Stymied by a lack of inhibitory control

pola negri

Before becoming a Stoic, I spent much time and effort trying to make other people think I was a good person; since becoming a Stoic, I have focused by energy on trying to be a good person. I am striving, in other words, to acquire traits that ancient philosophers would have regarded as virtuous -- traits such as loyalty, courageousness, kindness, and most important, self-control, the trait that makes the other traits possible

Twenty-First Century Stoic

What I'm doing now

almost taiwan

Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.

Seneca, Letters from a Stoic p37

My girlfriend moved into this house a few weeks ago, with the gaps between her going back to her place becoming longer and longer and then ending. We work together, break for meals and eat good food, drink coffee and wine. So far it's an easy way to live, with no fight and no resistance.

One odd thing about the last few months is how contentment has stopped me from needing or even wanting to update this blog.

When I was a lot younger and writing [very badly] all the time it was because I had none of the good things in my life that I have now, and even though I enjoyed writing a lot, it was like drink or drugs, a poor substitute for the thing itself, a coping mechanism rather than a solution.

Great things can come out of sickness, but never mine, and the only way out after butting my head against the wall for so long was to change my life. I quit my job and keep whatever hours I want as long as the work I accept gets done. I work in shorts or a sarong, take breaks and bike rides whenever needed, never face a boss and never need to work when not in the mood. It's as close to idyllic as I could expect with minimal effort or talent.

My ambitions when I was younger mostly concerned lifestyle rather than achievement, but for a long time I focused on the latter and failed. When I gave in and went straight for the thing itself rather than tokens I found that it was easy to achieve and [so far] to maintain. Life is essentially a joke and a game at the moment, although I'm sure it'll get serious again soon enough.

If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people's opinions, you will never be rich.

Seneca quoting Epicurus, Letters from a Stoic p65

Time off

William Steig/ Wilhem Reich

To live under constraint is a misfortune, but there is no constraint to live under constraint.

Seneca, quoting Epicurus, Letters from a Stoic p59

Moving average

The standard freelance work is famine or feast, and while it'd be nice to have things smoother that'd also take away the random and non 9-to-5 nature of the work, and it's in the peaks and troughs that you get the rushes of doing the right thing with regard to getting lots of work / $ and then having enough loose time to bicycle around town at odd hours and do other things.

Below is one way to smooth things out.

Freelancing income, arbitrary units, June 2008 to February 2009

I plotted my freelancing income for the last nine months as regular numbers and as a cumulative average. What's unsurprising is that wild fluctuations are far more likely to come at the start of the process, and the line gets progressively smoother, with even large changes having little effect.

Now halfway through March, which so far has been less busier than February, although I'm due 200 or so pages of a philosophy thesis [book?] from the UK this Friday, which is supposed to be finished by Monday. No doubt it'll be on Derrida and make no sense, whether well written or not. Accepting jobs like this makes me wish I hadn't eaten all my modafinil long ago, but I charge by the hour and it'll take up the slack of the last few days of doing nothing paid.

Still, halfway through March and the income is not where I'd like it to be, and because I'm relatively new to this game and waiting on general economic collapse there are small episodes of panic...but then plotting it out as a moving average makes it that much easier to relax. [That and the ton of work that came in today after this was written, not posted]

Looking at the figure and thinking back to the stoicism of the last post and whether this can be applied more widely. Wild fluctuations of feeling in youth, and then gradually less buffeted by life's ups and downs. One thing against this is that humans are not rational, and specifically not rational accountants of their own well-being. But then the theory of the hedonic treadmill would support the idea of something like a moving average for happiness (I think....my brain fails when it comes to real stretching).

Abstract from a related paper [pdf] with too many numbers for me to really enjoy

There is consent among psychologists and some economists that satisfaction from some events, like income and marriage, is adaptive. We propose a subtle but vital difference: happiness may itself be adaptive. First we present a model to explain the emergence of adaptive stimuli. We test our hypotheses running dynamic happiness regressions based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, the British Household Panel Survey and the Swiss Household Panel. Surprisingly, the autoregressive component is positive and significant in most econometric models considered. We propose that the hedonic treadmill may be mixed with what we call the "scale treadmill".

Deconstructing the Hedonic Treadmill Perez, Ricardo and Bottan (2008)

The last word with fate

This was sitting with the draft posts and can continue today's theme of suicide.

Thierry de la Villehuchet -- an acquaintance of mine -- just killed himself in the after effects of the Madoff case. He had dragged his clients into investing with Madoff . "Killing himself over money?" I kept hearing. No, it is not about the money -- it was other people's money. It is about dignity. I could not help comparing it to Madoff, pictured walking around Manhattan with a faint smirk --totally insensitive to the harm he caused

This is an aristocratic act coming from an aristocratic character: you take your own life when you believe that you failed somewhere -- and the solution is to inflict the ultimate penalty on yourself. It is not the money; but the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt that are hard to bear. Someone callous, indifferent to the harm done to others would have lived comfortably ("it is all about money"). A life of shame is not worth living. Christianity never allowed suicide; the stoics did --it allows a man to get the last word with fate.

Entry 106 [On killing oneself] in Nassim Taleb's notebook

Thinking way too much about Seneca on occasions, and fairly simplistic stuff like the deviant thrills of being Nero's tutor and how he made his $ / passed his days compared to how I make mine and pass my own. In addition, he's on the shelf with other long, long dead people, and I'm aware the worlds that their works were intended to acts as guides within were filled with problems that are alien to me in both their concrete horror and wild opportunities. There are no bath house orgies or man vs. hippo fights in my neighborhood, no living gods or slaves.

When you read the classics these are people writing in refined dictatorships ruled by superstition, ritual, intrigue and luck, with arbitrary arrest, exile and death always possibilities, along with the more mundane dental mishaps and trivial accidents / illnesses that get out of hand and prove fatal. In large parts of the world these conditions still prevail, but here I'm safe from nearly everything but traffic and cancer, although on this point I surely lack imagination.

Take all the knowledge now required to be thought of as an educated, informed individual and these writers had almost none of it, and suffered hardly, if at all, for the lack. I don't know what this means for me.

Over and gone

four stroke

Everything depends on opinion; ambition, luxury, greed, hark back to opinion. It is according to opinion that we suffer. A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is. I hold that we should do away with complaint about past sufferings and with all language like this: “None has ever been worse off than I. What sufferings, what evils have I endured! No one has thought that I shall recover. How often have my family bewailed me, and the physicians given me over! Men who are placed on the rack are not torn asunder with such agony!” However, even if all this is true, it is over and gone. What benefit is there in reviewing past sufferings, and in being unhappy, just because once you were unhappy? Besides, every one adds much to his own ills, and tells lies to himself. And that which was bitter to bear is pleasant to have borne; it is natural to rejoice at the ending of one’s ills.

Seneca, On the healing power of the mind