the authors POV; any sober and/or objective reading of this just reeks of ego and "holier than thou" attitude.
I suspect this type of attitude is a large reason why people that devote large amounts of time to thinking about politics end up categorizing "justice" into politically ideological boxes.
Edit to add;
I am reading the comments and not many are talking about this point either which I think is profound.
I hit ctrl-f inside TFA and did not find a word used in Stoic literature that I have read; Virtue.
You would think a critique on Stoicism would at least cover the basics, no?
Here is a reminder for everyone that cares;
Stoic virtue is the highest good and the only true path to a flourishing life, encompassing four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance (or self-control), and justice.
> Subtract the politics from TFA and it is really, really good.
I thought it was far too many words to express the core ideas, although perhaps there is value in taking that time to meditate on them. I suspect that an introduction like this is second nature to the author, though. The expressed views presumably play well to the author's intended audience, and among those who spend lots of time bashing the POTUS (whichever group, and whichever POTUS, at the time of bashing), it seems to be largely a form of socialization. In this specific case, the author clearly knows a lot of uncommon trivia about Trump, and was furthermore able to segue from that trivia into the main point, demonstrating linguistic skill.
Which creates at least two layers of irony:
1. (probably intentional, I think) Despite the distraction and effort, this shows a way in which the fact of Trump's political career has benefited the author.
2. (probably unintentional, I think) In a piece nominally about the virtue of apathy and the author's experience with that, the author comes across as compulsively seeking approval and commiseration.
(Once I'd gotten through the intro and understood the general topic, I ended up glossing over the rest, so on an initial read I completely missed the bit about healthcare. Another irony, perhaps, if the communication of that idea was actually a sincere and primary goal?)
As the wise man said: you will own nothing, and you will be happy.
or else
> Apparently catching a brief glimpse of the abyss during the 2020 campaign cycle, Trump expressed his wish to “hop into” one of his supporters’ trucks “and drive it away.” As he mused, “I’d love to do it. Just drive the hell outta here. Just get the hell out of this.”
Damn. Trump dropping some serious truth pills here frfr