“Why? Are the Greeks tired of fighting each other?” – Troy
I heard the Greeks kept watch on their infants by using a baby minotaur.
Epictetus is a dead Greek dude. His name sounds like Epic . . . well, it would make Beavis and Butthead laugh. Epictetus is, as I mentioned, dead. So are several billion people, but so, outside of his sorta-funny name, why am I bringing him up on a Friday?
Because he’s one of the people whose ideas have made it down to us because someone decided to invent the original wireless information transfer technique which uses a solid-state information storage media along with speed of light photon transmission: writing.
One of the things he wrote was this:
Remember that it’s not only the desire for wealth and position that debases us and subjugates us, but also the desire for peace, leisure, travel, and learning. It doesn’t matter what the external thing is, the value we place on it subjugates us to another. Where our heart is set; there our impediment lies.
Okay, the truth is, he didn’t write that at all. He wrote some sort of gibberish with lots of Latin or Greek letters. Sadly, no one left alive can translate those languages, so we had to guess at the meanings, like Bulgarian mall lawyers poking at the internals of a laser printer with a pen, dimly thinking that might somehow fix the complicated internals and make the magic printer work again, like humans at the dawn of time, worshiping an almighty being, hoping one day to be rewarded with things like mayonnaise, or French fries.
Only you east of the Rockies will get this. I grew up with Best Foods™, which ruins this joke.
Yeah, that’s a run on sentence, but so is the Preamble to the Constitution. Classic things can’t be rushed.
Anyway, the good thing is, Bulgarian mall lawyers are absolutely amazing at fighting judges over silly restraining orders. I mean, how could I be charged with trespass if it was just my drone looking in their window?
But Epictetus was trying to tell us something deeper than any silly restraining order. It’s that what we want is what controls us. Epictetus just made the point that the desire for power and the desire for peace and a restraining order are equally controlling. Diogenes, another dead Greek dude who pathetically didn’t speak English, said, “It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.”
Remember, Diogenes often walked around naked, yanking his crank in public, so, you know, ewww. I think Diogenes must have had Bulgarian mall lawyers because I never read that he had a restraining order against him.
What do you call it when a Bulgarian uses bad language? A Bulgarity. (This is not my first choice joke, but the other one was pretty rough. Email me and I’ll share. It starts with, “how do you get two Bulgarian brothers off of a couch?”)
These dead Greeks, though neither of them ever had a hamburger from McDonald’s™, did point out a very simple truth: our passions, our desires are what we give ourselves over to. And those desires don’t have to be bad to control us.
Some of the best times in my life are when I was single mindedly focused on a goal. In one sense, it is a freeing moment. In the very best of those times, I become the work. I lose myself entirely, because I am the goal. It may sound weird, but there are those moments where time ceases to exist, where I am 100% engaged with what I’m doing. I lose myself entirely. This has happened while gathering firewood (I used to call it getting wood, but then I read about Diogenes, so I changed it to gathering firewood) or working on a project, or even writing one of these posts.
It’s awesome. A day at work goes by in seconds. And I look at what I’ve done and am satisfied. I have lived a day that had purpose, that had meaning, even if it’s only meaning that I gave it.
So, were Epictetus and Diogenes wrong? I mean, it’s not like they’re going to come to my house and give me a wedgie if I make fun of their moms. They’re dead.
Kinda yes, and kinda no.
Yo momma so old? Her first crush was Diogenes.
The point is we are not small g gods. We’re people. We have desires, like pooping. Or another glass of wine. Or eyedrops when our eyes are itchy. To be a person without desire isn’t to be as a small g god, it’s to be . . . dead, or worse, a zombie or an ice cube or a houseplant.
It’s living in a world where the salt has lost its savor and every day is like going to a gray cubicle with gray carpet and gray walls and a gray chair and doing work that I don’t care about.
Yes, they may be dead (and in the case of Diogenes, a dead chronic masturbator) but I think people who have interpreted them have missed the point.
If we choose our passions, choose what we will do, what makes us mad, and what makes us happy, we have an amazing small g godlike power: we choose the people that we want to be. In those moments when I get mad (it happens) I try to step back and ask a simple question: why am I mad?
I had to kick some resistors that didn’t work out of my house. Now they’re Ohm-less.
I’ll allow it if it ties to virtue or values. Otherwise, it’s ego, and I try to choke it back, because in 100 years, absolutely no one will remember it. My virtue or values? Those aren’t for sale. I own those.
I really do think what Epictetus and Diogenes (when he wasn’t gripping the one-eyed wonder weasel) were really trying to tell us was to pick what we were willing to be controlled by.
I choose to be controlled by putting these posts out, three a week. I choose to do the best podcast ever done weekly. I choose to go to work, and, on days when there’s enough coffee, to give it everything.
I choose. If I am to be controlled by my passions, I get to choose them, and I make it a conscious choice.
And if I could choose my Greek name it would be Epic . . . well, I’d better stop there.
This is a family friendly place.
Anyone have TP?
