The Problem of Capitalism

Let it happen, if it wants, to whatever it can happen to. And what's affected can complain about it if it wants. I doesn't hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to. 

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

You are a part of the society in which you live, in which you were born. The culture in which you were educated has left its mark on you, but that does not mean you cannot choose another path. We don't have to remain the captives of a decadent culture. It is possible to look at the world and see it for what it is, and recognize the emptiness of consumer capitalism. You can blindly participate in the constant desire for objects and experiences or you can step back and try to understand your own desires. 

You can choose to fully participate in this selling of emptiness or you can understand you are already full, that everything you need is already there for you, within you. Western society functions as a massive making and selling machine that wants to grow like a cancer until it has consumed the very body that gave birth to it. The cancer can't exist on it's own, just as capitalism needs us to keep it going. Left unchecked, capitalism will kill its host. We individuals that have been programmed by consumer capitalism have, unknowingly, become part of the cancer, while those that have removed themselves are the cure. A cancer is made up of cells of the body, and the body nurtures the cancer, even protects it. When we are blind, we protect the very thing destroying us.

Life is already so short, but how much shorter does it become when we devote our lives to distraction, when we allow the world to prevent us from leading meaningful lives. It is impossible to lead a meaningful life if we are captured by the capitalist cancer that only sees us as consumers. Every action we take or fail to take is an opportunity for the world to grind more money out of us. Our sole purpose in the eyes of capitalism is to turn everything we can possibly do into a product and thus into profit, money. Illness and death are the most profitable of all. This alone tells you what capitalism is capable of doing.    

Marcus Aurelius is telling me that the world can only hurt me if I interpret it's actions as harmful to me. Is capitalism hurting me? Only if I let it. Only if I choose to call out it's harm and invest my limited energy into defeating it. I choose not to. I choose to remove myself as far as possible from the grinder that is capitalism, the grinder that wants to turn my very bones into profit. You don't have to be a part of the cancer, you can choose to live differently. Be well.    

Will

The driving force behind all of our actions, beyond even our mental or physical abilities, is our will. What is the difference between two people with similar abilities and situations? Their will to make progress towards an objective. Their will to stay focused and overcome obstacles that will come between them and that objective. If you look at those that are successful in life, to those that are able to recognize the good in life and stay on a path, you will see what makes them different: their will. I am not

referring to financial success although that could be part of it, but to that success that is based upon a pursuit of the good focusing on family, friends, work, education, philosophy, health, etc. If a person lacks perspective they will pursue money, fame, possessions, drugs, sex, power all for the sake of self-aggrandizement. Their will is not guided by the good, but by all that is superficial in life. The will must be directed towards the good and the pursuit of a meaningful life.  

Merriam Webster's Dictionary has one entry for "will," among many, that reads:

The power of control over one's own actions or emotions: a man of iron will.

When we can control our actions and emotions, we are in control of the direction we are taking our lives. After reading that statement, "we are in control of the direction we are taking our lives," I am left asking who is the "we" to which I am referring? When a person does things that feel out of control, they often feel they are an observer of those actions. If a person is overcome by their emotions and takes some action they later regret, they often feel as if someone else was controlling them, as if they were two people--the observer and the person taking the action. The objective here is to merge the observer with any actions and emotions and move towards the good. Remember, you don't wake up on Sunday morning regretting the good you did on Saturday night. When we are in control, when our actions and emotions are controlled by our will, we are no longer split, we are one, which leads to Stoic Freedom, Stoic Calm. 

Finally, we only control the direction we are taking our lives, we don't control the destination at which we will arrive. We can control our actions, opinions, emotions, and attitudes about events, but we can't control whether or not those events will happen. This isn't The Secret, the idea of visualizing something with the believe that will bring it to you. No, this is about staying on a path regardless of the outcome and with no guarantee of anything. The idea is to be in control of that which is in your control. Can you ask for anything more? Be well.   

Battling for Your Mind

In all that happens, keep before your eyes those who experienced it before you, and felt shock and outrage and resentment at it.

And now where are they? Nowhere.

Is that what you want to be like? Instead of avoiding all these distracting assaults--leaving the alarms and flight to others--and concentrating on what you can do with it all?

Because you can use it, treat it as raw material. Just pay attention, and resolve to live up to your own expectations. In everything. And when faced with a  choice, remember: our business is with things that really matter.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

We now live in The Age of Distraction. We are glued to screens that keep feeding us completely random information. We turn on our computers and immediately jump to something that starts feeding us the day's stories. Then we spend the day jumping from topic to topic with no objective, no purpose. Would you allow a person to walk up to you every minute and start a new conversation that had nothing to do with what you were just thinking about? We are fed political news, cultural news, pop news, business news, celebrity sightings, and on and on and on... And then, suddenly, with our brains buzzing we prepare to end our day and it's all a blur of, basically, nothing. We spent the day lost in some illusion of activity, but in the end nothing really happened that had any impact. We made progress on nothing, never completed an original thought, never acted upon an original desire, our day was pulled together by some algorithm that likely already has things lined up for tomorrow and beyond. Through the day we never had a single original thought or asked ourselves if this is the way to live? Is this what we were meant to do: spend our lives trapped in random triviality, perpetually distracted? 

Perhaps it's time to unplug the apps, turn off the news, and revert back to a time when we directed our own minds. We should not spend our entire lives thinking about things that don't really matter, thinking about things that were fed to us by the corporate advertising machine. We have a choice to live our own lives, drive our own thoughts and interests, and not simply give away our time, our minds,our lives. Be well.

Be a Captain

As a consultant, working in the world of technology, losing a consulting role is a common thing. I have had positions that lasted three years and others that only lasted a single quarter.

What does this have to do with Stoicism? There are a number of ways to respond to these ups-and-downs. You can get angry and frustrated and ask, "Why me?" You can embrace the fact that there are things in your control and things out of your control. Management can change their strategy and regardless of how hard you work, the outcome will be the same: the budget for a role is cut and a company goes in another direction. So long as you do the best you can, you should step away without frustration or anger. Sure, you can feel badly, but only for a moment as it doesn't change anything. All you can control is your own response to the forever shifting circumstances. If you allow your emotions to be jerked around by things out of your control, your entire life will feel chaotic. When faced with chaos, you have the ability to remain consistent moving toward a goal of your own design. You are in control of your mind and your response, not the events that occur around you. You don't ignore the world, you pick through it and discover those things you can control and that is where you put your energy. The alternative is to be like a boat with no captain tossed by the wind and sea.  

Clicking Away...

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while. 

Walden

Henry David Thoreau

Adrift by Andrew Wyeth

It takes a great deal of effort to pull away from the prevailing culture and assert your independence of mind. Henry David Thoreau, in the days before even the telephone existed, recognized the problem of people going to the post office multiple times a day to check their mailbox. And now we can check the equivalent of our mailbox a thousand times a day via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or dozens of other apps that basically serve the same purpose--did anyone reward me with a click. Stop! Would you not be better served if you spent your time exploring your own mind without the mindless interruptions and random searches brought on by the distraction economy. We have the greatest minds of all the ages right at our fingertips, but you would rather follow some inane person offering their opinion on Taylor Swift or The Top 10 Puppy Breeds. You have but one life to live and you have decided to give a part of it up to the empty pursuit of idiotic messages from the mindless world of the mass media. The greatest thing to explore is not the internet, but your own mind. But part of that is the creation of a mind worthy of being known. If all your thoughts are low and guided by trivial desires such as the latest brand of X or the new Y then knowing yourself is not going to be rewarding. You have to create that mind worthy of being known. You have to put your head down and work. Be well. 

Objectives

State your objective. Have a clear picture of what you are trying to achieve so you can check your progress or lack of progress. You are lost if you don't know what you are working to achieve. 

Do you know what you are working to achieve? When you rise in the morning, do you know what you are working towards? At the end of the day, can you point towards progress towards something? Anything? How can you work if that isn't completely clear? Could you imagine sending workers out to a site with a truck filled with materials and not have a plan? Your life is that truck filled with materials and your mind is meant to contain a plan of some sort. There must be a guide to direct activities or you are just responding to circumstances and living as an animal does. Philosophy can be the guide to direct your activities, but philosophy does not pick what you are building. Where is your plan? What are you trying to achieve in this life? Be well. 

Your Inner Thief

Every waking moment you must be on guard against your lesser self. It is so easy to allow your lesser self to win the battle and pull you into the world of empty pleasure--that second bowl of ice cream, that third drink, that eight hours of Netflix, or those three hours of web surfing when you should have been focusing on some more meaningful task. Your job in life is to defeat that creature that loves everything that is easy and right this minute. This is not happiness or satisfaction, but something small and empty. Stand guard against your inner thief, who is always there, for he is capable of taking your entire life one empty minute at a time. Stand guard.  

Our Will

What a truth it is that you are a result of your will. Your body is molded by diet and exercise, your mind by your will to focus and learn, and your finances by your daily labor and spending. All of these actions are within your direct control if you will grab the reigns. Who is your master? If you are unable to control that which sits within your own mind, what hope is there? Be a master of your own mind and you will make progress towards being the master of your world.  

Yes, the odds are stacked against you. I'm sorry, but that's life. Put your head down. Work. 

Kerryn Feehan on my Big Fat Fabulous Life

Isn't that about as Stoic as you can get? We all, in our various ways, and some more than others, have the odds stacked against us. For better or worse, we are born at certain times, to certain parents under certain conditions all completely out of our control. The person with every opportunity in the world is incapable of self-control and unable to establish their own life. The person born into poverty, racism, and political instability is able to rise up and create their own good life both large and small. This isn't about material success, but about the success that comes from putting your head down and doing the work: marriage, family, learning, friends, work, diet, etc. We all have to do the work regardless of where we are in life. What is the alternative? Is it an alternative to simply give in to every urge, every lazy offering of our culture that wants to turn us into payment methods?

When you are faced with a moment of decision, which is a hundred times a day, what decision do you make? There are times when it is nearly always the wrong one: Yes, sure, I will have the bottomless fries with that. Your life is the accumulation of thousands of decisions both large and small. What do you use to make those decisions? Where do you hold the responsibility for where you find yourself today? What path can you start following? Be well.

Discipline

Discipline in all things: love, work, exercise, diet, learning, etc. Doing the right thing often means doing the more difficult. When in doubt, do the hard thing and 9 out of 10 times it will be the right thing.  

How often does that easy thing today have a high price tomorrow? Better to exercise one's discipline today than suffer the consequences of our laziness, inattention, and self indulgence tomorrow. As you go through your day, how many opportunities are there to flex the muscle of discipline? Too many to count because it is so easy to say yes to yourself when you should learn to say no. No to the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Say yes to the seven virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity. Christian yes, but wise nevertheless. As Seneca said, to paraphrase: take your wisdom where you find it. Wise is wise. Be well. 

ICMM

There is no one you can name who knows how he began to want what he now wants. People are not led by their intentions but jerked about by whims. Sometimes we make the best of fortune, but just as often fortune gets the better of us. It is shameful to drift rather than to go forward; shameful to find oneself in the midst of a whirlwind of events and ask, astonished, "How did I get here?"

Letters on Ethics

Seneca

When my daughter was in elementary school, she received a certificate that stated: I Can Manage Myself (ICMM). I recall it well because I put the same acronym on a sign above my desk. Isn't that one of the most obvious requirements of an adult, of a rational person, that they will have the capacity to manage their own lives, make plans, and follow through on them? How do we make those plans? What do we use to guide their creation? Philosophy. We need a filter, philosophy, to separate out what is irrational so that we are not wasting our lives in pursuit of the trivial. Yes, we all want to have meaningful jobs but not for the purpose of impressing our high school classmates or submitting to the will of our family.

We don't want to spend our lives buying impressive consumer goods to create the impression we are successful. We don't want to spend our lives managing impressions on Facebook while our "real" lives are in a shambles. Life is a serious business so we should do more research on how to live than on how to boil an egg or buy a pair of boots. 

Don't find yourself sitting in the middle of a room full of "whims" wondering what it was all about. Be well.