Hard Truths and Happiness
blogs.exeter.ac.uk
blogs.exeter.ac.uk
This strikes me as a little bit similar to the comforting fiction that the article criticizes. Certainly disease/suffering/death are patterns, but patterns point to underlying mechanisms that can be understood and potentially controlled, not just accepted fatalistically as "the natural order of things".
The transhumanistic attitude of "let's look for solutions to death rather than accepting it" is a form of avoidant coping, little different to religious beliefs about the afterlife. Maybe you'll live forever in the singularity, but you'll almost certainly suffer and die and rot. It's better to contemplate that probability now, rather than on your death bed.
Better yet if I can delay it until a time of my own choosing rather than being yanked out of existence "when my time comes".
A rough calculation shows that 5-10% of all people that were ever born are still alive.
1. Well, Stoicism and its nigh identical twin Epicureanism are a response to the fading of classical Greece post Alexander and in the face of the rise of Rome. The idea that they are powerless and "slave" philosophies is kinda true.
2. The rest of the article does not dispute the first sentence; we all really are powerless in the face of death, etc., etc. The issue the article has is with the word "pretends".
I'm not sure that is an accurate translation, Aristotle said it is about "living well and faring well", it's more about a good life than a happy life.
I would argue that you cannot disaggregate the two. Only the person living a life can truly make a value judgement on it and if they value it as "good" they are quite literally saying they are happy.
Maybe we're getting caught up by different meanings of happiness. I'm working from happiness being a deep seated contentment (very much "living and faring well") rather than an active effervescent joy.
EDIT: nope, looks like they had a different word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equanimity#Stoicism
Call it GTD, 43 folders, Zen, Stoicism, in some ways it doesn't matter.
There is a lot of eastern mysticism tangled up in some interpretations of Stoicism. Arguably "when its time to X, X, and when its time to Y, then Y" given a western civ wrapper is an aspect of Stoic thought and when given an eastern civ wrapper we call it an aspect of Zen. I think I have a yearly Zen calendar hanging up with that quote somewhere. But its the same thing, presented by different theatre troops. If you're bored its possible to come up with other analogies between Zen or Buddhism in general and Marcus Aurelius or Stoicism in general. This month's Zen wall calendar quote is on the topic of correct practice means everything you observe is actual reality, which sounds vaguely Stoic I don't remember but I'm pretty sure M.A. said something like that in Meditations somewhere.
A good education means you're never really bored and always have something interesting to ponder, even if it turns out to be wrong, LOL.
The failure of emacs org mode implementing GTD, or Zen, or Stoicism is not fully applying it means unhappiness, they are philosophies of "do" not "believe" or "want" or "heard dat". So I do not have next year's Zen quotes wall calendar on my wall because I failed to input it in emacs org mode, or maybe I'm not Stoic or Zen the right way. One way or another, I'm off now to Amazon to order my 2017 wall calendar.
As said wonderfully by Marcus Aurelius: http://directingmind.com/meditations#8-36
To me, 'living in the moment' sounds awfully similar to the goal of Vipassana Buddhism: accurately perceiving reality (i.e. enlightenment). In that sense, 'living in the moment' is a passive rather than active act: experiencing your life without reflexively (often unconsciously) judging or labelling your experiences. Neither ruminating over the past nor obsessing over the future. Observing without judgement and thinking only when you choose to. A 'skillful' state of mind.
I doubt many, if any, of us are able to perceive things this way, without deliberate cultivation of a non-judgemental mind. I guess that's why the phrase is 'practice meditation'; it is literally 'practising' a specific way of perceiving the world (one that doesn't come naturally to us), just as you have to practice any other skill.
If this all sounds a bit strange, maybe even untrue, give this a try: go somewhere peaceful (a park, your backyard etc.) and just sit down somewhere and 'watch the world go by' for 5 minutes. Try to observe impartially, without labelling, judging or letting your thoughts drift to work, your social circle, what you're having for dinner etc. I suspect most of us (myself included) wouldn't make it past 20 seconds before some thought intruded. If you're a real masochist, try actually meditating for 5 minutes. It's torture.
If you try the above, I think you'll realise how little control you have over your own mind. I don't know much about stoicism, but maybe the stoics had a similar notion to the Buddhists. The word 'stoic' has modern connotations of outward calm and impassivity, despite the boiling emotion within. That sounds exhausting, maybe even impossible. But perhaps the original idea was similar to Buddhist philosophy: to master your own thoughts, and outward composure (maybe even 'happiness') would simply be a side-effect.
Does it help to list examples of the opposite, "tomorrow" or "manana" culture? Or aphorisms like never do tomorrow what you can do today?
This brings up time preference which the original article author carefully danced to avoid discussing. Uneducated or lower class thought patterns seem to yield instantaneous maximal values of happiness X. If your outlook on life is to achieve the highest value X, even if for a very short amount of time, then you won't like Stoicism due to having an extremely high time preference. On the other hand if you walk a difficult path, seemingly an unnatural unevolved superficially unemotional undramatic path, which the stoic philosophers seem to think takes a lot of training and education and generally higher class attributes like intelligence and wisdom, the resulting extremely low time preference will produce some superficially really weird and non-traditional attitudes (what does this say about tradition?) that regardless of how "weird" they are, result in a maximal value when value X representing happiness is integrated over an entire lifetime. But your super low time preference is going to result in nearly living on a different planet from people with extremely high time preference, those groups have severe difficulty communicating with each other, often totally opposing concepts of value and whats right. Basically a different culture.
Of course the stereotypes from people who don't really get it, start flowing and "naturally" its always the case that whatever is happy short term is the opposite long term or integrated over a long period, at least according to naturally grouchy people, for no apparent reason, or sometimes in defiance of reality, because it makes for dramatic philosophical texts. Of course reality has no obligation to make grouchy people consistent and happy, which is kind of funny in context. I guess I'm saying a crappy Stoic is a failure of a Stoic that wanted an excuse for being a grouchy "get off my lawn" guy, so spits out the grouchy answer off the cuff every time instead of the actual Stoic answer that might take some thought, unless its a really dumb question.
As someone who doesn't experience much emotion (usually none) except for my own hubris or pride, I find I'm happier than most people. I also find I have bouts of negative emotions at times, but very few identifiable positive emotional experiences. The number of times I could identify my own "happiness" is about 12...and that's where my life experiences and lifestyle was in a condition I would aspire to for the commensurate time period.
> According to a long line of modern critics of Stoicism from Hegel onwards, the Stoic is someone who lies themselves out of reality in order to feel happy in otherwise unpleasant circumstances.
I am considered "different" in many respects, by everyone I spend time around. It doesn't seem to make me much less popular, but I am avoided or included in exchanges, based on this personality. I don't ignore emotion to avoid unpleasant circumstances (although it may be related to childhood experience/trauma at some point), I just don't have it. As per American Psycho, I'm just not there. When diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, I respond (because they want a reaction) - "Everyone dies". So it might seem like it's a coping mechanism when I'm really just trying to accommodate others. When my father gets cancer. I reassess if I want to spend time with him. Nope. Didn't before, don't now.
One day I'll be gone and the whole question becomes moot for me, so I never thought it had a name.
You have accept you're an animal and your emotions, aka your instincts, guide you to propagate the human race in a way that worked ten thousands of years ago, but no longer works now.
One of the most powerful principles is that your instincts attempt to follow is to keep the same pattern of things that worked before.
Why are you attracted to someone who shares traits of your parents, even self-destructive ones? For that matter, why do you share these same psychological traits? Genes? Bah! It's because what happened, what you were exposed to, regardless of how painful it was, resulted in you being born. So instinctively, it's a good choice.
And to expand on that, this instinctive trait to emulate your parents were within your parents, so your parents did much to emulate their parents, and on and on. So the mere presence of this instinct in your lineage is very strong evidence that it helps keep your lineage alive.
You can see this pattern of behaviour by watching animals. In absence of other problems, they'll follow the same pattern day after day, they'll search the same areas for food, sleep in the same places they did before, etc. It's the safest thing to do, and it's very popular. If you catch a mouse and release it a mile from your home, it will find its way back to your very same property, regardless of better habitats that may exist along the way.
Any attempt to internally debate your desire to follow your instincts, is bound to fail. As soon as the argument seems settled in your favour, and you no longer think about it, you will find yourself creeping back to your own patterns.
So how do you combat this? The answer is continual exposure to alternative thinking patterns. You have to expose yourself over and over again to different thoughts and ideas from what you've been absorbing from your childhood, and never let up.
I'd recommend subliminal audio, which you can listen to while working or doing other things. It also is something you can continue to do for years without spending much effort. You can find a lot of it on youtube, search for "george hutton".
But I'm not sure about this subliminal messaging thing. Especially when George Hutton can claim... this product: https://gumroad.com/l/iDowu
I am however open to guided hypnosis, I'd like to try that one day.
He has a lot of normal stuff, too, though, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8L6SBQ9Mqo&list=PLwNH29STmg... (for motivation) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEPzSDt8YbQ&list=PLwNH29STmg... (for confidence). I downloaded a bunch of the audio from videos like these, using youtube-dl, and play them on shuffle. I found his audio to work for me, better than other subliminal stuff I tried.
He uses a combination of binaural beats + subliminals which may have something to do with it. Based on my results at least, I think this combination should be explored further.