Let Your Striving Be For This
Freedom. Not luxury.
On Freedom as the Highest Goal
“And what is freedom, you ask? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance.” — Seneca
Being a victim of circumstance sucks. You have to do what you're told. Or else.
The problem with living like this is you end up enriching the powerful while your life becomes duller by the day as you're half-assing it most times.
There's no soul in what you're doing because you don't yet own your life. You think you do.
Not that you're lazy, but you'll be accused of it.
You simply lack the interest to paint your life as you’d like because you’re yet to awaken to the fact that you can pick up the brushes and move your arms. That you’re the artist in this lucid dream.
If you're anything of a rebel, deep down you feel the pain of stifling your boundless creative energy to take orders from men lesser than you.
You want to run your rig. To create your little universe, like the powers that be. To do whatever you want with your time and resources, life, without a care about how you'll be perceived. To follow your weird niche interests. To create as much wealth as possible. To make as many friends as you'd have time for.
To have power.
“What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
For this to happen you need freedom. Freedom from your demons to go after what you want with impeccable efficiency. And the freedom of resources in the outer world, allowing you to move the chess pieces as you please on the time-space continuum.
Earning liberty takes time and effort; but you don’t have a choice, it’s all you can stake anyway. Might as well do it with a smile.
And when you do get it, freedom doesn’t mean there are no rules. Life doesn't work like that — cause and effect are law. But any rules and values you impose on yourself are because they benefit you. High standards improve the attractiveness of your presentation to the world. Besides, if you can't rule yourself, there will be a leadership void and you'll be at the risk of being tyrannized by someone or something else.
As Friedrich Nietzsche observed,
“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.”
This is why it's unwise to set money, people or material objects as your highest goal, unless they'll allow you to work better or faster, because in mistaking the means for the ends, you'll be at the risk of never getting what you need and never knowing it, like Plato’s allegory of the cave.
But if you understand that you desire those goods for happiness sake, you'll know how to use them for that end, rather than optimizing for possession, which will only frustrate you when life takes away what you hold dear.
Remember,
“The things you own end up owning you.” — Chuck Palahniuk
Strive for freedom. Not fame and luxury.
On Prosochê (Self-Consciousness)
“When you relax your attention for a little while, do not imagine that whenever you choose you will recover it, but bear this in mind, that because of the error you made today, your condition must necessarily be worse as regards everything else. For, to begin with – and this is the worst of all – a habit of not paying attention is developed; and after that a habit of deferring attention; and always you grow accustomed to putting off, from one time to another, serene and appropriate living, the life in accord with nature, and persistence in that life." — Epictetus
Prosochê is what the Stoics called a healthy self-consciousness. This is where you pay unrelenting attention to what's going on inside your mind: the emotions, thoughts, impulses and actions.
Why? So that you can be in a better position to control your mind, for mistakes come from living out of wretched habit.
You get to observe fear, anger, sadness and other murky emotions without getting carried away by or avoiding them.
Say you're about to public speak. You'll get nervous. Think you're about to bomb your presentation and embarrass yourself. But you're neither the sympathetic response nor the reflexive thoughts you get before the event.
"You have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet," Marcus Aurelius would say.
This something is the soul or seat of your consciousness, whatever you want to call it.
And it's in this space between stimulus and response that you get to decide what to do about what you feel and want.
You can decide to see the shakiness as the body priming your focus and metabolizing enough energy to help you handle the task ahead through the action of catecholamines like adrenaline. Or you can decide to ignore the thought that you'll embarrass yourself and go on to give your presentation with as much confidence as you can master.
"In our response," Viktor Franks said, "lies our growth and our freedom."
But there's a balance.
Wisdom is knowing you can be too self-conscious and in thus doing, lose your ability to take risks when it matters most.
You can miss out on connecting with people because you're thinking too much about yourself — your insecurities, rather than the person you're talking to. You can fail to capitalize on great opportunities because you're acutely aware of and identify with a poor self-image of yourself rather than being open to what you could be.
So the dichotomy is as follows.
Be conscious of whether you're paying more attention to your strengths: compassion, vulnerability, confidence and if you're practicing virtues like courage or wisdom, rather than the blemishes you don't control.
You can focus on if you're doing your best. If the action is right. And if it'll help you get better.
In paying attention to yourself, you can pause and have the chance to try the opposite of the reactions you're used to to produce better outcomes this time.
Be self-conscious. But on the things with the most impact.
On Premeditatio Malorum (The Premeditation of Evils)
"As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, "He may be dead in the morning." Don't tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?" — Marcus Aurelius
It's typical to think of positive outcomes when pursuing a goal, or someone you like. But we’d all do better to confront another possibility: that we might not get what we want. And not only to think of it; but also prepare what to do when this disappointment hits.
Confidence is this: to be alright with the worst that could happen because you can always use it to your advantage. It’s not the conscious obliviousness of the dark perils of life's uncertainty.
You can get fired from your job. The person you're attracted to might change their mind about the date you had planned. You can spill coffee on your best outfit. People die.
This idea seems counterintuitive to positive thinking and you might think it'll jinx them into happening. But nothing could be further from the truth.
It's in rehearsing what to do when you encounter disappointment that you adapt faster and use it all as material to further your aims. For failure is only psychological.
You'll be at peace as you're in harmony with reality, for life happens as it wills and that’s natural — it’s ok as it unfolds.
Cultivate confidence. Not delusional arrogance based on luck and hoping for the best.
On Pleasure
“Pleasure, unless it has been kept within bounds, tends to rush headlong into the abyss of sorrow.” — Seneca
Pleasure is important.