Someone Else Is Spinning the Thread – The Daily Stoic – Part 10 of 366

If the breaking day sees someone proud,
The ending day sees them brought low.
No one should put too much trust in triumph,
No one should give up hope of trials improving.
Clotho mixes one with the other and stops
Fortune from resting, spinning every fate around.
No one has had so much divine favor
That they could guarantee themselves tomorrow.
God keeps our lives hurtling on,
Spinning in a whirlwind.
Seneca, Thyestes, 613

According to the book, Clotho is one of the three Greek goddesses of fate who “spins” the threads of human life. The playwright Aeschylus wrote, “When the gods send evil, one cannot escape it.” The same was true for great destiny and fortune.

This is another example of acceptance. We are not in control, and what will happen will happen regardless. However, this quote digs into another facet of this concept. What is today may not be tomorrow. Nothing lasts forever. A triumph can be come a trial, and a trial a triumph in an instant.

What you are experiencing now will pass. Let this be a sobering fact because it applies to both the good and bad.

A Higher Power – The Daily Stoic – Part 9 of 366

This is the very thing which makes up the virtue of the happy person and a well-flowing life — when the affairs of life are in every way tuned to the harmony between the individual divine spirit and the will of the director of the universe.
Chrysippus, Quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7.1.88

For this quote the book talks about addicts struggling in a 12 step program where step 2 is acknowledge a higher power. At first glance this feels like a religious platitude, and it is not necessarily helpful to the nonreligious. But the point really has nothing to do with religion at all. The fundamental idea is to accept that the world does not revolve around us. It is much too big for that. We are not at the center, and we are not in control. We are simply along for the ride of life. As the book says, “As soon as you can attune your spirit to that idea, the easier and happier your life will be, because you will have given up the most potent addiction of all: control.” What a great way to phrase it — “attune your spirit to that idea.” How you think about and understand the world and your relationship to it is entirely within your control, and yet this is something that most people spend very little time thinking about.

I am not a religious man, and I have not been for a very long time. But I also figured out long ago that not being religious does not mean you cannot be spiritual. In the Neil DeGrasse Tyson interview with TIME magazine he is asked about the The Most Astounding Fact, and this helped me more concretely frame and explain my spiritual views ever since. You do not need to believe in a god to see the beauty and feel kinship with the Universe at large. In so many ways we are just a brief jumble of particles that have coalesced in a way for the Universe to view and experience itself. Our atoms will return on their journey before too long, and we should treasure the time given to us to experience this cosmic adventure.

When considering the big picture, we are not in control. We are along for the ride.

Not Good, Nor Bad – The Daily Stoic – Part 8 of 366

There is no evil in things changing, just as there is no good in persisting in a new state.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.42

Events are neither good or bad. They just are. In fact, they are objectively pure. The universe does not actually have an agenda since it is primarily a physics simulation.

The book notes that the Stoics would remind everyone of this fact. The status quo is not inherently good and change is not inherently bad, and the reverse is also true. The goal, then, is to make the most out of every situation.

Accept what is and adjust your attitude accordingly.

The Cycle

At the end of 2018 I wrote a post called What Do You Want? where I detailed achieving a goal I focused almost solely on for five years, and how that left me feeling… well, just feeling. Lots of feels. And ultimately I wasn’t sure what to do next other than keep going.

Since then it seems life was happy to keep me preoccupied with other things. New projects and challenges at work, a country in turmoil, a long distance relationship, adopting a cute senior pup, a global pandemic, and the loss of my father. And so I went, goal-less, for the past few years; just riding with the currents of life and unsure where exactly I wanted to go.

Honestly, while this was a departure from how I normally operate, it was kind of freeing to not have the yearly summit where I harshly analyze my progress and work diligently on course corrections. If ever there was a time to give myself grace, it would seem 2019 and 2020 were it. Now emerging from both the chaos and unstructured years, I do find myself slowly returning to things I once held dear.

I have always been an active learner, but it has grown more passive over time. I have generally felt over the years that work has left little bandwidth to want to program and experiment outside of it, yet I am seemingly happy to watch any number of Youtube videos on business, programming, and the like. Putting in more effort than that seemed a challenging ask even though all of the years I spent programming before work were chock full of experiments.

The same is true for gaming. It used to be that if I was not at work or school then I would normally be playing games. And yet, for some reason, even that had become a challenging ask. Challenging to the point where even the thought of playing some games gave me anxiety. I turned myself invisible on Steam and on the Blizzard client, and my game libraries collected dust.

Looking back I think this is enitrely due to life events and not changing interests on my part. It turns out the middle years are messy even without a wife and kids. Careers, buying houses, aging parents, and paying more attention to the country and local community start to take up time and mind share in a way they don’t when you are young.

Some of these stressful situations finally resolving seem to have introduced a light at the end of the current tunnel. Now I have a bunch of things I want to program for fun, including some products with financial potential. I have books to read, research to do, blogs to write, places to go with my pup, and even games to play.

I am finally ready for the cycle to start again.

Following The Doctor’s Orders – The Daily Stoic – Part 7 of 366

Just as we commonly hear people say the doctor prescribed someone particular riding exercises, or ice baths, or walking without shoes, we should in the same way say that nature prescribed someone to be diseased, or disabled, or to suffer any kind of impairment. In the case of the doctor, prescribed means something ordered to help aid someone’s healing. But in the case of nature, it means that what happens to each of us is ordered to help aid our destiny.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.8

Doctor’s orders. Somehow this simple phrase does carry enough weight to get people to accept unpleasant things. There is the promise that in following through with the unpleasant course of action we will find ourselves in a better place. And yet we often don’t apply this same thinking to fate or destiny.

Again, as in part 5, this one is harder for me to swallow. It implies that there is a destiny for each and every soul, and while I agree that each creature in this universe will follow a path to an eventual conclusion, that conclusion may not be one we readily desire and accept.

Many people are dealt an unfair and uncaring hand by the universe. Should you accept and welcome a destiny where you are permanently disabled and nearly die in a car crash in your 40s? That is what happened to my father. Although he survived, he lived another 20 years of declining health and ability, and he gradually watched as the world he was leaving to his kids seemingly became worse at every turn.

Perhaps the stoics would say that his destiny was in fact to have a family and be lucky enough to watch his kids grow up — a gift this universe did not grant my mother — and that this is enough. Framed in this light I can accept what Marcus says. I generally think being a good parent is by far the most important thing most humans will do with their lives.

It took me what feels like a long time, but I have come to appreciate my life experiences even though my younger years were extremely challenging and frequently consisted of loss and hardship. These experiences have indeed helped me become who I am today, and I know I would not be where I am without them. They have made me more grateful for what I have, and they have motivated me to stay on my purpose in a way that seems very uncommon amongst my peers.

I am still amazed at how insights into life from 1800 years ago are still incredibly poignant today.

Binding Our Wishes To What Will Be – The Daily Stoic – Part 6 of 366

But I haven’t at any time been hindered in my will, nor forced against it. And how is this possible? I have bound up my choice to act with the will of God. God wills that I be sick, such is my will. He wills that I should choose something, so do I. He wills that I reach for something, or that something be given to me — I wish for the same. What God doesn’t will, I do not wish for.
Epictetus, Discourses, 4.1.89

In the description the book describes a letter Eisenhower sent to his wife on the eve of the invasion of Normandy. In it he writes, “Everything we could think of has been done, the troops are fit, everybody is doing his best. The answer is in the lap of the gods.”

This is a powerful statement. No matter how much time you have spent thinking and preparing, you eventually have to pull the trigger to see what happens and bear the consequences. The code you write doesn’t matter if it never makes it into the hands of users. The rocket ship you built does no good rusting away on the launchpad.

The better you get at doing your best and then decisively acting the more you will accomplish even if there are some stumbles and falls along the way. It is better to be moving forward and course correct than stand completely still agonizing over the choice in front of you.

You must prepare, but you must also act. The outcomes will be what they are, whether we like it or not.

Accepting What Is – The Daily Stoic – Part 5 of 366

Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will — then your life will flow well.
Epictetus, Enchiridion, 8

It is easy to praise providence for anything that may happen if you have two qualities: a complete view of what has actually happened in each instance and a sense of gratitude. Without gratitude what is the point of seeing, and without seeing what is the object of gratitude?
Epictetus, Discourses, 1.6.1-2

The book mentions that in Stoicism this is called the “art of acquiescence” — to accept rather than fight every little thing. Indeed, when considering an event we wished had not occurred it is only possible to change our opinion and perception of the event since what has occurred is already in in the past.

After a very long break from writing this seems a to be a poignant topic to return with. Few would argue that 2019 and 2020 were not years utter chaos and disappointment in so many ways. Political turmoil, frequent natural disasters, a war on science, and a global pandemic all seek to occupy the mind and destroy all sense of stability, control, and happiness.

And yet, as consuming as these things are, for most people these things are still largely on the periphery of life. The worry over these things has far more damaging effects than many of these things for most people. Although it is not easy in times of turmoil, there is a great deal of virtue and value to be had in accepting the things you cannot change.

Integrate your learnings from these events into the decisions you make going forward, and then move on. Do not linger; dwelling on the past does not change it. There is more life ahead of you to live.

Interestingly the book also discusses the mental hack of wishing for what has occurred. Wishing for fate to play its hand never results in disappointment, and may very well be a source of joy by avoiding frequent anguish over any and every negative thing that occurs.

I personally find this a bit of a stretch. Wishing fate to play its hand and accepting it are two different things. It is not an inherently bad thing to experience disappointment or regret over something that has happened. In fact, I would consider this a primary source of empathy and solidarity that is important in society. Regretting that someone has cancer and expressing your sadness and disappointment seems a more human response than telling them that it was fated to be. But perhaps the point here was more in dealing with acceptance of one’s own experiences specifically. If you get cancer then regret and frustration would be natural feelings, but they do not change what has or is about to happen. In such a scenario I can see the virtue in acquiescence to the situation and focusing all effort on the future.