How to Think Like a Roman Emperor
If you have anger issues, this one is a great tool (h/t mindyourbusiness)
This week’s book:
Discourses and Selected Writings
Disclaimer: I’m not your Supervisor. These are my opinions after reading through these books a few times.
Epictetus was born a slave around 50 ad. His owner was Epaphroditus, a rich freedman who was once a slave of Nero. Though he was a slave Epictetus was sent to study philosophy under Musonius Rufus.
Epictetus was lame and there are some stories it was caused by his master and others that it was caused by disease.
He was a freedman when all philosophers were banished from Rome in 89 by the Emperor Domitian. He then started his school in Greece, and had many students. He did not leave any writings from his lessons, but one of his students, Flavius Arrian, took notes and wrote the Discourses.
Epictetus did not marry, had no children, and lived to be around 80-85. In retirement, he adopted a child that would have been abandoned and raised him with a woman.
He died sometime around AD 135.
He is my favorite Stoic teacher. I love his bare bones and very straight forward approach.
Following is a paragraph-by-paragraph discussion of one of his lessons. Epictetus’s text appears in bold, my replies are in normal text.
That it is possible to derive advantage from everything external
In the case of our intellectual impressions practically all men have agreed that the good and the evil are in ourselves, and not in externals. Nobody calls the statement that it is day, good, or that it is night, bad, and the greatest of evils, the statement that three is four. But what? They call knowledge good, and error evil; so that even in regard to what is false there arises a good, that is, the knowledge that the false is false. So it ought to be, then, also with our life. Is health a good, and illness an evil? No, man. What then? To be well for a good end is good, to be well for an evil end is evil.—So that it is possible to derive advantage even from illness, you mean?—Why, I call God to witness, isn’t it possible to derive advantage from death? Why, isn’t it possible from lameness?[1]
I need to find an advantage to my externals. While rationally I know there is no evil in the outside world or in my health, if I am not careful, it is easy to think the world is conspiring against me. Is there a positive to having my ankle lock up? My husky certainly doesn’t think so. He tries to get me to take him for a walk, but that is still not really an option. Instead I have to play fetch with him and wrestle with him. I am using this to work on the instant anger I get when he gets hyper and jumps on the back of my chair or does his impression of a smoke detector to get my attention.
5Do you think that Menoeceus[2] derived but little good when he died?—May the one who says anything like that derive the same sort of good that he did!—Ho, there, man, did he not maintain the patriot that he was, the high-minded man, the man of fidelity, the man of honor? And had he lived on, would he not have lost all these? Would he not have won the very opposite? Would he not have acquired the character of the coward, the ignoble man, the disloyal, the lover of his own life? Come now, do you think that Menoeceus derived but little good by his death? Oh, no! But the father of Admetus derived great good from living so ignobly and wretchedly, did he? Why, didn’t he die later? Make an end, I adjure you by the gods, of admiring material things, make an end of turning yourselves into slaves, in the first place, of things, and then, in the second place, on their account, slaves also of the men who are able to secure or to take away these things.Is it possible, then, to derive advantage from these things?—Yes, from everything.—Even from the man who reviles me?—And what good does his wrestling-companion do the athlete? The very greatest. So also my reviler becomes one who prepares me for my contest; he exercises my patience, my dispassionateness, my gentleness.
The length of life is not as important as the quality. If I am truly lucky, I will get both, but only one of these is under my control. I think that for the most part my life has been lived well, but I am definitely not perfect. As my mother has died and I see my wife struggling with her mother having Parkinson’s disease, I see old age approaching us. While I have come to terms with the fact that running is probably an activity I will never enjoy again, I am hoping that walking my dog daily is not.
10You say: No. But the man who lays hold of my neck and gets my loins and my shoulders into proper shape helps me, and the rubber does well when he says, “Lift the pestle with both hands,”[3] and the heavier it is, the more good I get out of doing so; whereas, if a man trains me to be dispassionate, does he do me no good? Your attitude means that you do not know how to derive advantage from men. Is your neighbor bad? Yes, for himself; but for me he is good; he exercises my good disposition, my fair-mindedness. Is your father bad? Yes, for himself; but for me he is good. This is the magic wand of Hermes. “Touch what you will,” the saying goes,[† 1] “and it will turn into gold.” Nay, but bring whatever you will and I will turn it into a good. Bring disease, bring death, bring poverty, reviling, peril of life in court; all these things will become helpful at a touch from the magic wand of Hermes. “What will you make of death?” Why, what else but make it your glory, or an opportunity for you to show in deed thereby what sort of person a man is who follows the will of nature. “What will you make of disease?” I will show its character, I will shine in it, I will be firm, I will be serene, I will not fawn upon my physician, I will not pray for death.
Using my present physical weakness to improve my mental strength is a challenge. It is difficult because it seems as though every time my ankle feels like it has improved, I will get a setback with no discernible cause. That and spending so much time by myself makes it easy to feel defeated and not find joy in playing with my dogs and feel it to be a chore instead. But for the most part I do manage to control my reactions. Even if sometimes I do get a flash of anger, I am usually successful at tamping it down. Notice I said “usually”, not always.
15What else do you still seek? Everything that you give I will turn into something blessed, productive of happiness, august, enviable. Not so you; but, “Watch out that you don’t get ill; it’s bad.” Just as if someone said, “Watch out that you never get the impression that three are four; it’s bad.” Man, how do you mean “bad”? If I get the right idea of it, how is it going to hurt me any more? Will it not rather even do me good? If, then, I get the right idea about poverty, or disease, or not holding office, am I not satisfied? Will they not be helpful to me? How, then, would you have me seek any longer amongst externals for things evil and things good? But what? These things go thus far,[4] but nobody takes them home with him; nay, as soon as we leave here, there is war on with our slave attendant, our neighbors, those that mock, and those that laugh at us. Blessed be Lesbius,[5] because he convicts me every day of knowing nothing!
I am doing better at identifying the things likely to push me into either anger or melancholy. When I read Meditations it helps me to see that the things I struggle with are the same things humans have struggled with since the dawn of time.
Your footnotes are external to the article 🙁
They’re not mine, they are from the original lesson I copied here.
“What else do you still seek? Everything that you give I will turn into something blessed, productive of happiness, august, enviable. Not so you; but, “Watch out that you don’t get ill; it’s bad.”
I’m trying to be more positive and count my blessings instead of being fixated on things that angers me. It’s hard but it has changed the way I think about a lot of things in my life and it also makes me less angry.
Thanks for the write up Ron!
That is the difficult part.
Cultivating gratitude in the middle of a shit storm is probably the hardest thing we do. But man does it do good things for your soul.
You’re just messing with us now.
No man is an island.
My dad used to tell me this. I didn’t really understand what he was trying to say. I guess, “Ask for help if you need it”? Trouble was, I didn’t know what questions to ask or, in those days, whom to ask.
I was making a joke about the island of Lesbos, but I think it means we are all connected and not separate from humanity.
I was reading a copy of the Songs of Sappho that had like six different translations collected together. It’s just weird that some translators switched the beloved’s pronouns to masculine.
I saw an interview once with an old English farmer conducted in about 1960. He was asked what he thought of the fall of the British empire.
He answered something to the effect that great men and great movements come and go but life on the farm doesnt change. He said the common people of Britain hardly noticed aside from sensationalize headlines in the newspapers.
For those of us that are black pilled (looking at you Ed since you mentioned it specifically and at those yesterday complaining about suffering from black pill poisoning) keep in mind that the world will keep on spinning and we still have to feed the stock. Oh, and move them to the other pasture.
Keep your heads down and look after your wife and kids.
*goes to toss another log on the fire*
Whenever I get down about the way shit is going I remember that life is going to go on and that the most I can do is raise my two daughters to be the best women they can be and instill them with values that will foster self-accountability, perseverance, and treating everyone how you would like to be treated but also having a solid set of principles.
My black-pill nature is simply to ignore the hope of those that believe it will get better.
I see another source of frustration: We have a natural tendency as humans to want to play whack-a-mole with problems.
Perhaps we should look beyond the fray and get to the root of all of the problems. We have lost sight of the basic premise of our constitution. Our founders knew that concentrations of money and power are the source of all evil. It draws the worst kinds of people the way shit draws flies. We have so much money that not only do we have domestic parasites (our governement) but foreign ones as well (NATO, The UN, Every shithole everywhere). We have positions of too much power so that each time one gets seated everything gets radically upended.
This was the problem with aristocracy and what we have now is a functional aristocracy.
Solution? In my opinion strict constitutional limits on how and how much money the government can take and strict term limits on offices. Reinforce checks and balances.
I have numbers I can pull out of my ass but it would be subject to debate.
“concentrations of money and power are the source of all evil”
They help, but IMO it’s a lack of accountability that is more of a source of evil. Fucking up and ‘oops, sorry!’ don’t cut it for me. That’s why the potential preemptive pardons are so socially erosive. You know that if OMB did the same on his way out the D’s would still pursue their targets to the end of the universe. Set a precedent? Better accept there will be consequences.
I am in too much of a hurry to look the details up but didnt we have a blanket presidential pardon for all things confederate after the civil war? It was an olive branch offered by the victor to preserve the peace and move on from a very dark time and in my opinion appropriate.
I agree, this is different. It is being done by a very partisan president to protect his own criminal cabal but the precedent has already been set. I am not sure how to undo that.
To me, escaping accountability is the first thing people do once they get power. “Too much power” is pretty much the same as “not accountable any more”. And it’s human nature to try to avoid accountability and to pursue power for that purpose.
RC I don’t think it is human nature, as the curse only afflicts some of us, not all of us.
Only the American government is allowed to spy on Americans
The third has been systems that telecommunications companies use in compliance with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which allows law enforcement and intelligence agencies with court orders to track people’s communications. CALEA systems can include classified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which processes some U.S. intelligence court orders. The FBI official declined to say whether any classified material was accessed.
Privacy advocates have long advocated using end-to-end encrypted apps. Signal and WhatsApp automatically implement end-to-end encryption in both calls and messages. Google Messages and iMessage also can encrypt calls and texts end to end.
The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have a complicated relationship with encryption technology, historically advocating against full end-to-end encryption that does not allow law enforcement access to digital material even with warrants. But the FBI has also supported forms of encryption that do allow some law enforcement access in certain circumstances.
The FBI wants you to use secure encryption? Har dee fucking har har.
How else are Pelosi et al supposed to get their insider trading info from?
*sob* Finally got my website redone because WordPress broke it.
Millennial programmers don’t care about end user problems. This Is Known.
Every “update” or “upgrade” makes the app/service LESS controllable by the user. Paypal “updated” its invoicing UI and I am forced into options that do not apply. It’s also HUGE and ugly and clunky.
I prefer Windows to Mac for a REASON and that reason is CONTROL. I want to be able to dig into my computer and make it do things I want it to do.
Mojeaux:
UI/UX is woefully underappreciated in the current development mindsets. The push to force in new and (usually) unfinished features into systems/applications instead of fixing the existing bugs is something that just pisses me off.
/glares at corporate overlord
Can you use this doll to show me where the Agile Methodology touched you?
You remind me of how Windows 11 takes away the two row taskbar ( a feature used by everyone in my group ) and when a third party figured out a way to re-enable it, patched that capacity out in a later update.
I was opposed to the change even beofre I found that out and before it bricked my dad’s computer because it didn’t like his wireless adapter.
I don’t update ANYTHING unless forced or the website changed (a la Paypal).
R.J.:
I’ll just look at this daily call that got added to my calendar for an issue that’s been ongoing for months that we’ve been trying to get assistance with. It finally got escalated up to the executive level, and several of the people who got pulled in said, “Why did you wait so long to bring this to us?”
Mother. Fuckers. We’ve been reaching out to you for months about this exact issue, you just ignored us.
On the bright side, I did get to hear one of them throw themselves under the bus on the call today. (“Where did you get x from?” “This e-mail you sent us a couple weeks back.”)
R.J.
*takes the doll and shoves it headfirst up my ass*
Right there. That’s where Agile touched me.
Isn’t Agile like a fancy synced to-do list for project teams?
Agile is the excuse for never being complete.
Agile is a different excuse for never being complete.
I posted this late last night. Don’t know how many people got a chance to see.
Snow White Trailer Parody – Snow Woke And The Extremely Ugly Evil Queen | AI Generated
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp9cZqloyEM
Haha! That’s great!
Speaking of being stoic. I was one of a large chunk of America that their credit information leaked from Equifax. Roughly SEVEN years ago.
After spending at least 8 hours figuring out what happened and locking down both my credit and my wife’s credit I filed for the settlement. There was no way I was settling for the standard “go to” remedy of “free credit monitoring”. I wanted as much of those asshole’s cash going to the impacted people and as little as possible to the legal vultures and Liz Warren’s federal mafia the CFPB.
Unlike my parents who took their $19 and walked away I actually filed for my actual time spent and made a full claim. My parents got paid around year three and about year four I got about $18. I joked with my dad they were punishing me for actually fighting them. Today I got my remaining funds – $22. So I came out with a total of $40 for easily 10 hours of my time both locking my credit and applying for the settlement. Yeah $4/hour baby. It’s been so long I can’t remember what I was fully eligible to receive. I think it was either $120 or $150. Naturally that let them advertise that as the settlement amount while they actually paid far less.
I am still trying to come up with a schema that allows class action suits to exist but shifts the balance of payments away from the lawyers and to the impacted population.
Make representing class actions pro bono as part of their Community Service for getting a law degree?
That schema already exists. Class action settlements, including attorneys’ fees, have to be approved by the judge.
Since judges routinely rubber stamp obscene misapportionments, this mechanism isn’t functioning for the purpose required.
RC you mean rubber stamped by a fellow Guild member?
Where could he possibly have gotten that idea?
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire tech mogul and owner of The Washington Post, says he views it as a responsibility of the mainstream media to convince President-elect Trump the press is not his enemy.
“I’m going to try and talk him out of that idea,” Bezos said at the New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “I don’t think the press is the enemy.”
Stop it. You’re killing me.
He lives in a very strange bubble.
He’s actually trying. Even if you disagree with his viewpoint I’ll give him credit for trying to have a discussion instead of just calling him a fascist like just about all of MSNBC.
Agreed. I can’t make fun of a man who is trying to.
He’s just trying to make nice with OMB so that the Evil One’s minions don’t sue him into the gutter.
Daniel Penny jury is deadlocked. I thought that’s how it would turn out.
https://x.com/FoxNews/status/1865082036492382215
It’s depressing that they found jurors willing to vote to convict.
Yep. That city is going to hollow out after this. Even if he somehow manages to get free, nobody will ever lift a finger to help another person in NY again.
Of course – had to be some willing to convict based on race and / or fear of the mob outside.
Juries should be allows to convict the lawyers (including the judge) involved in a case.
“We find the DA Guilty of improper prosecution”
Seeing drawing of the jury is enough to guess which jurors vote which way.
https://x.com/robbystarbuck/status/1865093607255920794
Better than railroaded into a guilty verdict.
He’s actually trying. Even if you disagree with his viewpoint I’ll give him credit for trying to have a discussion instead of just calling him a fascist like just about all of MSNBC.
That’s true, and good for him, but it’s got to be hard trying to keep a straight face while saying the legacy establishment press is not Trump’s sworn enemy.
Especially WaPo which actually published an editorial in 2016 declaring its job was to stop Trump.
This. These people are like the cornered rat that begs, pleads and grovels when you have the upper hand but the instant you let your guard down they go on the attack. Fuck Bezos and the media he rode in on.
Ah, yes. The Democracy Derps in Darkness era.
Scott Adams with some stoic advice put to music. It’s stuck in my head now.
https://x.com/akirathedon/status/1865049210200191379
How can you be stoic when they cancelled democracy?
It’s not terribly hard when you don’t give two ruined fucks for democracy in the first place.
Are they alleging that Russians rigged the vote counting? Or they just posted some Tik Tok videos that stupid Romanians believed (like Hillary alleged in 2016)?
Not the vote counting. just the tik toks.
but there was clear campaign financing violations. for what that is worth. the guy disclosed 0 campaign spending. And there were millions, just done voluntarily by supporters which is not legal without disclosure.
It was strange as many tiktok accounts were made in 2016 when you could not make them outside of china. But I assume they could be bought. Anyway it was very well planned. All quiet until 3 weeks before elections when it all exploded. not shabby work to get a guy no one heard of a year back in the second round.
it was certainly not grass roots but made quite well, with intent. by whom or why, one may never truly know.
Meanwhile, the City of New York, aided and abetted by the governess, is doing their best to price private vehicles out of midtown and force people to ride their totally safe and effective subway system.
It’s a double fuck you. We will make traveling in your car expensive and difficult, then you’ll have no choice but to take public transportation but then we’ll make little to no effort to make public transit clean, dependable, and most importantly, safe.
FEUERSCHWANZ – Dragostea Din Tei (Live at Waken 2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s7EqsfyP8k
not that bad pronunciation
Breathtaking Solitude Property on Snake River with Spectacular Teton Views
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRdD83hIiPY
Annual Tax Amount: 104538
Be stoic over the fact that Hitler likely escaped Germany to Argentina and was protected until he died peacefully of old age.
What is this? 2000’s internet conspiracy hour?
It doesn’t seem all that conspiracytheoryish. I always thought the Hitler suicide story was just a little too just so, all lose ends tied up and unlikely.
It makes sense but…so what? Everyone involved is dead now. Napoleon was secretly gay. Churchill moonlighted as a bank robber. Alexander the Great was a space alien. Who cares?
Thanks Ron
Always good to have a reminder. As friends disappear one can not help but wonder when the Aces are going to run out. While I’m not looking forward to winter I’m looking past that and thinking spring. I’ll be ordering bees next month. I started apple seeds inside about 2 weeks ago, I checked today and it looks like none are going to sprout. Fortunately I can try some other method with fresher seeds, maybe they will grow.
I was thinking of not trying to burn wood this winter, switch on the gas furnace. Then I decided to start with wood and see what happens. Now I’m thinking it is not any more difficult than last year when I only used wood.
I’m grateful that I have the Glibs, I can see with my glasses, don’t need hearing aids though I have them and I passed the driver’s eye exam and am good for 4 more years.
Difficult to get angry for very long now, easier to laugh at myself.
Off work for a month. Well two weeks in OKC for “training” on a system I’ve worked for 14 years. Then off for the holidays.
Mrs OBE is going to join me in OKC so should be fun. Any glibs around in area we’d be welcome to hang out
True? Who knows but given all the fuckery that those poor folks are dealing with…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8R9_K5azJmU