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> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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
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.
A huge amount of nonfiction work is overlong. Many nonfiction works could be condensed to an essay or even just a blurb.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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