The mascot of ATmosphereConf is a goose, accompanied by the motto we can just do things.
If you've peeked at my reading log the last year or so, you'd be excused for thinking I'd abandoned Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. It has featured under my reading section for more than a year!
Finishing a book has never taken me this long before. But finish it I did, and I did it just the other day.
Stoic philosophy has interested me for many years. Even before it was co-opted by the ‘manosphere’ and quotes from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and their fellow stoics became endemic to various platforms. I just never really got around to following up on my curiosity. Not until I began listening to the History of Rome podcast a couple of years back. It renewed my interest in the philosophical teachings of the age, and — having both Seneca's Letters and Aurelius' Meditations on my shelf — I decided that I needed to read these two cornerstones of stoicism.
Seneca's letters are written as musings and advice for his friend Lucilius. The 65 letters have become somewhat of a bible or, the original teachings, for stoics. They cover a wide array of subjects. Everything from the folly of the crowds to how to meet death to the point of philosophy.
Part of the reason finishing the book took me so long is because I decided to read at most one letter per day. Given the subject matter, plowing through felt insufficient. Better to let each letter sink in and process it properly before moving on to the next. I also took a fair bit of notes.
Much of what Seneca teaches resonates with me. The stoic views on death, in particular, align with my personal beliefs. Seneca closes his 65th and final letter to Lucilius:
And what is death? It is either the end, or a process of change. I have no fear of ceasing to exist; it is the same as not having begun. Nor do I shrink from changing into another state, because I shall, under no conditions, be as cramped as I am now. Farewell.
Mic drop!
Death is a recurring subject throughout the letters. The view is consistent in that death is nothing to be feared. All of our lives we are dying. (‘For death itself is always the same distance from us.’) Not a single one of us has any guarantees for when that final moment will come. We should lead our lives as if death is constantly around the corner. ‘Let us postpone nothing’, he writes.
His first letter deals with just that. Seneca opens it thus:
Set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands.
Seneca preaches that ‘life is long, if only you know how to use it’. Most of us, unfortunately, do not. We are not set free. We do not gather and save our time. Instead, our precious time is squandered to ‘the most disgraceful kind of loss’ which ‘is due to carelessness’.
His strong and adamant preaching that ‘nothing is ours, except time’ was a timely (hur-hur) reminder. I'm at a part of my life where the days seemingly fly by. Each day is filled to the brim. Reading Seneca's letter compelled me to take stock of how I'm spending my time. To make adjustments, sure. But, more importantly, to reach the conclusion that much of what I fill my days with is genuinely what I want to be doing.
What a gift.
Another gift was his thoughts on crowds. In the physical sense, in the sense of ‘everyone is doing it’ that is so easy to use as justification for our actions and in the sense that we need to strive for the approval of the many. This particular anecdote hit home:
The following was also nobly spoken by someone or other for it is doubtful who the author was; they asked him what was the object of all this study applied to an art that would reach but very few. He replied: ‘I am content with few, content with one, content with none at all.’
And, on the subject of attracting praise, Seneca wrote (emphasis mine):
Many men praise you; but have you any reason for being pleased with yourself if you are a person whom the many can understand? Your good quality should face inwards.
These are thoughts I've sort of held or vaguely surmised, but never truly expressed. But I could not agree more. Your compass should point towards something other than praise and adulation. Your good quality should face inwards. Seneca also talks about going against the crowds in how you act:
It shows much more courage to remain dry and sober when the mob is drunk and vomiting, but it shows greater self-control to refuse to withdraw oneself and to do what the crowd does, but in a different way — thus neither making oneself conspicuous nor becoming one of the crowd. For one may keep holiday without extravaganza.
In opposing the crowd, it is easy to default to reclusive behaviour. As Seneca points out here, however, this is not necessarily the stoic way. Instead, to be among the crowds, and to do what they do, but in a different way, is both more challenging and more instructive.
Another cornerstone of stoic philosophy are the views on material wealth. It is not that they abhor richness. In fact, they actively encourage anyone to pursue it. It, however, being something quite different than what we normally consider wealth. Nothing illustrates this more than when Seneca quotes Epicurus in a story about Pythocles:
‘If you wish to make Pyhocles rich, but not rich in the vulgar and equivocal way, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.’
Seneca believes that it is equally true that:
If you wish to make Pythocles honourable, do not add to his honours, but subtract from his desires.
And:
If you wish Pythocles to have pleasure forever, do not add to his pleasures, but subtract from his desires.
Not as eloquent as his ‘Epicurean enemy’, perhaps, but it certainly gets the point across. This view that wealth and honour and true pleasure is not defined by what you own and acquire, but rather what you desire, is something I believe deeply. Seeing it written in such plain words helped me cement that belief. Every day I now try to remind myself of this. That I can become richer, more virtuous and make life more pleasurable simply be subtracting from my desires.
To that end, I will end this post with perhaps my favourite quote from all of Seneca's letters, concerning what constitutes happiness:
…teach us that the happy man is not he whom the crowd deems happy, namely, he into whose coffers mighty sums have flowed, but he whose possessions are all in his soul, who is upright and exalted, who spurns inconstancy, who sees no man with which he wishes to change places, who rates men only at their value as men, who takes Nature for his teacher, conforming to her laws and living as she commands, whom no violence can deprive of his possessions, who turns evil into good, who is unerring in judgement, unshaken, unafraid, who may be moved by force but never moved to distraction, whom Fortune when she hurls at him with all her might the deadliest missile in her armoury, may graze, though rarely, but never wound.
Alex Chan in Creating a personalised bin calendar:
I start by generating an HTML calendar using Python. There’s a built-in calendar module, which lets you output calendars in different formats. It doesn’t embed individual date information in the
<td>cells, so I customise the HTMLCalendar class to write the date as an id attribute.
Neat post from Alex. Can immediately think of a few places where this approach might be useful. Also wish I'd known that Python calendar module fifteen years ago when I spent a not insignificant amount of hours setting up a calendar grid in Photoshop by hand ^_^
Soundtrack — Soundgarden — Blow Up The Outside World
A lot of people try to rationalize the AI bubble by digging up the past.
Billions of dollars of waste are justified by saying “OpenAI just like Uber” (it isn’t) and “the data center buildout is
I was so taken with Civilisations that I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to indulge in an earlier novel by Laurent Binet.
