It kind of reminds me of a time when I was so deeply concerned about someone. It was like i couldn't thought of living without them. But now it looks like I can, & I have lived my life without them.
Yes, just as lifting weights strengthens your muscles, exposing yourself to safe, voluntary discomfort builds mental resilience, making you stronger and ready for unexpected life challenges.
Your exercise leads me to wonder whether the real issue is discomfort itself, or rather the relationship we discover when comfort disappears.
Going without a phone for a day can certainly teach us that its absence is bearable. But it may reveal something even more interesting: what that object had become for us. A tool, a habit, a source of stimulation, perhaps even an almost invisible condition of our sense of equilibrium.
From this perspective, askēsis could be understood not only as training ourselves to endure deprivation, but also as an exercise in understanding. We temporarily remove something from our environment and observe what its absence reveals about us.
This is where I would be tempted to introduce a Spinozist nuance. Not every form of dependence necessarily diminishes our power to act. We depend on countless relationships, objects, and other human beings that actually increase what we are capable of doing. The question then becomes less whether we can do without something, and more what our relationship with it is doing to us.
This may be particularly relevant to AI, which you mention. If it saves us certain kinds of effort, does that necessarily make us weaker, or should we instead examine which capacities it may cause us to exercise less, and which new capacities it makes possible?
Perhaps voluntary discomfort, then, is less a way of proving our independence than a rather elegant way of discovering what we depend on and, more importantly, how we depend on it.
What we fear is not as bad as what we think! So true!
Deep
Stoic
Hello, send me an e-mail with the word STOIC at: admin@thestoicmanual.com . I’ll add you to the waitlist.
Stoic
Hello, send me an e-mail with the word STOIC at: admin@thestoicmanual.com . I’ll add you to the waitlist.
I loved this.
STOIC
Hello, send me an e-mail with the word STOIC at: admin@thestoicmanual.com . I’ll add you to the waitlist.
It kind of reminds me of a time when I was so deeply concerned about someone. It was like i couldn't thought of living without them. But now it looks like I can, & I have lived my life without them.
Yes, just as lifting weights strengthens your muscles, exposing yourself to safe, voluntary discomfort builds mental resilience, making you stronger and ready for unexpected life challenges.
Your exercise leads me to wonder whether the real issue is discomfort itself, or rather the relationship we discover when comfort disappears.
Going without a phone for a day can certainly teach us that its absence is bearable. But it may reveal something even more interesting: what that object had become for us. A tool, a habit, a source of stimulation, perhaps even an almost invisible condition of our sense of equilibrium.
From this perspective, askēsis could be understood not only as training ourselves to endure deprivation, but also as an exercise in understanding. We temporarily remove something from our environment and observe what its absence reveals about us.
This is where I would be tempted to introduce a Spinozist nuance. Not every form of dependence necessarily diminishes our power to act. We depend on countless relationships, objects, and other human beings that actually increase what we are capable of doing. The question then becomes less whether we can do without something, and more what our relationship with it is doing to us.
This may be particularly relevant to AI, which you mention. If it saves us certain kinds of effort, does that necessarily make us weaker, or should we instead examine which capacities it may cause us to exercise less, and which new capacities it makes possible?
Perhaps voluntary discomfort, then, is less a way of proving our independence than a rather elegant way of discovering what we depend on and, more importantly, how we depend on it.
Moriarty Benson
You’re teaching your mind and your body who’s in charge.
WHO is in charge?