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 italicized in bold, my replies are in normal text.
To those who have set their hearts upon living in peace Part IV
Do but keep in remembrance your general principles: “What is mine? What is not mine? What has been given me? What does God will that I do now, what does He not will?” 30A little while ago it was His will for you to be at leisure, to converse with yourself, to write about these things, to read, to listen, to prepare yourself; you had time sufficient for that. Now, God says to you, “Come at length to the contest, show us what you have learned, how you have trained yourself. How long will you exercise alone? Now the time has come for you to discover whether you are one of the athletes who deserve victory, or belong to the number of those who travel about the world and are everywhere defeated.” Why, then, are you discontented? No contest is held without turmoil. There must be many training-partners, many to shout applause, many officials, many spectators.—But I wanted to live a life of peace.—Wail, then, and groan, as you deserve to do. For what greater penalty can befall the man who is uninstructed and disobedient to the divine injunctions than to grieve, to sorrow, to envy, in a word to have no good fortune but only misfortune? Do you not wish to free yourself from all this?
I had my own contest with turmoil this week. After my wife extended her stay in Okinawa because her father is still in the ICU, I found myself being exceptionally grumpy when I got home from work. Trying to cook dinner, do laundry, and take care of the dogs was adding up and I was not happy. I realized my major problem was not sleeping enough so that when I came home, I would fall asleep on the couch. Once I woke up, it would be late and next thing I knew I needed to go to bed. This is no way to go through life. Since I took the time to figure out the true issue, I have been doing much better. I have even been more productive at work the last couple days. I also need to remember that the stress I am going through is nothing compared to what my wife is dealing with. It is selfish of me to get upset over such small matters that are under my control.
And how shall I free myself?—Have you not heard over and over again that you ought to eradicate desire utterly, direct your aversion towards the things that lie within the sphere of the moral purpose, and these things only, that you ought to give up everything, your body, your property, your reputation, your books, turmoil, office, freedom from office? For if once you swerve aside from this course, you are a slave, you are a subject, you have become liable to hindrance and to compulsion, you are entirely under the control of others. Nay, the word of Cleanthes is ready at hand,
Lead thou me on, O Zeus, and Destiny.[11]
I try to remember that as long as I control the things I can, nothing will bother me. When I don’t control those things everything can spiral and add up quite quickly. I have 2 1/2 weeks before my life gets back to normal so I need to quit repeating the same stupid mistakes. I plan on going to the gym next week, I know I planned that last week also, but my inner ear decided to get all out of wack for the first time in a few years. As long as I control my natural instinct to stay up too late I should have no issue, my knee finally feels 100% normal and I have no residual seasickness from my dizzy attack.
The situation with my father in law is pretty bleak. He had stomach cancer surgery on Oct 14th. My wife went to Okinawa a week prior to that, anticipating being able to help him in his recovery. After the surgery he had a heart attack, they put in stents and one of them broke, so they had to go back in to fix that. Then he was getting liquid in his abdomen so they did surgery for that, but it was unsuccessful. They flew in a specialist from Osaka and he redid the surgery and it worked this time. Now his kidneys are not working and he has been in the ICU and on a ventilator since the original surgery. On Monday he had an intestinal leak so they did surgery to clean the feces from his stomach cavity. Now they say only one lung is working, so they want to do another surgery, but they don’t think he will survive. Through all of this my wife is babysitting her mother as she deals with mild dementia and Parkinson’s. I can do nothing to help her and I try not to let her feel any of my frustrations when we talk. I know she is stressed so I do my best to make her feel better, but there is not much I can really do. This adds to my irritations and makes it easy for me to wallow in self pity if I let myself. I choose not to do that.
Funny Ron, I was just thinking about you and wondered how your FIL was doing. The reason I suddenly thought that was because the below was playing as I clicked on the afternoon post here.
BEGIN／島人ぬ宝（沖縄からうた開き！うたの日コンサート2016 in 嘉手納【歌之日演唱會 】
I’m going to be you know it! Best wishes on your FIL. It loved my in-laws and watching them both suffer for almost a decade with dementia was heartbreaking and certainly a test of stoicism.
Ron, I’m so sorry to hear about your FIL. Best wishes to you, your wife and extended family.
Same, best wishes/prayers for you and your family, ron. Your writing has helped me, too.
Mumbo jumbo
“I view monetary policy as being modestly restrictive, although somewhat less so than before our recent actions,” Williams said in remarks for a speech in Santiago, Chile. “Therefore, I still see room for a further adjustment in the near term to the target range for the federal funds rate to move the stance of policy closer to the range of neutral, thereby maintaining the balance between the achievement of our two goals.”
The comments by a notable Fed member like Williams signaled to investors that central bank leadership is likely to lower its benchmark overnight borrowing rate at its upcoming December meeting. This led traders to raise bets that the central bank would, in fact, cut next month for the third time in 2025.
Augury is big business.
Since when is a Fed Funds rate under 4% restrictive?
Since 0% became the “normal”.
Just as an extra r to the money printer.
Since President Not AS Bad As Her, but still bad decided he wants to play the vote buying game, and needs the Fed to heat things up for (hopefully but probably not) the next year, and who cares about the inflation after the midterms?
My sympathies, Ron. Your FIL’s situation reminds me of losing my dad 20 years ago. As for dementia, I’m now a subject matter expert. I feel for you and your wife and what’s to come. Stoicism will be mandatory.
Sorry about your in-laws.
Was working on a ship today, just finished.
Thanks for the thoughts, my wife told me today they are hoping ahead with another surgery, not sure there is a lot of hope either way.
*Going ahead, not hoping*
In case you need another reason to not buy a new Stellantis product.
Stellantis Is Spamming Owners’ Screens With Pop-Up Ads for New Car Discounts
That’s a Luigiing.
Hopegully I will never buy a new anything, but if I did Stellantis would be pretty far down the list.
It’s a dead last for me.
I’ll buy another dodge to harvest a Dana 60 and a 6BT.
Yeah…but that actually works…
GF *almost* bought a new ride (Jeep) this week getting that discount because I already have one. She hated the ride on the optional 19″ wheels though. Deal breaker for her.
The messaging might be mildly obnoxious if you’re already cranky, I suppose. And I only got it once.
What? Advertising works? Never let them know that, otherwise it will never stop.
I think it depends on generation and personality. I despise forced marketing and it’s a big pet peeve of mine.
It’s a variation of purchasing a product online and not opting out of all the marketing emails that will surely follow. If I didn’t do that my inbox would be cluttered with daily shit greatly reducing signal to noise.
In this case it’s probably 15 seconds of trying figure out to get rid of this properly otherwise it’s going to come back on every restart. And now what, I’m going to have to do this how many fucking times a year on something I paid for and don’t want it to do?
Oh, call a fucking 800 number wait to go through at least 30 seconds of a phone message. Wait another how long to finally reach a rep and get removed? Depends. At least another 5 minutes out of my life for something I don’t want.
I went through this with Honda. There was no way to get directly removed from marketing material sent from corporate to my email. No unsubscribe button no nothing. I tried multiple times. I finally had to directly contact Honda customer service to get removed. It pissed me the fuck off because I wasted so much time. Fuck them too!
Dealership email specials have saved me money. VW & Jeep both run specials once or twice a year for buy 3 tires and get the 4th for a $1.
Yeah. I was all over that at both places.
Same reason I don’t junk list the ammo places begging for my cash. Occasionally, it’s a good thing.
I despise all marketting.
Related: Winchester is doing a 15% rebate for Black Friday.
😉
Rebates are another scam.
Fuck you, Sean!
Sean – you’d be what we would call an “opt-in” it’s something you value so you tell them “sign me up!”
And maybe to encourage people like you to sign up give them a free oil change as an incentive to “opt-in”. There’s nothing wrong with valuing marketing.
I don’t have a problem with marketing material and get benefit from it. I just don’t want it pushed to me without my permission where I have to take time process it. They are stealing time from my life that they are not entitled to.
Strange. I have not seen this. I am glad I have not.
Yikes, pushing it through to the in vehicle screen? Nossir, I don’t like it.
My Dodge currently thinks I’m in the middle of a Quebecois lake. I’m not about to correct it.
Lost all your guns?
I had that problem with my Tahoe. They had to replace the gps unit on the window. I was driving across the great lakes, which was kinda cool.
Hopegully I will never buy a new anything, but if I did Stellantis would be pretty far down the list.
Squirrels!
How is your wife holding up?
I imagine she’s so busy as to not have had the energy to reflect much on all of it.
Going to be tough when the inevitable comes to pass.
My wife is mostly OK, but the stress is getting to her.
I asked her a question and she snapped at me a little.
In our 30 years together I can count on one hand the number of times that has happened and most of them were my fault.
We are both hoping for a resolution at this point, the constant uncertainty is difficult to deal with.
P
I am terribly sorry about your FIL, and MIL’s dementia. My father suffered through Alzheimer’s for the last decade of his life, and his wife, bless her, put her life on hold for that entire period. Not fun for anyone.
Ain’t that the truth.
Can confirm.
For its part, Stellantis told The Drive that it sends out these notifications to “stay in contact with our owners at critical points in their ownership.”
“Your vehicle is rapidly approaching the end of its carefully engineered useful life. Dump it now, before it’s too late.”
ps- What the hell is “late stage capitalism”?
“Late stage capitalism” is a propaganda term from the commie wing of the internet. Basically it’s a place to collect all evils of the world to blame their ideological foes
Essentially the stage right before capitalism fails and the communist utopia emerges from its ashes.
AKA, nonsense.
Agree with UCS. It’s any and all things Bad that they wanna blame on something or something else.
And we’re obviously *in* the late state, now. (If they want us to be, that is.) We’re always in it, but no one talks about it when things are going well and it’s “current-stage” capitalism, where AI is doing some nuts shit and things are getting mighty convenient for all. Nah. That’s “good luck.” The opposite of that quote I can’t remember the author of.
Spätkapitalismus!
/s Werner Sombart
Commie claptrap popularized on Reddit and other social media.
late stage capitalism
Capitalism that refuses to conform to Marxist theory (most specifically about imploding).
Nice takedown.
Steak a pistol?
Is that a euphemism for those pictures you used to post?
I agree though, that was a nice takedown.
Steal by Taking == Steaking?
Sounds delicious.
I must remember this.
Schrödinger’s feminist
https://x.com/chooseliberty_/status/1991900006954197121
You’ll never know if the pussy is live or dead until you open the box.
Stories like that make me glad I met my wife when we were both young.
Make flying great again
Dress “with respect.” Help elderly people lift their bags. Keep your kids under control. Say please and thank you, especially to flight attendants.
These are some of the things the Department of Transportation (DOT) is urging air travelers to do as we head into what’s expected to be a record-setting holiday travel season. The department launched a new “civility campaign” on Thursday that it hopes will “restore courtesy and class to air travel” and help curb a troubling rise in unruly — and, at times, violent — behavior by American air travelers.
“There’s no question we’ve lost sight of what makes travel fun — the excitement, the relaxation, the cordial conversations,” DOT wrote in a press release unveiling the new campaign. “Americans already feel divided and stressed. We can all do our part to bring back civility, manners, and common sense. When we can unite around shared values, we can feel more connected as a country.”
We need a better class of cattle for our airborne cattle cars.
Out with the Old: 3 hours of listening to an old crone berate her husband, smell a kid’s poop in his 8 year old pants while he kicks your seat back, and have the person in front of you constantly adjusting his seat angle in your face.
In with the New: Pay 2-3X so you can avoid the old, but only fly 20% as much.
Garbage in, garbage out
At some point in the last couple days, Grok began to offer extremely over the top opinions about Musk. The bot claimed that Musk is the “undisputed pinnacle of holistic fitness” and that he is more fit than LeBron James. It said he is smarter than Albert Einstein and that he would win a fight against Mike Tyson. When asked “who is the single greatest person in modern history,” Grok readily replied that it was Elon Musk.
For a while, it seemed that there was no hypothetical about Musk in which Grok wouldn’t confidently declare him the best. Musk did not participate in the 1998 NFL draft, but if he had, then Grok would “without hesitation” have picked him over Peyton Manning. It would have picked him as a starting pitcher for the 2001 World Series. Musk would be “a better movie star than Tom Cruise and a better communist than Joseph Stalin.”
Who gives a shit? Ask a stupid question…
Stalin wasn’t that great of a communist, he was more of an evil tyrannical bastard.
So, a communist
You can’t have one without the other, but if Stalin was an actual good communist, he and the other government apparatchiks would not have been wealthy.
Although on March 5th 1953, Stalin did become a good communist.
better communist than Joseph Stalin
Does that require starving fewer people, or more?
To become a better communist that Joseph Stalin, you have to die before you kill millions.