Harmful vs. Meaningless Work

What value does a man produce by his labors? Should we only measure our efforts by the income generated, which is what we seem to do in this world? Unless a person is engaged in outright illegal activity, we don't seem to care how a man earns his money. All we seem to care about is how much wealth is generated with no regard of how it is generated so long as it is legal or reasonably legal. We live in a world now where billions are generated by the most dubious of enterprises and the work of those that make a meaningful contribution to the betterment of society are paid little.We have become a culture dazzled by money but not by work. We are a country that worships at the throne of celebrity but not at the throne of competence. Don't tell me what you do, just tell me what you're worth. 

How many people are now sitting in their retirement homes reflecting back on a life spent marketing opiates to doctors and patients? How many bankers can sit back and think through the corrupt deals they spent their lives constructing so they could spend their final years relaxing in some over 55 concentration camp. How do we come to sell our souls for money with no reflection upon the results of the work we do. Can a man justify anything by merely thinking: someone is going to do it or it's legal? There is a big difference between work that is meaningless and work that is actually harmful, that is taking away from the lives of people rather than adding nothing.

There are three types of work: 

• Work that is meaningful, and helpful to society: teacher
• Work that is meaningless, but harmless to society: perfume designer 
• Work that is meaningless, but harmful to society: social media marketer

Recently I had a job that fell into the third category because its purpose was to increase the time "users" spent playing video games. I spent each day attempting to create ways to draw "users" further into playing video games and away from living real life. It's one thing to sell a customer a product of questionable use, but another thing to sell customers a product you know is bad, that actually has a negative impact on the human experience, that reduces the amount of happiness in the world. Video game players are avoiding life and, if they ever have a moment of clarity, will see the time they spent playing video games as lost time, time they could have spent doing meaningful things like building human relationships, experiencing nature, creating art, furthering their lives in any way other than playing video games. If you can't have the first type of work, don't opt for the third. There are plenty of meaningless jobs out there so that a person doesn't have to compromise their ethics-- if you can do no good, do no harm. Sometimes it's better to not work than to do work that is harmful to the world. 

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.  

Our Time

Your ability to control your thoughts--treat it with respect. It's all that protects your mind from false perceptions--false to your nature, and that of all rational beings. It's what makes thoughtfulness possible, and affection for other people, and submission to the divine.

Meditations

Marcus Aurelius

It's December 31st and time to think about the past year and the one to come. What did you do and what can you do better? Did you waste time thinking about things that were out of your control and too little time focused on those things within your control? Did you work to control that one thing completely within your realm: your mind? 

It's an opportunity to survey how much time was wasted on trivial distractions versus meaningful progress towards the good. There is plenty of time in a given year to accomplish much if one spends one's time wisely, if one takes charge of one's time. One objective will be to use my time wisely and not let a day slip by without making progress on something. No more wasted days. For in those days, one upon another, is our lives. We bother over $20, but will let an entire day slip away without a trace.

My goal for 2018 is to use my time more wisely. To do things that may be difficult, but will leave behind something of value such as a stronger mind and body. Be well.

Create Your Own Christmas

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.

Epictetus

That's about it isn't it, that's the core of this thing called Stoicism. Separate the events in your life into two distinct areas, those in your control and those out of your control. It sounds so simple, but how often do we get lost in that distinction. Here are the holidays, Christmas is almost upon us, and the big issue is our expectations of how things should be rather than how they are. We even distort the past to paint the present in a certain way. There were those wonderful Christmases we had so long ago that will never be again. Maybe so... I tend to think we color them in two ways, both of them wrong. Either they were these bright, happy days with family and friends and fat gooses (does anyone eat a goose nowadays?), or they were these sad days because the family was apart, the goose was gone, and, perhaps, we were alone. We tend to romanticize both versions: it was never really as good or as bad as we remember. (Note: I am just thinking about normal bad times here, not those times that end up being a Netflix series or drive new legislation.) 

Never mind all the issues around the commercialization of Christmas, the buy, buy as the path to happiness. What gets me is the selling of the emotional side, the way it has of making people feel worse on December 25th even if everything is perfectly fine. We expect the rosy cheeked kids opening presents in front of a glowing fireplace while the white, cardigan clad grandparents sit watching. I like the "Trailer Park Boys" image better: Wouldn't we all rather be home getting stoned and drunk with our families. It all comes down to expectations... We can't create that Norman Rockwell scene that has been so oversold and puts everyone into debt both financially and, more importantly, emotionally. But, we can take advantage of a few days off from work and the opportunity to get stoned and drunk with our families and friends.

The important thing is that, regardless of our circumstances, we do have our will to find happiness (contentment, might be the better word), by doing something other than feeling sorry for ourselves. Don't allow that fantasy to slip in of how things are supposed to be, they are the way they are which is a gift.  We can use our will to share what we have and spend time with others that might not be our families. There are people that would rather hide for the entire holiday because they have this fantasy of how it should be. Maybe you won't be with the rich grandparents showering you with gifts (would anyone care for a Lexus?), or be the rich grandparents doing the showering. But, remember, you have something to give. Find someone to share a moment with. If you are sitting alone thinking of other times or imagining something that never was, you need to explore that with every ounce of Stoicism at your disposal. If there is anytime of year that requires a philosophy, it's this week from Christmas to New Year.

Regardless, I am hoping things go on sale on Tuesday! I need some new boots. Be well.

Good Fortune

I was once a fortunate man but at some point fortune abandoned me.

But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions. 

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

In time, when youth has long passed, you have a chance to look back at your life and realize those moments when choices were made. There were times when you had a chance to choose one path among many. There were those easy paths that allowed you to continue on without much effort, and then those difficult ones that were a challenge, that required change and uncertainty. If we add all of those choices together, we end up with the life we have today. The guide for those choices should be virtue rather than pleasure, the desire to do the good, the right thing, and often the more difficult one. There is no mystery between good and bad because we all know the difference. As it has been said, by who I can't remember, "When in doubt do the right thing because we all know what the right thing is." With the word fortune, I am not talking about possessions in all their forms, but, no doubt there is some of that. There is of course the unvirtuous man with great wealth but that is a different story. It goes without saying that good fortune comes in many forms, but in the end the key to the two words, "good fortune" is the word "good" because the fortune, if it is worthy, must be good. Fortune, is our present situation. Is it good, or are we stuck with an empty life filled with empty pleasures. Are we petty, angry, jealous, unloved, alone, without the fortune that can come only from love? Love of others, love of ourselves. We come to that fortune of a good life by a thousand choices so that in the end someone who made different choices will look upon that person with good fortune as lucky. 

What is the path you are on, and is it an easy one or one that requires some effort? Luck isn't easy, it turns out that it can be a lot of work. It requires attention.

There was a farmer that had a gorgeous farm. He was walking along a fence checking each post for rot when a man approached him. The man asked if this was the farmer's farm? The farmer replied that it was. 

The man stood there and saw the white, sturdy fence surrounding a pasture with cows. Up the road there was a large barn with various pieces of equipment around it and beyond that a white house surrounded by trees with a large porch. He took it all in and turned to the man and said, "The lord has surely blessed you with good fortune." 

The farmer replied, "Well, maybe so, but it sure was a mess when he blessed me with it."

And so is life. We are given everything we need, the raw material of good fortune, our farm, and it is up to us what we mold with it. Be well.

Is Change an Illusion?

This too is one of the evils of foolishness: it is always beginning to live.

Epicurus as quoted by Seneca

This brings up the question of whether or not it is possible to change by simply flipping a switch in one's mind and taking a different path. If I put together some grand plan and set a date for a change, is that a foolish path? It seems I am always thinking of some change, but often lack the discipline to follow through and take the steps needed. In the real world, yes, I go through the steps to reach a goal, but what of the world of the mind? How often do I go down a mental path but fail to stay on that path. 

What is wisdom? Always wanting the same thing, always rejecting the same thing. You do not even have to add the proviso that what you want should be right: only for the right can one have a consistent wish.

Seneca, Letters on Ethics #20

Thoreau warns of activities that require new clothes because too often they also require a different man. Do different ideas require a new suit? More to come... 

Today is the Time and Now is the Moment

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.” 

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius 

How much time have I wasted waiting for something to happen rather than doing that thing that was scratching at the back of my mind? What was the greater risk: to open the door to that thought and act upon it, or to wait and postpone opening the door to that thought? I think I know the answer. Yes, there is a need for prudence, but there is also a need for progress on that thing I wanted to do, but was either too afraid or too lazy to work towards. Anything worth doing requires a focused effort. These posts, for example, don't write themselves--although it may seem like they do. If I want to pursue something, advance my enlightenment by studying philosophy, it will require effort. There will come a day when everything will end for me, and if there is time to think before that happens, do I want that second, week, month to be filled with regret? I am on that path. Instead of working towards training my mind, I continue to waste my mind on the trivial. 

Step one: what is that "thing" worthy of my attention and energy? And what activity am I engaged in now that is preventing me from feeling that regret at my last moment? What would I pursue if I was told I had a year to live? I would be healthy, but would pass in 365 days? What would I do with my 365 days? And of course, it could be there is even less time because we don't know when the curtain will fall? It could be in mid-sentence, as I type these words, or it could be 30 years from now. What do I want to be doing with my time when I am called off the stage? Pursuing enlightenment... What is enlightenment? Understanding what in life has value and then living by that value. Be well. 

Staying Focused on the Project at Hand

What is my big project in life? Is it to buy a house? Get a good job? Produce art? Be happy? Have money set aside for retirement? Die with the most toys?

Each morning as I wake, I am confronted with my big project, but my efforts on most days are not directed toward advancing on it. My project is to work towards being a good person, a virtuous person. It's a big project but one that is mostly ignored. It should be at the center of my days. If I focus only on what is in front of me, and work towards doing the best that I possibly can, I am making progress. If I waste my time focusing on things out of my control, literally waste my life focusing on things that will not bring me closer to being that good person, I will continually be distracted. As a minor example, I reset my browser so that it doesn't offer up the days news to me. I found it to be the source of much distraction particularly given the recent big news about Jessica Simpson that kept appearing on my screen.

An innocent enough piece of clickbait, but the fact that it appeared on my screen all day, and I remembered it enough to mention it here, is a sad comment on what I allow into my brain. Part of being a good person surely has to be guarding what I allow into my head. If my day is filled with the absorption of trivia about trivia about trivia then what can the result be but a trivial mind?

The project at hand is to focus my mind on that which will add to my life not diminish it. Yes, it's fine to watch television dramas about life at Versailles when I am in control and know I am opening my mind to the trivial looking to be entertained. The insult to my time and life is when I hand over my mind without knowing. I will make sure the front door is locked 20 times a day, but how often do I make sure my mind is locked to those that wish to rob me of my own thoughts. And what do we have other than our thoughts? 

Guard your mind and stay focused on the task at hand. Be well. 

Freedom, Judgment, Will and Integrity

The first thing I should do in the morning is realize I am free to go through the day as I will. I have freedom because I only direct my energy towards those things immediately in my control. If I have to drive to work in the morning and I leave at 8:00 AM, I know the traffic will be heavy and it's going to take between 30 and 45 minutes to get to work. Why struggle with that fact and pretend there is anything I can do to move the traffic along. I can get in the left lane, the center lanes or the right lane, but I can't create a new lane with no cars in it. I have the freedom to take it for what it is and not allow it to alter my mind, my mood or any aspect of the day other than the few extra minutes my commute will take.

Traffic can be used as a metaphor for every seemingly unpleasant thing I have to deal with in my day. I have the freedom to decide how, or if, I will react to that "traffic." There are unpleasant people I will interact with and for some people I will be that unpleasant person. In fact, the majority of the "traffic" will be what happens in my own mind as I choose to allow anger, disappointment, or my sense of entitlement to muddle my perspective. I have the freedom to allow those feelings to drive my day or to cast them aside just as I don't allow the person that cuts in front of me to spin up an angry response. They didn't do that as an assault on my dignity, they are just driving their car. I am free to react how I choose. 

My judgment gives me freedom. I can decide how to judge the things that happen around me. And the primary judgment of most of the things that happen around me should be indifference. I can think the flow of activity around me has something to do with me, that the world is in some way against or even for me, or I can see it has little to do with me. I decide how to judge or, maybe more importantly, how not to judge. It is how we judge things that impacts how we react to the world. We are free when we judge the world as it is rather than how we wish it to be or twist it to make us the victim. When we judge wrongly we can lose our freedom, which is essentially control of our minds and actions.

I have control of my will, how I want to direct my energy. How I direct my will is at the center of the four concepts: Freedom, Judgment, Will and Integrity. My will is what I apply to direct my freedom, judgment, and maintain my integrity. The one thing I must realize as fully my own is my will. And of course that will can be applied to the defeat of injustice. If I want to maintain my integrity, I can't ignore injustice, dishonesty, theft, etc. I have an obligation to myself to not be a part of anything that would compromise my core beliefs as a human being trying to get through life without diminishing another person that is also trying to live a good life.

I am free so long as I make the choice to see the world as it truly is. Circumstances will arise that will hinder me, that will require a change of course, but even these things are but a test of my will. There is a daily effort to see things as they truly are and to exist within reality. The world is a crazy place full of confused beings misapplying their will, distorting their judgement, abandoning their integrity all with the goal of being free. But it is impossible to be free when we do not have control of those basics. 

My goal in life is be in control of that which is mine, that which I can truly control--my mind while I still have it. Be well.

Interacting with Our Tormentors

It's so easy to allow our emotions to get the better of us. We tend to put ourselves at the center of all of the activity around us whether we are involved or not. We respond to traffic as if it was a personal affront (at least I do); we participate in some vast process that started before we entered and will continue after we are gone, but still we somehow take responsibility for anything that goes wrong; we encounter people we don't know, and will likely never meet again, but we give them huge pieces of our time and energy. Stop it! Again, this isn't about you. We need to learn to see the reality of situations. As Marcus Aurelius said:

Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

Indeed. We need to accept that the world is full of perceived obstacles, but they only become so as far as we allow them. To achieve the freedom I want via the study of Stoicism, I have to see the truth of the fact that it's not about me, I am not in the thoughts of others, but am only a victim of their actions as long as I allow myself to be so.

It's Me

"It's not you, it's me."

The profoundness of this simple statement stuns me because generally speaking it is me. It's my perception of a situation that is the problem rather than the situation itself.

The other day I interjected myself into a meeting because I knew one of the attendees. I went in during the introductions and said hello and asked how it was going. They didn't pay much of any attention to me, and initially I allowed my ego to jump in. I walked away thinking, what a jerk, he hardly said hello and barely looked at me. I walked down the hall mumbling to myself and feeling badly in an overly dramatic way. But then I stopped and realized everything was in my head. It was me, not him. What response did I expect arriving at the start of a meeting to say hello to someone that wasn't expecting me? We apply our interpretation to every interaction and I suspect we are generally wrong. It's not about us.

I recently started working for a new organization where I am likely the least important person on the team. I am the person everyone is thinking the least about. Nobody is thinking about what they can do to advance my career or position me for a powerful position on the team. I am there to deliver a small piece of work and nothing more. The business isn't there to ensure I have a good time and pay my bills. In the end, whatever happens there is on me and anything that happens will be based upon what I deliver.

Stoicism says that we need to strive to understand what is under our control and what is out of our control and then to apply our energy to the former. If we apply our energy to what we can't control, we are wasting our lives. If we walk around expecting something from the world, we will be disappointed more times than not. If we work on those things actually within our power, and apply our will, we can achieve much. Be well.