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.
Damn. Trump dropping some serious truth pills here frfr
Imagine how you’ll feel about things tomorrow.
But yea you can pick and choose parts of some ideologies as they are useful in the moment.
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
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.
> 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.
Why was he nevertheless a stoic?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.
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 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.
How dare they.
Again, genuinely curious as an outsider.
Where is being nice unnatural? Russia?
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.
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?)
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.
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.
cantor_S_drug•3h ago
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.
iJohnDoe•3h ago
astrange•3h ago
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.
add-sub-mul-div•2h ago
astrange•2h ago
kamranjon•2h ago
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…
raw_anon_1111•2h ago
rayiner•3h ago
MangoToupe•2h ago
Also I struggle to see San Francisco as "flourishing" so much as "the very hostility choking the world out for no particular reason".
walleeee•2h ago
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.
api•2h ago
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.
sifar•1h ago
But it is. The physical world is finite, with finite resources, human greed not so.
samdoesnothing•1h ago
xbar•1h ago
walleeee•1h ago
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.
rayiner•1h ago
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.
walleeee•42m ago
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.