An Online Stoic Mindfulness and Resilience Training Course Starting 17th May | Hacker News Reader

An Online Stoic Mindfulness and Resilience Training Course Starting 17th May

modernstoicism.com

40 pointsweavie21 comments

Can someone explain to me in laymen's terms what stoicism means in this context? I've googled it and have a general idea, but am curious what it means to everyone here, and why it and mindfulness seem to be having a minor fad/resurgence recently.

You can learn to be better. You can practice being the person you want to be, and so more reliably be that person even when it's hard.

Some things you can control. Some you can't. Your response to the things you can't control is one of the things you can control.

I don't know much about the whole mindfulness thing, but the fundamental insight of stoicism (as explained by Aurelius, anyway) seems to me to be that the majority of negative emotions and unhappiness the typical person feels or experiences are self-inflicted, which means one may learn, through knowledge that these are under one's control and practice avoiding them, not to feel them.

I can't speak for everyone, but this was a major breakthrough in my development as a person. Once you think of it in those terms and treat negativity as a considered choice, you may find it astonishing how many little ill thoughts and such clutter one's day, in addition to larger, obvious things like brooding uselessly over a situation or event that one does not like but cannot, at the time of the brooding, meaningfully change.

YMMV. Maybe that's obvious to some people from the beginning, or maybe some people naturally come to understand that as they grow older. I know that I feel fortunate to have encountered Stoicism, by way of a high school English teacher who taught Salinger's Franny and Zooey, when I did.

I'm not on board with the other reply to this comment, but to me stoicism means the ability to handle stress better, staying calm through it rather than getting overwhelmed. Mindfulness helps with this by giving you awareness of your thoughts and giving you the ability to choose whether to act on them.

This course is powered by moodle.org, an open source learning platform.

I don't know their business model or who their competition is, but signing up for this course was the worst signup/onboarding experience I've had in a long time.

Agreed.

If you're going to have validation requirements for a password field tell people what they are before they submit the form.

We used moodle a lot for courses in university a few years ago. It was horrible back then, still horrible now.

We had Moodle at school and it was bad, but it's nothing on Blackboard. Not even close.

That was a part of your stoicism training.

I gave up on the sign-up. Too much of a hassle choosing a password to their specifications. It's a stoicism course, not a freakin' bank account.

Moodle as a project really makes me sad. I'm glad it exists, its marginally better than nothing, but I was working on a private product in 2006-2008 that was so far ahead. Sadly they were crushed by the mighty BlackBoard Inc. and the source was never made public. I would love to get back into online learning and try move it forward.

I have to grapple with Blackboard every day, it's just awful. We had Moodle at school - it wasn't great either.

Sakai is an open source offering that seems to be pretty good. At Texas State we use a (heavily customized, I believe) instance of it as the standard e-learning platform, and it's quite a bit better than Moodle in most respects.

Should someone who has never had any contact to whatever is meant by "stoic mindfulness" get an introduction to the topic? Should a link be shared and upvoted if it doesn't make it clear what its purpose is?

PS: After clicking links and reading blog articles for about 10 minutes starting from that page I still have not the slightest idea what I would learn from that course. But a comment made by @ashark can at least explain that stoicism is a topic from ancient philosophy and that practicing it might improve your view on the world by avoiding self-inflicted feelings. That's not so hard to put on the first page of a website about that topic, or on the about page, right?

How often is the course? I couldn't find any information past the start date.

Side note: "Smrt" stands for "death" in Czech.

I guess I could make a comment about the apparent blending of stoicism and mindfulness. But right now I want to give a critique on the site itself - or be a grump, depending on how you view it.

1. The sign-up says that I should enter my email twice. No big deal, but what's really the point? I've heard that this practice is cargo cult programming; is that correct?

2. This password requirement:

> The password must have at least 8 characters, at least 1 digit(s), at least 1 lower case letter(s), at least 1 upper case letter(s), at least 1 non-alphanumeric character(s)

Is a pain. in. the. ass.

Hate to pile on, but the signup was, indeed, painful. The site wouldn't even accept a generated password from LastPass. After getting through all that, I'm awaiting a confirmation email and it's not showing up. Feeling like a serious waste of time here, but I'm pretty chill about it because of my Stoic outlook.

This and the other replies just seem sort of ironic to me given the course that people are trying to sign up for:

  Stoicism:
    the endurance of pain or hardship without a display of
    feelings and without complaint.

Not sure what's ironic about that. If I was already skilled at being stoic, then why would I need a course on it? :)

And I intended to sign up for it because I was curious, not because I was already sold on the concept.

Perhaps amusing would have been a better choice of words.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com