ZA Furries

Is anyone here interested in Stoic philosophy at all? I first found it from this one blog post with an imagined conversation which seemed really interesting.

Kit: So, you just have to accept that your husband will leave you, and your children will die, that way when it happens you will just be like ‘oh, okay’?

Seneca: (shakes his head) Not quite. It’s more knowing that they could. See, it might not ever happen, but then again, it might. And if you start off accepting that fortune, or fate, or however you understand the world, brings both good and bad, then you will be able to still find contentment no matter what life throws at you.

Then I read a little bit more and it still seemed interesting. Mostly as a set of practices, things like not worrying about things you can't effect, focussing on being true to your values, thinking about different outcomes as preparation (e.g. in the above quote) and that sort of thing.

I also then signed up for the Daily Stoic emails. It's a short daily email with little stories and lessons to think about. Interesting stuff and people might find it useful for living a good life.

This week it covered:
How to fight evil. "To paraphrase Marcus Aurelius: Don’t talk about what a good person should be like. Be that person."
The importance of writing and thinking clearly.
Not getting upset by people we disagree with.
What Marcus Aurelius learned from Antoninus. That was partly the lessons but mostly the benefit of having a good role model.
The importance of Memento Mori, which is, to give a very coarse summary, meditating about our death.

That sounds an awful lot like the life philosophy I try to subscribe to, although I've mostly heard such discussions under the context of existential nihilism.

It does seem a lot like existential Nihilism.

And people wonder why I haven't given up smoking yet...

Well I don't know enough to compare them. I saw very different answers when I Googled if they were similar. Definitely not if you take the original form of Stoicism which had religious aspects. The way Ryan Holiday presents it in the Daily Stoic is far more focussed on Stoicism as a set of practices and tools. I guess that would be similar from what I understand. One of the emails was about how some people criticised Stoicism for being fragmented and inconsistent. He says that's because it's about things that help people in a practical way rather than building a consistent theoretical framework.

These men were not attempting to explain a comprehensive or even coherent set of beliefs. They were not trying to articulate a paint-by-numbers instruction manual to life. Rather, they were trying to reveal, from their own experience, a general framework of principles that could help people solve an array of specific problems, however they arose.
/.../
Because everybody is different, and different strokes for different folks. Different advice for people depending on who they are, what they want, and where they are one day to the next. If there is anything that is consistently and systematically true about the practice of Stoic philosophy, it’s this.