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The only thing i dont like about stoicism os the brand itself.

When u have an " emperor" being one of the biggest examples, predicating good healthy lifestyles, and then said emperor, then decides to be fed and bathed by slaves, to me he is just a hypocrite. He could have changed the outcome, specially as a "loved and revered" emperor. But decided to act passively when he had control, he did not wanted to lose their standing and privileges, instead of pushing society forward like a good emperor,he was a weak willed douche, whose son rekt his legacy. So much for the stoics huh?

Choosing to be a lesser version of himself, Marcus a pussy.

Yeah, there is a certain magical mix of qualities that an activity has to have to achieve flow. The examples always mention athletes and musicians as discussed above in this thread but video games have it too, but only in some situations. The game has to:

• Be sufficiently difficult that it demands expertise and mastery to perform well

• Be fast paced enough that it occupies your entire mind when playing (no room for your mind to wander)

• Have a continual feedback loop of mastery and focus = reward, from moment to moment. So you are always occupied with doing well right now.

• Be something you are an 'expert' at, in other words that you can perform the actual mechanics of the game (say, going from intending to cast a spell to casting that spell) without ANY conscious thought, leaving your mind to focus on the higher order mastery of decision making.

The only things that have ever given me this are Dota and Street Fighter!

It is funny/interesting/crazy how Stoicism is essentially the Serenity Prayer but some still try to strawman it. Then again people strawman Nietzscheanism into being a teenage rebellion and about becoming superman, so eh.

Serenity Prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Sure, but if circumstances are difficult then I wouldn't call it going with the flow to just play along. If your house is on fire, there is no effortless action. All choices are difficult and all action hard.

I think it's more in line with circumstances/context fitting perfectly with what you expect of the world. And your expectation is managed by your ability and experience.

I like to see it as the principle of least action from cognitive neuroscience. Where we try to update our model of the world to fit according to our senses. If your model is aligned with what we sense then we do not need to take any action. We are already in sync so to say.

Author simply does not understand Stoicism.

All good points. To add on to your climate change example: there’s a big difference between that (you can at least affect change there) and, say, getting mad at the day’s weather or human nature (which exists totally outside your control). Epictetus said (I’m Paraphrasing) “I’m fond of a jug. When the jug breaks, I simply sweep it up. It’s in the jug’s nature to break.” You could try to protect your jug but once it breaks, you can’t go back in time, can’t change the reality of it being broken. So, yeah, a stoic isn’t going to sit and cast anger into the past about damage already done to the environment but also won’t give up and do absolutely nothing about a problem that isn’t in their sole, direct control.

suppressing emotions is not the same as not letting them rule you. my understanding is that stoicism focuses on developing the strength of character and understanding of self that will enable you to live without emotion dragging you down unnecessarily.

The first note to make would be that I am not sure you have the interpretation of passiveness in Stoicism right. If anything the Stoics used this exploration of what is or is not in our control for to 'overcome' and take control of certain issues in life. As well as this, I do not believe using Holliday as the bastion of Stoicism is correct. The way I describe his books on the Stoics are someone who has put a garishly green bath in an otherwise nice bathroom suite. His takes on Stoicism are not terrible, far from it, but it is clear he writes for mass appeal and it is very clear he comes from a marketing background. To what extent he is disseminating Stoicism and/or vacuously marketing for mass appeal in his obnoxiously cringe LinkedIn style of marketing techniques is a line he rides; I do recognise this may be a that is generally my own, but I would say reading core texts yourself if far more fruitful than his works (which is a given).

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>consciousness which really means "soul",

I don't think bringing up the concept of the soul is very productive in the conversation about consciousness (as i hinted at in my above comments).

>There's just consciousness that's the opposite of sleep.

How do you explain the phenomenon of lucid dreaming? It is true that current medical use of the terms conscious and unconscious do mean sleep and awake, it's not universally true in every medical context. It would be more accurate to say it means aware and unaware. You can be awake yet unconscious (there are drugs that prove this) and asleep yet conscious (just ask anyone who's suffers from sleep paralysis).

>There's just consciousness that's the opposite of sleep. It's a disagreement on the definition.

Correct me if I'm wrong here but you're defining consciousness as the opposite of asleep and asleep as the opposite of consciousness?.. Given that you're in a philosophy subreddit do you see why that is a poor answer for a definition? Assuming sleep is also a well defined phenomenon when it most certainly is not. Of course we have a practical definition of both what being awake is and what being asleep is that works very well in typical scenarios. But those definitions fall short when you ask what it means to be conscious. Normally I wouldn't care about it, and move on to something more interesting but the near potential of Turing Test passing AI has me pondering this question again. If can AI simulate a person requesting human rights, can simulate what a human response of being abused, can simulate being aware of its surroundings, can simulate episodic memory, can simulate being aware of being conscious and unconscious (powered on versus off), then is it not conscious and deserving of rights in which all conscious beings are? Or is human consciousness special? Or is our definition of consciousness incorrect?

>I dunno how to explain this to you

I can tell you're fun at parties... But seriously if you disrespect me again I'm leaving the conversation.

Man, this explains why I'm still so drawn to the game after 10 years of playing. That flow state is magical, for those 30-60 minutes everything makes sense, I feel like I belong.

> Marx further saw Stoicism as a tool of the ruling class to placate the proletariat so that they accept extreme privation like slaves.

Where can I read more on this? My own search provided no results.

Very good explanation. Being Stoic doesn’t mean being helpless, a doormat, or not caring. I spend so much energy on the “result” instead of what I have power over (myself, my actions, even my reactions). But it’s such a powerful idea, to work on what’s in my control and just let go of the other things. Thanks for the reply, nicely put

To start labeling places as perfect doesn't seem like Daoism/Wu Wei but I'm no scholar. I thought it was about accepting everything that is and happens without any judgement?

To my understanding, Nietzsche basically says that slave-morality - us loving underdog stories, the poor and pitiful, sacrifice, humility, turning the other cheek, and so on - is, at its core, an inversion of master-morality, and Christianity is to blame for its popularity in the West. The slave-morality is mostly about one's attitude towards guilt, sin, vices, etc. - negative behaviors. Are some people good and some people bad (as in: high-quality and low-quality, powerful and weak, based and cringe, etc.), or some people good and some people evil? Do you treat harm done to strangers like a neutral action or a negative one?

It was Hegel who identified Stoicism as the slave philosophy in his Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hegel understood Stoicism as a stage in the development of the mind wherein we may assert to being free despite extreme privation. What Nietzsche saw was that Stoicism can keep us in a mentality of servitude rather than creating what does not yet exist. Marx further saw Stoicism as a tool of the ruling class to placate the proletariat so that they accept extreme privation like slaves. It's little wonder that Stoicism increases in popularity as the extremes of wealth grow ever wider.

This article screams strawman argument from top to bottom. A couple of examples:

“Say my wife is feeling tired and irritable. I can either, as a good Stoic, try to feel good about that, or I can get up from the lounge and bring her a glass of wine and some crackers with Taramasalata.”

Nowhere in the Stoic philosophy does it suggest to “feel good” about someone you love being angry or sad. Realizing that you are not in control of something outside of your own person does not mean to feel good of be happy no matter what.

A good example would be your wife being sad and you not pretending you can control that by PRETENDING she stops, say because you are also tired. A good stoic would only focus on his own reaction, maybe by being a good person/husband and being supportive, instead of implicitly pretending that she should not do that “because you are my wife!!!”.

A good stoic would not get to the point of being too tired to NOT be supportive for his wife.

“This leads us to the passivity problem. If we focus only on our character, reactions, and actions, as Stoicism proposes, and put no effort into things that lie beyond our direct control, it seems to me that a practising Stoic will remain passive in the face of major problems like climate change or social inequality.”

Realizing you are not in control of climate change does not mean you are automatically allowed to simply don’t care about it, or contributing to making it worse, as the author implies.

It could mean to take the situation seriously enough to decide to change your own person and habits based on what society demands, but not seriously enough as to think that YOU have the power to change it personally.

The latter will grant you the feeling of impotency because, as we know, no single person is in charge of fixing climate change. No single person SHOULD even being in charge of that, even if it was possible.

Thinking that you have the power to fix things outside of your control is one of the most frequent and potent traps in human cognition. Recognizing this could lead you to maximize your positive impact, because you would focus on yourself without “wasting” energy fixing what you cannot possibly fix.

So focus on yourself and then have the biggest positive impact in the world.

Realizing that you cannot control what you cannot control does NOT mean “who cares!!!!!”.

> You’re a person who gets irritated by the smallest things, things outside your control like a person loudly crunching chips in the cinema. Accept everything about this situation, your own responses included.

Personally, I'm actually not that irritable. You could say I'm more "stoic" than people are kind of "socially expected". I don't know if "socially expected" is the right term. In movies, people are easier to affect than I am in reality, for dramaturgic reasons and I feel like other people try to emulate movie-behaviour.

Just because you can talk yourself into being angry about something, doesn't mean that's your most natural and honest mental state towards it.

I'm all for honesty towards yourself. That's what I like about Nietzsche. Sometimes being honest can mean that you aren't as emotionally affected as society expects you to.

Being honest towards yourself can sometimes be tricky. For example imagine a grandma who likes to bake cake and knit sweaters for her grandchildren. People might say to her that she should listen to her own desires and she might be tempted to invest less work in others to achieve that, but in truth the might be happiest when she actually makes other people happy.

I'm not sure what Nietzsche meant by the slave-mentality. Does this grandma have a slave-mentality? I guess some people think on a surface level that they should endure and please others but a deeper, surpressed, level they know that they are sacrificing their own happiness. That doesn't apply to all altruistic people. You would expect humans to be evolved to be altruistic to the extend it benefits your genes.

I also like these "strangely satisfying" Youtube videos, like where someone pops bubble wrap. You only get to feel satisfaction from these weird things if you are very honest to yourself, because society won't suggest it to you. Weird sexual fetishes are the same. People who aren't honest to themselves would rather eat at an expensive restaurant or visit a popular tourist destination, for example. (On the other hand society very much suggested to kids to buy fidget spinners and push pop, so it's not that clear cut either. The honest option is not necessarily the less obvious option and it's not necessarily the option that goes against social pressure.)

Sometimes you can choose how you feel about something. For example when you watch a race and you don't know any of the competitors, you might choose to invest your "heart" into anyone arbitrarily and feel good when they win and bad if they loose. There is this other youtube channel where they race marbles. I guess it would be anti-stoic to feel emotions when watching a marble race.

On a darker side of that, I can choose to "dehumanize" people and then I don't feel empathy towards them anymore. I can "dehumanize" a spider when my sister asks me to kill it and I can "humanize" another spider in a terrarium that my friend asks to to care for, while they are on vacation.

In these cases you can't choose based on what is most honest.

TY for the link

It takes a lot of effort to be effortless and multitasking requires a stable mind guided by meditative and contemplative techniques

I consider stoic philosophy as a tool something to use when u in need for it, not to leave by it, after all compressing emotions is unhealthy, and emotions is a part of human being so you can't leave without them

Was there any purpose to relate it so a specific culture's concept within the title rather than another's? It's an odd and out of place addition

Skill and complexity of task are subjective and dynamic. Is it about the perfect task? Or about our ability to flow to the task?

You could view flow as a skill in and of itself.

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