Self-help gets philosophical
thedriftmag.com
thedriftmag.com
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 the trump quote is more value-nihilist:
> "You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn’t mean a hell of a lot.”
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.
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).
Like it or not, but you __can__ control others. This is what advertising is based on, for example.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Why was he nevertheless a stoic?
Nothing has changed in this since his time - humans will always have things they cannot change and things they can change.
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?
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
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.
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.
[0]: "Episode #237 ... The Stoics Are Wrong - Nietzche, Schopenhauer" <https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/h48mld6lelcfrts-c55...>
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."
“Change your world” said retired elite corps officer, and all-around badass Denzel Washington, to a young trafficked sex-worker without passport.
Imagine how you’ll feel about things tomorrow.
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.
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.
How dare they.
Some places smile, some don't. That's all fine. But thinking your way is the one right way is kind of sad.
Again, genuinely curious as an outsider.
Where is being nice unnatural? Russia?
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Also I struggle to see San Francisco as "flourishing" so much as "the very hostility choking the world out for no particular reason".
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.
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.
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.
But it is. The physical world is finite, with finite resources, human greed not so.
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 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?)
Damn. Trump dropping some serious truth pills here frfr