[trabant00]

The older I get the less wisdom I find in any philosophy that means to teach how we should live and particularly how to avoid pain and unhappiness.

The short of it is: nothing is good or bad, but things can be too much or too little. Where the line is depends or circumstances and is different every time. And the correct answer is mostly only available in hindsight if it is at all.

Pain is useful. We know physical pain is because there are people who don't feel any and they injure themselves all the time. I find no reason or evidence emotional pain is any different.

I saw perpetually and unconditionally happy people. In a mental asylum. Enough said.

Trying to give up desire? Then what would motivate you do do anything at all? "money, health, sex, or reputation" are good things. You might exaggerate in these desires but that's a "too much of anything" problem, not a desire problem.

Taking examples from the article: getting angry with a service provider can convince him not to try to wrong you in the future and save you unhappiness this way. Getting angry with people on the street giving you dirty looks doesn't work because they are many and different every time. But still, that anger can convince you that you should move. And maybe you should.

[ejolto]

> The short of it is: nothing is good or bad, but things can be too much or too little. Where the line is depends or circumstances and is different every time. And the correct answer is mostly only available in hindsight if it is at all.

That sounds like a very stoic point of view, reminds me of Marcus Aurelius's meditations. It's worth a read.

[trabant00]

Thankfully somebody did the research for me, I just had the vague knowledge that his actions where not exactly matching his writing.

https://marcusaureliusmeditations.weebly.com/index.html

The case can be made that he mostly wrote what he thought of as ideal and how we would like to see himself, but often failed to apply it in practice because as I propose life is more complex than any particular philosophy.

[reducesuffering]

> he mostly wrote what he thought of as ideal and how we would like to see himself, but often failed to apply it in practice

Yes, most Stoic thought is about attempting to do your best to attain the ideals, not that you'll suddenly perfectly attain them.

Sort of like how meditation has the common misconception that you're doing it wrong if your thoughts wander. No, the point is acknowledge the wandering, bring your thoughts back to your breath, and keep trying.

Also, reading through that undergrad student's critique, I disagree with many of them characterizing his words as contradictions. I don't think many strong arguments were made that he was being very contradicting. One of them implies he was being contradictory by making humanitarian laws benefiting children. Because he had lost many children, and wrote that only "right and reason" should guide you, not the loss of a child. Like it couldn't be that the humanitarian laws were due to "right and reason" as opposed to emotion from losing his kids.

[acoard]

He was a complicated man. On the one hand, he liked to sleep on the floor without finery, and had to be told to stop because he's the Emperor. On the other hand, he basically waged a war of genocide against the German tribes. He clearly took personal development really seriously, but, like... genocide.

I've read him extensively and multiple translations. Your original post is strongly stoic, although the "tune out to it all and just live a good life" is a bit more Epicurean[0].

Stoicism is not about being a neutral perfectly calm emotionless robot. Stoicism is recognizing that you ultimately can't control the world, you can just control your (re)actions. The entire ethical system stems from that realization. Death or dying isn't "bad", it's just "not preferred", because the only good and bad things centre around things you can control. Everything else is just life. Roll with it.

(Personally, I'm with you though. I've learnt to eschew the labels and just lead a common sense life; but I do pick and choose from the valuable ethical systems over time.)

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

[jedimastert]

> That sounds like a very stoic point of view

I agree, it really does sound like an argument for stoicism.

[michaelgrafl]

Part of the problem might be that we didn't evolve to live in groups of people as big as in big cities, so getting angry with strangers in the streets might be the result of not being adapted to that environment.

Now that I think of it, I guess most neuroses nowadays stems from environmental changes we weren't able to adapt to quickly enough (global communication, oversaturation from violent and sexual imagery, etc.) and not from desires that are inherently bad.

[trabant00]

I think it's the density rather than the absolute size of population in cities.

[tartoran]

Big cities tend to have high density. Sure, if density lowered so would the stress levels but cities make use of higher density to make certain things such as public transportation as well as other types of businesses viable which in turn makes the proposition of living in cities more attractive.

[manmal]

Your philosophy sounds to me like the Golden Mean from Aristoteles: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy)

> The golden mean or golden middle way is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency.

(I do realize the irony of answering such to someone who just declared they don’t find philosophies useful)

[Thorentis]

I've invariably found that most people who say they don't find philosophy useful, subscribe to a philosophy somebody already described at some point in history. Most people at some point in their lives think they're terribly unique, and then realise they are quite the opposite.

[jfengel]

It's a lot like code. Is it faster for you to invent it yourself, or re-use somebody else's.

It's not surprising that somebody else thought of that philosophy before. The question is, did they think of it any better? Do they have anything useful to add over what you came up with?

[watwut]

He is not saying he is unique. He is saying that he don't find value in studying philosophy or what someone long ago says about how he should live.

That is not nearly the same as thinking you are terribly unique.

[mkane848]

I don't think that's what OP is doing at all, you're just setting up a dunk for yourself. Congrats on saying "Simpsons did it".

[trabant00]

Moderation, avoiding extremes, yin and yang etc are core ideas in a lot of philosophies. I am well aware of that.

While I can not be completely exhaustive in HN comment, I did point out that my issue is with having a philosophy that predetermines in a generalized way where that golden middle way is. And the difference between seeing it in hindsight and trying to predict it.

I do not find philosophies useless, just not recipes for living your life like the author of the article tries.

[stared]

My take on stoicism is not that you need to give up desires. You can have those, follow them. However, it works as long as you don't fight with factors you have no control over.

(Though, from the list "reputation" is the trickiest one. Reputation is precisely what OTHERS think about you; you have a limited control of that.)

[katzgrau]

> The short of it is: nothing is good or bad

Kicks off personal viewpoint with key element of Stoic thinking :)

[manmal]

It’s the key element of almost every philosophical school though?

[somedude895]

Epicureanism, which is somewhat of the opposite of Stoicism, sees pain and unfulfilled desires as evils that need to be fought constantly. The removal of pain and fulfillment of desires, accordingly, is the "good."

Also, I'm pretty sure many Eastern philosophies have concepts of good and bad.

[beardbound]

The four noble truths kind of touch on this (which if memory serves are all life is suffering, suffering comes from desire, and the cessation of desire causes the end of suffering, and the fourth one... Cessation of desire leads to nirvanna maybe?), as well as the the three poisons, sometimes called sins (greed, anger, and delusion which when overcome become wisdom, generosity, and compassion).

[mycologos]

> Pain is useful.

There's a line I like from (of all people) Jerry Seinfeld, that's something like "pain is the feeling of truth rushing in". That's not always true, some people experience pain disconnected from any meaning, but a lot of times it is.

[acituan]

> The older I get the less wisdom I find in any philosophy that means to teach how we should live and particularly how to avoid pain and unhappiness.

There are two limitations with this proposition. First; most of the useful "philosophies", by which you mean schools of philosophies, and by that we actually mean "wisdom traditions", have already been incorporated into many aspects of the mainstream culture that they are as invisible to us as the pair of glasses we wear. Participated in any Abrahamic religion? You've also made use of Stoicism. Done any CBT therapy? You have practiced being a stoic. Read Hamlet's "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so", you've heard Epictetus. Quoted the serenity prayer? Quoted one of the central Stoic maxims.

The second issue is parts of any doctrine that gives a didactic, algorithmic way of solving life's problems, are not the bits related to wisdom. Think it like the static data of any tradition, vs the executable bits, in which an on-the-fly heuristic needs to be run to actually approximate the optimal. Wisdom traditions only aim to sharpen the heuristic strategies, not to hand feed ready made solutions, because the problem space is inexhaustibly complex and the environment constantly changes.

The "should" statements you encounter in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, or Epictetus's Enchiridion etc, are not the ready made answers you should take to heart. They are the example outputs that give you the perspective to train your own heuristic. It increases your chances to recognize the life inputs that Stoic optimizations can be applied to.

The core formulation of Stoicism is actually very simple, avoid agency ascription errors; don't take on anything you don't have control over, don't relinquish anything agency you do actually have. Constantly focus on what you can actually do, not the shoulds, oughts, would haves.

> Pain is useful.

Disease states exist, in which one is stuck in pain that is not useful. Chronic pain, phantom pain, chronic depression etc. They are pain states that have lost their utility.

> I saw perpetually and unconditionally happy people. In a mental asylum.

Likewise, this is a disease state too. Unconditionally happy people cannot survive "in the wild"; it is not adaptive or relevant to be happy in face of all life inputs. That is why mania is equally serious condition as depression, even though one feels more egosyntonic.

> The short of it is: nothing is good or bad, but things can be too much or too little. Where the line is depends or circumstances and is different every time. And the correct answer is mostly only available in hindsight if it is at all

Good or bad already implies too much or too little. E.g the original meaning of "sin" is missing the mark. It is the residual error we have anytime we apply our heuristics.

If the local optimal point was only available in hindsight though, we couldn't have survived as a species thus far (not saying we are missing some better optimum and we will definitely survive). But turns out our strategies have been good enough (and getting better) to make us pretty OK general problem solvers. If our heuristics was so low precision, we couldn't even talk and understand one another, which requires mentalizing the state of mind of the recipient.

[streamofdigits]

I've come to appreciate the enduring importance of "wisdom traditions" after (at some random time) seeking the etymology of Ubuntu (the operating system). The concept of humans acquiring their humanity through others resonated deeply despite coming from an alien to me culture.

[trabant00]

> If the local optimal point was only available in hindsight though, we couldn't have survived as a species thus far

We didn't survive as a species thanks to life guiding philosophy or in general thanks to a conscious thinking process in which we tried to predict the future. When even our greatest people tried to do that it more often resulted in unpredicted results than not.

I can make a case for believing we can though. It is a most powerful motivator for action and association. So maybe the lesson is don't have a philosophy for yourself but have one for your would be followers?

[pattrn]

> We didn't survive as a species thanks to life guiding philosophy or in general thanks to a conscious thinking process in which we tried to predict the future.

Not sure I understand you correctly here. Choosing to build shelters from the inevitable elements, storing food for the winter months, building traps to capture animals that may walk by at some point, etc... seem like crucial, conscious, predictive behaviors that increased odds of survival. Are you talking about this type of predictive decision making, or something else?

[trabant00]

The second part of what I said is simply bad. Should have stopped at philosophy.

[pattrn]

No worries! I agree in part with your original statement, which is why I was asking for more detail. As a society I think we have too much confidence in our predictions about macro events, especially ones involving human behavior. Even the simple examples I gave likely involved many unsuccessful predictions before landing on the ones that were reproducible, so in a way we were likely poor at predicting even those events (20/20 hindsight). It's certainly an interesting topic.

In a way, we do fail pretty often at predicting, but if the gold standard is every other organism's creative predictive ability (as opposed to common instinctual behavior), we're actually quite good :).

[acituan]

> We didn't survive as a species thanks to life guiding philosophy or in general thanks to a conscious thinking process in which we tried to predict the future

You couldn't be more wrong. Consciousness, inferential thinking, symbolic processing, they are all selected because they give a tremendous adaptive advantage. To claim otherwise would be at best to claim they are mere spandrels.

> I can make a case for believing we can though. It is a most powerful motivator for action and association.

Believing we have agency where we don't is actually the most powerful reason for burnout and depression. Stoicism gives a corrective suggestion; engage in a questioning process in order not to overestimate your agency, but also not to underestimate it; don't forgo the predictive power you do have. It calls you to reframe your life's problems in a way where you salience the information about the degree of agency you might or might not have. Notice how there is no ready made answers for you to consume.

> So maybe the lesson is don't have a philosophy for yourself but have one for your would be followers?

I think you're conflating philosophy with indoctrination or dogma. Philosophy literally means love of wisdom. Wisdom is not a collection of propositions or assertions, it is roughly a hyper-parameter tuning process of our heuristics. One does not become wise, because it is not a terminal position. One aspires to cultivate wisdom, i.e. to work on their hyper-parameters. Philosophy is the dedication to this process.

[dandanua]

Avoiding pain is a natural stimulus (it's why pain exists in the first place). Ignoring it is wrong, in general.

I believe Stoicism teaches not to ignore pain, but to change our emotional response. To be more thoughtful and rational about causes of pain. And yes, ignoring a pain is the best strategy if there are absolutely no ways to avoid it (e.g. you can't change a past that causes unhappiness).

[Phiwise_]

>Trying to give up desire? Then what would motivate you do do anything at all?

This is a very poor reading of the Stoic philosophy, and a direct contradiction Epictetus' instructions (Long quote ahead, but it's essentially a direct response to this sort of criticism, so I think getting it all out at once is worthwhile):

>To the rational animal only is the irrational intolerable; but that which is rational is tolerable. Blows are not naturally intolerable. "How is that?" See how the Lacedaemonians endure whipping when they have learned that whipping is consistent with reason. "To hang yourself is not intolerable." When, then, you have the opinion that it is rational, you go and hang yourself. In short, if we observe, we shall find that the animal man is pained by nothing so much as by that which is irrational; and, on the contrary, attracted to nothing so much as to that which is rational.

>But the rational and the irrational appear such in a different way to different persons, just as the good and the bad, the profitable and the unprofitable. For this reason, particularly, we need discipline, in order to learn how to adapt the preconception of the rational and the irrational to the several things conformably to nature. But in order to determine the rational and the irrational, we use not only the of external things, but we consider also what is appropriate to each person. For to one man it is consistent with reason to hold a chamber pot for another, and to look to this only, that if he does not hold it, he will receive stripes, and he will not receive his food: but if he shall hold the pot, he will not suffer anything hard or disagreeable. But to another man not only does the holding of a chamber pot appear intolerable for himself, but intolerable also for him to allow another to do this office for him. If, then, you ask me whether you should hold the chamber pot or not, I shall say to you that the receiving of food is worth more than the not receiving of it, and the being scourged is a greater indignity than not being scourged; so that if you measure your interests by these things, go and hold the chamber pot. "But this," you say, "would not be worthy of me." Well, then, it is you who must introduce this consideration into the inquiry, not I; for it is you who know yourself, how much you are worth to yourself, and at what price you sell yourself; for men sell themselves at various prices.

>For this reason, when Florus was deliberating whether he should go down to Nero's spectacles and also perform in them himself, Agrippinus said to him, "Go down": and when Florus asked Agrippinus, "Why do not you go down?" Agrippinus replied, "Because I do not even deliberate about the matter." For he who has once brought himself to deliberate about such matters, and to calculate the value of external things, comes very near to those who have forgotten their own character. For why do you ask me the question, whether death is preferable or life? I say "life." "Pain or pleasure?" I say "pleasure." But if I do not take a part in the tragic acting, I shall have my head struck off. Go then and take a part, but I will not. "Why?" Because you consider yourself to be only one thread of those which are in the tunic. Well then it was fitting for you to take care how you should be like the rest of men, just as the thread has no design to be anything superior to the other threads. But I wish to be purple, that small part which is bright, and makes all the rest appear graceful and beautiful. Why then do you tell me to make myself like the many? and if I do, how shall I still be purple?

The Stoics do not say to desire nothing, only to desire those things which you can actually obtain, for as long as you can actually obtain them. Since Virtue is dependent only on one's own reasoning, and is therefore always available to everyone (Modern psychology has added some exceptions to this rule, but only of an exceptionally rare nature), it is the sole "Good" worth always pursuing, and other things which are sometimes within our reach and sometimes not are "Preferred Indifferents", which we choose to desire when we can have them (when we are willing to pay their price) and to not desire when we cannot, because it is in their nature to not be ours forever:

>With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.