Category: Stoic

“Egon, somehow this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Do you remember that?” – Ghostbusters

See, a bottle of wine costs $15.  Plus the crap I buy on Amazon.

That which you desire, controls you.

Let’s look at common examples:

• Money
• Power
• Respect
• Sex
• Great Parking Spaces at Denny’s
• Friendship
• Water in the Sahara Desert
• “Buy One Get One Free” Coupons for Chocolate Dipped Ice Cream Cones at Dairy Queen®
• Booze
• Glittery Sunglasses in the Shape of Stars

Can’t you feel their magnetic pull?

When we see these desires, we see those who are driven by them and are instinctively repulsed.  An example:  when The Mrs. and I were newly married, we had an idea for a book – a humorous parody of the Clinton administration.  Its title?  An Intern’s Guide to the White House.  I thought it was funny, and maybe we even still have a copy sitting around somewhere.  If so, I’ll post it sometime – we got hooked up with a bad literary agent (we were young and stupid) and it never got published.  But like George Washington jokes, that material is just a little out of date.

This is like a photo from the world’s most awkward prom.

But back when we were still optimistic the Intern’s Guide, The Mrs. and I were excited when the Starr Report (a report by the independent counsel looking into the Clintons) came out.  We felt that it would make a perfect sequel to our Intern’s Guide.  Heck, the working title for the sequel was The Starch Report.

Then I read the Starr Report.  Ugh.  What President Clinton did was . . . sad.  You can forgive lots of things, but getting past disgust over behavior that was, by any standards, weak and pathetic is a pretty high bar.   And it wasn’t the perjury that was the worst part – it was the complete lack of self-control.  Just because a complete lack of self-control is legal doesn’t make it moral or desirable.

As you can see from President Clinton’s example, this lust wasn’t just a weakness, it was personally destructive to him.  And some of our greatest fiction, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, explores this same theme.  I still recall when Macbeth, in the movie version, gets kicked off campus.  Then he and his wacky friends form a paranormal investigating service, and save New York from Macduff, who is portrayed as the Stay-Puft® Marshmallow Man.

Ahh, Shakespeare at his best.

But history has shown time and time again how lust for sex or lust for power has led to the downfall of the powerful – like the time Weinstein put the moves on Napoleon and Napoleon outed him on Twitter® with the #NapoleonToo campaign.  But in all seriousness – if Napoleon had been content with France?  If Weinstein could be  . . . not Weinstein?  Napoleon could have gone down in history as an amazing leader and statesman.  And Weinstein could have maintained his revered status in Hollywood.

In the end, greed makes you poor.  Need makes you needy.  And desire makes you a slave.

But you’re saying, “John Wilder, all of that seems kind of negative.  What’s the solution, I mean besides joining your cult of the Nudist Beatnik Threesome?”

Outcome independence.  The idea of outcome independence is that who you are doesn’t change based on the results, and, win or lose you realize that’s an okay outcome.  Like Kipling wrote in his poem, If (LINK):

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same . . .

You are independent of the outcomes around you – your job, the last raise you got, all of it.  That’s not outcome indifference.  Not at all.  Throw yourself into getting to an outcome that you’re passionate about.  Outcome independence isn’t being without passion, because nothing worthwhile ever gets done without passion.  Let me explain with an example:

I was nearly a freshman in high school, and was mildly infatuated with a girl in class.  Back then, people had phone books, and had their names in the book.

I called her house.  Her dad (a doctor) answered.

“Is Michelle in?”

“Michelle, it’s for you.”

Michelle:  “Hello?”

John Wilder:  “Hi Michelle, it’s John Wilder.  Interested in going to go see a movie?”

Michelle:  “I’m sorry – I’m busy that night.”

Seriously, I didn’t leave anything out of the conversation.  I asked her to a movie, and she said she was busy.  But I had never said when I wanted to take her to a movie or even what movie.  Even freshman me understood that meant that there was no night, ever, when she’d say yes.

Even then I was amused.  I really wanted to go out with her – I was not indifferent – she was pretty cute.  But when the outcome was negative, I didn’t have the slightest bit of loss of self-worth.  There were lots of girls out there.

But failure is a result, too.  I prefer to win.  Strongly.  But winning doesn’t make me a better person, and it doesn’t make me more moral – look at all of the really horrible people that have been successful.  I could name them, but they have lawyers.  I learned my lesson with Gandhi.

Losses can be better than a win . . . sometimes:

• What did you learn?
• Are you stronger?
• Would success have been bad for you?
• Is this just a temporary loss that brings about a greater victory?
• Can you lose gracefully?
• Is the loss pointing you to a mistake you’re making that you need to correct?

The best victories are internal.  I know when I hit “publish” on a post whether or not I liked the post, whether or not I hit a home run.  I really want you to like it, too, but internally, I know when I enjoyed writing it, and am pleased with the results.  I’m passionate about it, and when I know I’ve done a good job, it makes it hard to go to sleep.  I’m excited.

And I get enjoyment out of failing, too.  If you never failed, victory wouldn’t feel so good.  But I’d still like some glittery star glasses.

“They would’ve learned to wear skins, adopted stoic mannerisms, learned the bow and the lance.” – Star Trek

Okay, it was really only one color.  But it was a LOT of ink.  Staining and painting.  Stainting?

I rarely saw Pop Wilder mad at any living human being, at least I rarely saw him mad after I reached the age of ten.  And I assure you that I deserved it every single time he was mad at me – drawing on the hardwood floor in ink under my bed wasn’t a particularly popular move – especially since Ma and Pop only discovered it the night before we were supposed to be out of the house so that the new owners could move in.

Oops.

Perhaps his even temper with people was learned.  After being in banking for decades (and having me around for years), I imagine he’d seen everything, including frogs swimming in the World War I helmet his father wore.  It might be that he believed the worst of people, and that way when they weren’t horrible, they pleasantly surprised him, and when he found ink on his hardwood floor and the family photo album soaking in the bathroom sink (I promise I had a good reason)?  Or spray painted the fender of his brand-new car?  Well, that was to be expected.

So, Pop Wilder was a mild and even tempered man and perhaps even a saint for not killing me.  The one exception to him getting angry was that he would get mad at . . . things.  Chainsaws.  Cars.  Snow machines.  The blinking light on his VCR.  In fact, the only time I ever heard him drop the f-bomb was when he was referring to his computer.  He said it not long after I’d introduced him to the future The Mrs., and in her presence.  “It’s . . . it’s all f****d up.”  Honoring Pop Wilder’s tone and frustration make it a form of punctuation in our house when things have just gone completely wrong but in a comical and hopeless manner.

But what I do know is this:  the computer didn’t care.

Ahh, the United States Swear Force in action.

Dead Roman Marcus Aurelius nailed it when he wrote, “Pray to change yourself, not your circumstances.”  Marcus wasn’t referring to what was in his control.  Being an Emperor of Rome, Marcus could control a lot of things, but that’s not what frustrated him.  No, Marcus was referring to those things he couldn’t control.  Marcus was going to grow old and die, and he couldn’t change that.  Marcus would be resurrected as shoe salesman in Savannah, and he couldn’t change that, either.  Marcus wanted to change himself so he took those things that he couldn’t control and not react to them.  Why complain about gravity?

Marcus Aurelius, with a hipster beard before it was cool.

The computer doesn’t care that you’re mad at it.  The computer won’t change if you speak harshly to it, though I hear Bezos is working on a computer that will buy random things from Amazon® that it knows you won’t like, just to spite you if you’re mean to it.  Honestly, most people don’t care if you’re mad at them, either.  The real secret is, however, that most things simply do not matter on any sort of cosmic scale.  I even wrote you, dear Internet, a poem about that:

The Unblinking Stars

The stars looked down.
When Julius Caesar was born, they looked down.
When Caesar defeated the Gaul, they looked down.
When Caesar died, they looked down.

For every man, for every empire.
The stars looked down.
Unblinking.

When continents split, and then recombined.
The stars looked down.
Nearly eternal.

At every time, at ever place,
Every ambition, every love.
Every betrayal.  Every loyalty.
The stars looked down.

Looking up at them, seeing into eternity.
I gasp.  I wonder.  I check the router.
Oh, good.  The Internet’s back up.
I wonder what just happened on Twitter?

I think that what sets us up to become angry about a situation is contained entirely within ourselves – there’s a way that we think the world should be, and when the world refuses to be that way, we get angry.  And the world doesn’t completely conform to anyone’s hopes and dreams.  From time to time, even I end up comparing my life to someone else’s life.  But I do this particularly awful thing:  I compare what they’re best at, to my accomplishments in the same arena.  Let’s take the business guy I knew.  He had tens of millions of dollars, a house in the mountains, and even a vintage fighter airplane.  I don’t have tens of millions of dollars, a house in the mountains, or any airplane that’s not a model kit that I made when I was a kid.

There’s a lot to envy, isn’t there?  I even think he had a pretty good marriage and smart kids.

Oh, and he’s dead.  And he died in a really dramatic fashion that probably left his widow with nearly no money after the lawsuit and attorney’s fees.  So if I’m going to be envious, I have to be envious of the whole person, not some small aspect of their lives.  It’s a big world and someone, somewhere has it all better than you.  They’re smarter than you, slimmer than you, with a really close, cool family.

And I’m okay with that, too.

One thing that helped me through my own personal envy was . . . cars.  When I lived in Houston, there were really nice cars everywhere.  And by nice, I mean cars that are worth more than my house.  I felt envy.  Then I thought about the car payment that they had to make (I read somewhere that most Mercedes® on the road are not paid for – they’re for show).  That made my four-year-old dad-four door car that I’d bought used seem a LOT better than the Mercedes® driven by the 27 year-old at the stop light next to me.

If you’re a billionaire crime-fighting superhero that found an amulet that gives you super powers but also covers your body in reptilian scales while flying screaming skulls follow you around?  I suppose it’s okay if you buy yourself something nice every once in a while.

To recap:

• The situation doesn’t care. Don’t get mad at it, especially if it’s beyond your control.
• Most things really don’t matter – don’t get hung up on the trivia of now.
• If you won’t remember it next year? It’s probably meaningless.  Don’t sweat it.
• Don’t compare yourself to others, unless they’re clearly awful in everything compared to you. Then gloat.
• Expect that your children will destroy thousands and thousands of dollars of your property and at least a dozen priceless, irreplaceable heirlooms. And burn the counter with hot macaroni.  And write on the bathroom walls.  And . . . oh, wait, those were my kids . . .

Wait, what?  I’m Pop Wilder now.  When did that happen?