Stoic – Page 9 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Memorial Day and Memento Mori

“Ron’s sudden death was the catalyst for everything. Deborah told me later that it had been like a wake-up call for her. What people used to call the Memento Mori. Ron’s massive coronary had reminded her that life was just too short to waste any chance of true happiness.” – Men Who Stare At Goats

Philippe de Champaigne’s picture “Vanitas”, which was a Memento Mori – inspired picture – the fleeting life symbolized by the flower, death by the skull, and the amount of time until the casserole comes out of the oven symbolized by the hourglass.

Memorial Day in the United States is meant to commemorate soldiers who died on active duty for the United States armed forces. The total number of dead is about 1 million, although many families use Memorial Day to remember their dead relatives as well, bringing flowers to graves.

It’s also an appropriate time to bring up the concept of Memento Mori. Memento Mori is Latin for “remember death” – which is an admonition to, well, remember death. And this isn’t just about your relatives that have passed on, and not just for the soldiers that died. No, this is also a time to reflect on your own death.

And why should we reflect and remember death?

To start with, this is something that isn’t new. Seneca, the Roman stoic philosopher, said: “No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it. Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.” Throughout the middle ages, the phrase Memento Mori was the lolcat meme of the day, if we put lolcat memes on tombs.

Reflect on death – if you knew that you wouldn’t wake up ever again, what would you do with your remaining hours? This reflection on death has multiple values to you and your character:

It reinforces that which is important to us, here today.
It exposes the frivolous that consume too much of our time.
It shows what’s really of value – the money you made will be less important than the lives you’ve changed.
You don’t have to worry about returning that library book.

All too often we think too little of those who sacrificed all for us. All too often we think too little of how we are spending (or squandering) our own lives.

So, on Memorial Day, by all means salute those who reluctantly laid down their lives for freedom. Spend time in remembrance of relatives who have passed on. And work to understand what is really important in your life.

Besides PEZ®, I mean.

Pizarro, The Economic Failure of Spain, and Why Bad News May Be Good News

“You don’t acquire the kind of wealth your uncle commanded by being like the rest of us.” – John Carter On Mars

I love the idea of people carrying me around everywhere I go. Now how do I become emperor again?

In 1532, Francisco Pizarro, accompanied by a force of less than 200 Spaniards, took on a portion of the main army of the Inca. Why? To defeat the entire Inca nation. The plan was at least partially desperation. To retreat would show weakness. As Cortez had burned his ships years earlier to give his men incentive to defeat the Aztec empire, Pizarro was all in.

Pizarro invited the Incan Emperor, Atahualpa, into a down called Cajamarca. Believing this to be safe since there were only 200 Spaniards, Atahualpa was accompanied “only” by 6,000 of his warriors and generals who were admittedly armed only with small battle axes. The Spaniards had waited, concealed and terrified in Cajamarca, for hours.

As Atahualpa was carried into the central square of the town, his honor guard parted to allow Atahualpa down from his litter. History records that he became angry when a single Friar approached him and asked him pledge fealty to the Spanish king, Charles, and become a Catholic. At the point where Atahualpa enraged, the Spanish sprang from their concealment, attacking the Incans with cannon, gunfire, and sword. The cavalry managed to abduct Atahualpa, and Pizarro himself blocked a sword strike at Atahualpa, catching at least part of the sword on his own hand.

Pizarro wanted Atahualpa as a hostage – a living Atahualpa could be used to give orders. A living Atahualpa could be used to prevent the 55,000 battle-hardened troops outside from rushing the Spaniards. A living Atahualpa could be ransomed.

Fake news, 1532 style: a picture of Pizarro meeting Atahualpa looking like everything is nice and rosy. Not pictured: The battle where Atahualpa lost his entire empire.

Also: Do you have a few minutes to listen to a story about Jesus?

And ransomed he was – for a room, 22’ by 8’ by 7’. Not just any room. But a room that big, filled with gold. And two the same size filled with silver. It’s certain that the gold wouldn’t have been solid, but would have been jewelry and other items. Let’s assume that it was 2/3 filled with air. That still means the gold would have been worth (in today’s dollars) at least $20 billion. The silver wouldn’t even be worth a billion.

Atahualpa was executed, anyway. The King of Spain was reportedly not pleased, but was pretty good with the over $4 billion that was his (minimum) cut of Atahualpa’s treasure. In November of 1533, Pizarro entered Cuzco, the capital of the Mayans as its conqueror. He would serve as governor of what is now Peru. Pizarro was killed in 1541 by the son of an assassinated rival.

Pizarro, with a fine, feathered hat. Makes me want to kill some tropical bird so I can have a cool feather. What, I don’t have to kill one for a feather? Spoilsport. Oh, and Pizarro had two kids with Atahualpa’s wife. She must have been attracted to that fine beard.

But the impact on Spain was enormous. The Conquistadors kept coming, and kept taking gold from the New World for over a century more. All of the treasure went back to Spain, and, initially, paid off the debts of the Spanish government. But it did other things, as well.

Seville, the Spanish city had over 16,000 shops making textiles out of silk in the year 1500, before the gold started to come in from the Americas. The population of Spain stood at (around) 10,000,000 at this time. 200 years after 1500, in 1700? The population of Spain had dropped to around 6,000,000.

What happened?

All of the gold. Such good fortune, right?

Where it would have been pretty rough for a foreign power to have taken over Spain (it was in pretty good shape, militarily) the gold from the New World did the job wonderfully. How?

All of the gold led to a change in the culture and value of Spain. Whereas before, Spain had been an industrious nation, after gold, things changed. Why do it, when you could have someone else do it? There were people in the Netherlands that would gladly build it for you and ship it to Spain. There were people in the Netherlands that would gladly come to Spain to do work that Spaniards wouldn’t do. Begging (among Spaniards) and living off of charity became to be seen as more virtuous than resorting to common work, at least that was the message the common man received from watching the nobility. Spain had traditionally been more than self-sufficient in providing agriculture. In 1578, one observer noted that the lack of production “was not the fault of the land, but was the fault of the people.”

Spain’s military and colonial establishment, however, continued to provide the currency that the country needed even as the country sank into indolence and despair.

And what brought about the despair?

Success.

Success took away the hard lessons in life. The Spanish military took the ambitious young men of Spain and allowed them to seek glory. The rest of Spain? Lived off of the glory. Eventually, the rot of success allowed the United States to completely remove the remaining Spanish colonies from Spain. When our new, steel warships fought against the Spanish? They often fought cannon that were 100 years old, and 70 years out of date.

Success allowed Spain to become an economic shambles. Success teaches no lessons.

In my life, everything that ever made me better was . . . awful. Losing a wrestling match. Being deeply in debt. Getting a divorce.

Losing a wrestling match (2-1, in overtime in 8^th grade) made me want to win. And I worked harder. Next time I wrestled that guy? I pinned him in 20 seconds.

Being in debt. That one mad me reexamine my entire life, or at least the spending associated with it. Each spending decision became a moral choice, since I was living in a constant state of (nearly) not having enough money to make it. There’s nothing immoral about being either rich or poor – it’s what you learn.

Getting a divorce, to me, allowed me to really understand how I’d contributed to the failure of the marriage, realize what I was really looking for in a partner, and allow me to both pick a more suitable wife as well as to become a more suitable husband.

If I had won the lottery or become a rock star at 20, what would I have learned? Well, besides learning what a car upholstered entirely in endangered species would drive like, probably not much. I’ve often said that if I’d been immensely wealthy when I was young, I probably wouldn’t have made it to 30. For whatever reason, I find that adversity and challenge are my friends. Success is nice, but only if it holds a challenge.

Holy cow – maybe the ultimate challenge is beating success?

Oh, Seneca figured that out 2000 years ago:

“Let us too overcome all things, with our reward consisting not in any wreath or garland, not in trumpet-calls for silence for the ceremonial proclamation of our name, but in moral worth, in strength of spirit, in a peace that is won forever once in any contest fortune has been utterly defeated.” – Seneca, Letters

So the next time you feel that you’ve just had a spot of bad luck? It might just be your best luck. Or, if you believe Seneca – no luck at all is required.

Tiny Fight Club, Taleb’s Skin in the Game, and Expensive Female Lawyer Reproduction

“A guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, he was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.” – Fight Club

The Boy and Pugsley square off in a Beta version of Fight Club. Bigfoot is in the background as an observer.

I have a fight club in my basement.

Not an officially sanctioned, Tyler Durden® approved Fight Club. Just a small fight club, mainly involving me, The Boy, Pugsley, and (sometimes) The Mrs.

What is this tiny fight club? Well, it’s wrestling.

Wrestling season ended for The Boy a little sooner than he’d planned – he’s in high school and would rather have gone on from districts. We talked about it, and he was ready to commit to working harder for the coming year – and I read somewhere that “working hard” was correlated with “success.” Sounds like crazy voodoo to me.

But sometimes a hard loss will do that to you much more effectively than a win – when I wrestled, I learned something from each match I lost. Some wins? I didn’t learn a thing. And losing can either break you or motivate you. The Boy sounded motivated.

Given The Boy’s commitment, we immediately started practicing for the next year. Since Pugsley wanted to join us, we threw him in for good measure – he’s five years younger and a bit smaller than The Boy. I will note that The Mrs. has been after me for about two years to take a more rigorous and structured approach to coaching The Boy and Pugsley in wrestling. My excuse was that I didn’t want to interfere with their actual wrestling coaches and the work that they were doing with my kids – what if I taught them moves differently than the coach liked? Yeah, a lame reason, but it was my reason.

But after this year for The Boy, he was ready. He only has so many days left of wrestling, and he committed that he’d work with me to make the most of them. Fair enough, I’d commit to him to work hundreds of hours with him to help him be better. So we started practice. But before we started practice? I started reading, studying, and preparing to coach.

I prepared to start Tiny Fight Club (no, this wasn’t a restart of my failed Midget Hammer Fighting League):

What sort of things should I teach them? In what order? Wrestling is easily the oldest sport known to humanity – men were wrestling each other when we still hadn’t figured out how to knock two rocks together to make a “clunk” sound and way before they’d invented the Nintendo® Switch™.

Why did we wrestle in the murky depths of history? To impress the ladies, sure. Also, because it’s fun. Most importantly, as Jordan Peterson would say, this combat allows us to create a hierarchy, and having that hierarchy is important, as I describe in my perfectly awesome post about Peterson’s book (LINK).

But something more happened. I became engrossed in study about how to coach and what to coach. And Pugsley still had one more tournament left . . . so we had exactly three practices until he would finish out his kid’s wrestling season.

Like The Boy, Pugsley had been, well, stalled in his progress if not taking a few steps backward this year. He just wasn’t getting much better. But we had those three practices. And with them, and in drilling he felt more confident than ever.

The good thing about that last tournament? There were only two people in his bracket. One was Dirk. Pugsley had never even taken Dirk down (where you gain control over your opponent) in the last three years. The other wrestler, Ezekiel, well, Pugsley hadn’t beaten Zeke in two years. Literally he had wrestled these two other boys a dozen times or so in the previous two years and hadn’t beaten either one of them. What was three hours of practice?

In the very first match in his weight, Dirk pinned Ezekiel. Quickly. As was usual. Dirk routinely took first place.

Dirk’s second match was against Pugsley. Pugsley immediately (and with confidence) went out and gained control and got the take down! He was up 2-0. Dirk was in such difficulty (and pain!) he’d done anything he could to get off the mat. Pugsley dominated him for most of the period, then got in a pretty bad position, and then got pinned. But he came off the mat with confidence – he knew what I had coached him in worked – he had been amazing against an opponent he’d never even scored on. The next match he pinned Ezekiel in the first period. Zeke was not pleased – the creampuff he always beat had grown fangs. And Pugsley was sold on our practices.

On the way home he talked about wanting to be a national collegiate wrestling champion. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say, I now had “Skin in the Game” and so did my boys. And it matters.

(The following link doesn’t get me any money as of the time of this writing, but at some point I might monetize it. It’s Taleb. Buy the book, anyway.)

I am thinking about reviewing this book, but reviewing Taleb might prove to be difficult in this blog – it might require five or more posts. We’ll see. Buy it, anyway, and read it.

In the process of working through wrestling with The Boy and Pugsley – I found something interesting (outside of the bruises randomly outcropping on my biceps, forearms, and chest). I felt more energized than I’d felt in ages. The very act of working with The Boy and Pugsley to make them stronger and more skilled improved my attitude about . . . everything. My daily cardio workouts became sharper (and I studied wrestling moves during them). And my muscles started to grow as I kept up with the boys when we lifted after fight club.

But I also had another epiphany.

The combat serves many purposes: It builds confidence. It teaches to never give up. By example, it shows that hard work pays off in success. It bonds fathers to sons. It builds discipline (Pugsley’s respect for me has gone up 372% and his pre-teen surliness has utterly disappeared). These are all traits that will lead (along with intelligence and Stoic virtue (LINK)) to much greater than average social and economic success.

And I’m in much better shape, and I’m learning how to teach The Boy (no, you have to rotate more than 180˚) and Pugsley (no, you have to throw your head through while you get your hips under your shoulders) and The Mrs. (dear, could you make us all some nice sandwiches). I kid. The Mrs. oversees our deadly serious play. When The Boy complained that Pugsley smelled like sour milk, The Mrs. awarded The Boy a penalty point for “Involuntary Lactation.” That caused us all to laugh.

But the epiphany is that the combat pays off down the road in the ultimate Skin in the Game moment: this work is a precursor to reproduction . . . what?

Yes. Being a high status man increases reproduction possibilities. Being a high status woman doesn’t.

Huh?

How does that work??? Check this tweet out:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/973473559933747206/photo/1

I would say that being a high-powered female attorney actually lowers reproduction access for women. The most fertile years for women are in their 20’s – after that, it lowers drastically. By the age of 40? Forget it.

But high status guys? The guys back in the cavemen days that were winning the wrestling matches? They got a chance to reproduce. And 8,000 years ago, science says that only one guy versus 17 women reproduced (LINK). The odds are better now, one guy will get to reproduce for every out 3.3 women that to reproduce. 3.3 to one? Are you kidding me? Nope. High-status guys, only the top third, get to reproduce. I guess that choosy girls all choose the same men.

High status men.

Competition – physical competition is hardwired into the brains and souls of boys. And old men, like me. That’s why I felt so good – I was throwing myself into physical combat for the first time in years, and relishing it. Winning (and coaching well) provides many physical benefits – increased testosterone, brain chemicals and other science-y things in addition to the strength and fitness ability. If you look at the math, social hierarchy is a must for men.

In today’s society, that means a cool job with money. So, in order to have children, i.e., the ultimate Skin in the Game, the behaviors of competition and working long hours to increase income are absolutely necessary for men and are negatively correlated with reproductive success for women.

There’s no wage gap, at least not one based on any sort of discrimination. Thousands (if not more) of years of human breeding have made men drive to succeed – because success is the currency of reproduction.

The final observation for today:

Raising boys is a full contact sport. To allow them to reach their full potential they have to fight. I suspect that many (but not all) cases of ADHD and the other alphabet salads of childhood disorders that have suddenly emerged after existing . . . never, are really just boys not being able to take risks or have a fistfight or nurse a bloody nose or confront a bully – behaviors that bind them into the social hierarchy.

“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” – Fight Club

Oops, I guess I broke the first rule of Fight Club. Again.

Stoics, Fight Club, Wealth, and Virtue

“I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.” – Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is . . . be older than six. And no swords.

Wealth – what is it?

Is it:

Something that we sacrifice our lives for?
Something we obsess about until it controls us?
Something that is never . . . quite enough?
Something we have to have more of than our neighbor?
Something that defines our feelings about ourselves?

I’ll be honest, but there have been times I’ve viewed wealth in more than one of the categories above and acted as such. “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants,” is what Epictetus wrote about 100 A.D. Even more succinctly, Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your (gosh darn) khakis.”

What Epictetus may have looked like. If he were in a comic strip.

I may have it in for Johnny Depp, but Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is my spirit animal (we’ve started a tiny Fight Club in my basement, but I’m not supposed to talk about it – first rule, you know).

I keep coming back to the stoics. What did Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Tyler Durden, and Epictetus think about wealth? The website How To Be A Stoic says (LINK): “. . . they classed everything that lies outside of virtue as either preferred or dispreferred indifferent. To the first group belong things like wealth, health, education, and high social standing; to the second things like poverty, sickness, ignorance, and low social standing. These things were preferred insofar it is normal for a human being to pursue them because it makes her life more comfortable, and dispreferred insofar it makes her life less comfortable. But they are “indifferent” in the sense that they are irrelevant to our ability to exercise the virtues . . . .”

So, the Stoics were indifferent to wealth, but it was better to have it than not. You could be virtuous and poor, or you could be virtuous and rich. If you were rich, perhaps you could share your virtues even further than if you were poor – so it was preferred to have money. And Marcus Aurelius was emperor – it was hard to be richer than that, even for Jeff Bezos. Seneca? He was really wealthy, too. And since they are some of the thinkers that literally define what Stoicism is, well, wealth and power isn’t off limits, but the goal was to live a virtuous life.

So what does wealth signify?

Mostly, wealth is like stored energy – it’s a potential. A child may have a wealth of days before it, and an old miser a wealth of cash, cash that he might trade every dime of for just one more taste of youth. And a six year old would trade the ages of 18-30 for six Cadbury Cream Eggs®, which is another reason that kids can’t vote.

Steve Jobs certainly traded some of his wealth for additional days of life without having to cheat a six year old in a candy deal – he could honestly say he could be at any liver in just a few hours (having a private jet and all) and he could afford to have a staff of people looking for ways to improve Steve’s chance of getting one. Heck, Apple® has a project to clone Steve from a clump of his cells that they found in his comb – they just keep getting Ben Affleck copies instead. Thankfully, Ben Affleck is not considered by the state of California to be a “living human.”

Steve’s wealth did buy him time – a few years, perhaps. And Apple will soon sell the Affleck clones as iBens©.

Choices. Wealth buys choices. And one of the choices is always . . . not choosing right now. The wonderful thing about being rich, is you don’t take any offers you don’t want. If have to sell my car – I need the money for a new kidney for my Yosemite Sam© PEZ® dispenser, well, I have to have that money now. I can’t wait. I have to take the offer I get now.

If I have wealth and can afford to buy new, black market PEZ® kidneys for cash? Well, I don’t have to sell my car. In fact, if I have cash, I can look for people who have to sell kidney cars for PEZ© kidney cash to get a bargain.

I am willing to bet a large amount of PEZ™ that this is the first time the last sentence has been written in any language.

Anyhow. Wealth buys choices, and wealth creates the conditions for more wealth.

But what creates wealth? Well, in reality – the same virtues the stoics upheld (from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – LINK):

“The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

“Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness.
“Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing.
“Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and industriousness.
“Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control.”

If you will look – many (but not all!) of these virtues, if followed well and long enough, will lead to . . . wealth.

But perhaps Epictetus was right: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

And then there was Tyler Durden: “It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet or a comforter is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? We are consumers. We’re the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.”

So, be virtuous. Get wealthy. But don’t make the wealth the focus . . . it’s not the money, after all – it’s all the stuff.

Simple Way to Avoid a Heart Attack, Roman Style

“Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself? What is its nature?” – Silence of the Lambs

So, if I’m reading this right, I’m not supposed to stress out the alligators? I’m not supposed to stress out the 400 pound armored killing machine? Okay, getting right on that.

I ran across a health article about heart disease the other day by an actual medical doctor, not an amateur Civil War surgeon like me (Motto: Splinter in your toe? Amputate.). Dr. Mercola’s theory was simple, that stress causes inflammation which causes the damage that kills you. Here’s a link to his article (LINK). Now this article was on a political site, so it wasn’t even related to the main focus of the site, but I read the article and immediately thought of you Internet. And also me, since I was looking for something to write about today.

It just might be that stress is a problem for you that actually might kill you. It also just so happens that I have a 2000 year old solution for you – all bright and shiny since I dug it up in my backyard last night:

“Your present opinion founded in understanding, your present conduct directed to good, and your present contentment with everything that results. That’s enough.” – Marcus Aurelius, Mediations 9.6

Okay, okay, you say, it’s John Wilder Talking About Dead Romans Again. And you’re right. Because they were ever so much more like us than you might imagine. Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic. And he was also Emperor. The book he wrote, Meditations, was just that. His thoughts that he meditated on. He wasn’t writing it for us, he was writing it to sort out his own thoughts and feelings.

Yeah, a Roman Emperor, able to command power few before or since ever had – King, President, Pope, and General all rolled up into one – had to work out his thoughts. This makes sense, because Marcus was the last of the Five Good Emperors (spoiler alert) and thought himself something of a philosopher. It’s like Vladimir Putin took time out of his busy schedule of wrestling bears while shirtless and dating Olympic gymnasts to attempt to deeply study and understand a philosophy of living that directly worked towards the quote from Marcus, up above.

But the quote above encapsulates in just a simple two sentences the core of the Stoic philosophy. Let’s look at how it can help you reduce stress.

“Your present opinion founded in understanding . . .”

If I were to take liberties, I would re-write that one, “Your present opinion founded in truth.”

Dealing with reality was the core of the philosophy – that’s why it came first. And if you are dealing with truth, you’re dealing in certainty. You’re not lying to yourself.

“your present conduct directed to good . . .”

So, you’ve studied and know the truth. Now you have the opportunity to turn your work towards the good. You’re doing the right thing, the right way.

“and your present contentment with everything that results.”

You did the right thing for the right reasons. You have purpose, clarity, and are taking positive action. And, the best part? You don’t have to win to win. Whatever happens, happens. If it didn’t work? You tried. Be content. If it did work? Great! This is a formula for a low stress life. The Stoics got to the core of it – things have meaning because we place meaning on them. We think that the world should be a series of results, instead of a series of truthful opinions and actions directed toward good outcomes.

What happens, happens.

I know this is hard, because every day when I try to divorce myself mentally from the outcome of an action that I’ve taken, and just be cool when it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to work out. The worst part? When I get upset about something that didn’t go my way . . . that didn’t even matter.

Perspective that I need to remember. Most things don’t matter – at all.

Back to Marcus:

Marcus Aurelius had a really, really awful son. Commodus. So bad Commodus’ wife poisoned him. So bad that Commodus’ best friend strangled him. So bad that they had Joaquin Phoenix play Commodus in Gladiator. Did Marcus have a clue that Commodus would be so awful? Probably. But he did everything he could. And his book has reached across centuries to us.

So, he did the right thing for the right reasons. And it worked.

After a fashion. To quote Marcus again: “That’s enough.”

John Wilder is not a doctor. Go see your doctor before you take medical advice from a blog written in a basement . . . .

The Chinese Farmer, Kipling, Marcus Aurelius, and You

“I’ve come back. Give me a drink, Brother Kipling. Don’t you know me?” – The Man Who Would Be King

Kipling in 1895. Good heavens, what a handsome mustache! No wonder the English ruled most of the world – any group that can create such handsome whiskers deserves to run the place.

I first heard this from a friend in 2002 or so . . . there were several of us that would get together to talk about ideas and concepts, and one of the participants told this story:

There is an old Chinese story about a farmer. One night, there was a terrible storm. The wind blew so hard, it opened up his corral, and his horses got out.

“Bad luck!” said his friends.

“Good luck, bad luck. Who can say?” replied the farmer.

The next week, his horses, lonely for home, came back. But while they were loose, they got in with a group of wild horses. The wild horses came home with them. The farmer now had twice as many horses.

“Good luck!” said his friends.

“Good luck, bad luck. Who can say?” replied the farmer.

A wild horse is good to no one, so the farmer’s son began to work on breaking the horses. Most of them were no problem, but one particularly fierce horse bucked the farmer’s son off. The farmer’s son broke his leg.

“Bad luck!” said his friends.

“Good luck, bad luck. Who can say?” replied the farmer.

The next week, the Emperor, having decided to go off to war due to a very dangerous threat against the empire, marched with his troops through the farmer’s town. They called up in a draft all of the able bodied young men to accompany them to war. The farmer’s son could not go – his leg was broken.

I think you can see where this is going.

But the story does stop there (thankfully!), though you see that it could keep going indefinitely, probably ending up with the farmer’s son constructing an evil robot army to enslave the human race that ends up saving us instead by stopping the invasion of the mole people from below South Carolina. Oops! I think that’s the plot of the sequel to Pacific Rim.

Source: Uproxx, by porkythefirst

Despite my firm belief in the power of self-determination, even I’ve got to admit that sometimes you just have no idea how an action will impact your future – what will the result be of a decision you make today. Opposite effects aren’t unknown.

For example, brush your teeth every day in order to keep them longer, right? Well, at one point they used abrasives in toothpaste in order to scrub off that yellow tint that evolves over time. Unfortunately, over time you weren’t brushing your teeth – you were sanding them down to nubs.

That’s an extreme example, but here’s another:

You work really hard at your job. You’re smart, and come up with innovations to make things work a little bit better. Your boss notices, but so does his boss. Rocket ship to the top, right? I mean, at least a promotion?

No. Your boss is lazy and scared that he’ll lose his job. The last thing they want to see is you breaking the curve at work. He is now focused on . . . . getting rid of you. Again, the opposite of what you’d expect, and the opposite of what your work merits.

Which brings me to this:

by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too.
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make a heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

I am an unapologetic Kipling fan. And in this poem is more good philosophy than you’ll find anywhere. Well, anywhere but here.

At a certain point, you realize that you’re not going to be a trillionaire. Or even a billionaire. You have to settle for what you’ve done and not feel regret that you’ve not transformed the world entirely. In reading history, it wasn’t just one of the best poets ever to live who understood that, but also, over a thousand years earlier people understood it.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Pretty cool statement. From? A frigging Roman Emperor, Caesar Marcus Aurelius. I’ve mentioned him before. His book, Meditations was something he wrote for himself. He didn’t write it for other people to read to see what a smarty-pants he was. No, these were his private thoughts.

And as Caesar, he had more power than most people on Earth have ever had. And he still worried about stuff. He worried about doing a good job. His back hurt him. He worried that he wasn’t being a good dad (he wasn’t – his son was horrible and was destined to be played by Joaquin Phoenix – a curse of history).

But Marcus, the unnamed Chinese farmer, and Rudyard all had it tuned into the same thing – we can’t understand exactly what the outcome will be. We can only go out there and do our best – break the horse, fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds of distance run, or do our best to run the most complex civilization ever devised.

So, today’s your day. Go out there, and run as hard as you can. Maybe, just maybe, one day you can have a mustache that will rival Kipling . . . .

Seneca, Stoics, Money and You

“My heart attack didn’t kill me, so why act like it did? See, Tim, it was the Roman philosopher Seneca who said “if we let things terrify us, then life is not worth living.” – Home Improvement

Seneca could definitely use a makeover, but would probably be the last person who cares about a makeover, since he’s willing to be dead and made of marble.

Source- I, Calidius CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What is stoicism, and why does it matter for your money?

From Wikipedia’s definition of Stoicism . . . “the path to happiness for humans is found in accepting this moment as it presents itself, by not allowing ourselves to be controlled by our desire for pleasure or our fear of pain, by using our minds to understand the world around us and to do our part in nature’s plan, and by working together and treating others in a fair and just manner.”

What on Earth does that have to do with money?

Everything.

Let me explain . . . with a story I’ve used before:

When I was young, we had a subscription to Reader’s Digest (which, really, might have been influenced by the CIA for a time – google it). For those that haven’t heard about it, it’s where they take articles (and even books!) and edit out the boring bits and republish them. It’s like someone printed a tiny bit of the Internet.

Pop Wilder always said, “I can read my own articles and decide what’s important.”

And yet? I always found an issue of Reader’s Digest in the bathroom that only he and I used, and I know that I wasn’t carting them in there.

But in Reader’s Digest they had features as well as the articles, one of which was “Laughter is the Best Medicine.” In it were nice, clean stories that were, well, funny. Some of them were even taken from real life. My favorite was about a five year old girl and her eight year old brother.

They were playing in the backyard (which kids used to do prior to the Internet). The boy was holding a tin can on top of the little girl’s head and smacking it with a rock.

Mother: “Tommy, what ARE you doing????”

Little Girl: “Mommy, it’s okay. He’s almost done.”

I keep coming back to that image. It’s like life.

Sometimes the problems we go through are pointless. Sometimes they are downright silly. Life keeps smacking a rock into the top of your head. And when it stops, you feel so good.

Another example:

A friend of mine went through Army Ranger School (a long time ago). There were two out of their class that passed. Two. The other guy was a chaplain. The last ordeal had been an extended duration hike with little food. They had survived. They had made it back to base. But . . . it was five hours until they would be released from training, and couldn’t go to mess hall (cafeteria) to eat.

They climbed into a dumpster. They found Doritos® covered with ants. They brushed the ants off and ate the Doritos™.

And this relates back to money, too.

Seneca was a Roman. I use the word “was” because he’s dead. Nero ordered Seneca to kill himself (spoiler, Seneca totally did kill himself) back in moldy old 65 A.D. (Not “Common Era” but good old Anno Domini).

Seneca was rich. How rich? Rich enough that he could have purchased six hundred million loaves of bread. And that didn’t count his real estate, which included at least six Sonic® drive-ins and three strip malls in Omaha.

I’m not even sure where I would put six hundred million loaves of bread. Certainly my pantry would fill up after 2 million or so. But outside of bread (food), the man had a lot of bread (money). And thought a LOT about it.

Seneca: “He is a great man who uses clay dishes as if they were silver; but he is equally great who uses silver as if it were clay.”

In the end, a dish is a dish, and as long as it comes out of the dishwasher without last night’s Kraft® Garfield® Macaroni and Cheese, well, deal with it.

And a car is a car. I went to a stand-up comedian one night with a friend, his wife, and a blind date. (Yes, this is you, Chris – the friend, not the blind date). The comedian was making a joke about cars. The reason, he thought, that we had so many traffic fatalities was that we didn’t make cars out of Nerf® stuff.

He looked, from the stage, down at me.

“You sir, you look like you drive a big-ass truck.”

Me: “No, it’s a Toyota® Tercel™.”

Him, loudly into a microphone with everyone in the room listening: “Well, you must be the world’s BIGGEST pussy.”

Needless to say, the blind date ended right there since I didn’t go and beat him up. And, yes, I probably should have answered “yes” when he asked if I drove a truck. But . . . like Seneca, a car to me is . . . just a car. The first virtue of a thing is in its utility. Does it do the job? Sometimes duct tape is the proper solution.

From the standpoint of a Stoic, even a wickedly rich one like Seneca, taking pride in personal possessions was to be looked down upon. And, yes, his wife had earrings that cost more than a house. And he had solid silver nose hair trimmers. And we know this because he wrote about them. But, did he care? I don’t think so. He bought the stuff because he could, not because the stuff had power over him. I’m certain that he understood that he didn’t own the “stuff” but just had it until he died, so it had no power over him.

But we let stuff have power over us. Does the neighbor have a nicer car? Do they have a better stereo? It’s normal, natural to envy that. It’s totes Stoic if you go, “good for you!” and not want to go and buy an even better car because you’re good with the one you have.

When I was in Houston I would be stopped at a traffic light, surrounded by cars much nicer than my 2006 Ford® Taurusdadcar™. And I would wonder how many of them owned their car. And I wonder how much heartache was caused by that REALLY BADASS Mercedes® next to me when monthly payment time came around. And, truthfully? If it was being driven during work hours by a girl, I wondered how long she’d be with her husband after the money ran out.

So, for me? Being Stoic about the stuff I own is a sanity preserver. If I had to worry that The Mrs. would leave me if I didn’t have an awesome car, or, honestly, cared at all about what my neighbors thought, life would have a stress it doesn’t need at all.

But Seneca went further. He said, get rich all you want, but don’t do it in a way that’s “stained by blood.” My interpretation? You got you money honestly, without forcing it out of other people.

How does this play out? Well, let’s look at . . . Obama phones. Regardless of how you feel about them, the money that comes to purchase them, and to provide monthly service is forcefully taken from others. Don’t think that it’s forceful? Try not paying your taxes and then you’ll learn that the IRS is not your benevolent aunt who bakes cookies. Unless your aunt works for the IRS. In which case, please tell me the rule on deductibility of capital losses from a prior year against current year capital gains. Just kidding, I use TurboTax®, which is probably nicer to me than your aunt.

I digress. But I think Seneca would think it was wrong to take money from one person (me) without their consent to give to another (Obama phone users) and taking a cut in the middle. It’s wrong. Unfortunately, it’s our government’s current business model (LINK) and Elon Musk’s (LINK).

Last? Seneca thought you should be generous. Bill Gates is certainly living up to that, shooting money out like a lawn sprinkler at causes he likes. And I tip well at the restaurant.

But the biggest danger of generosity? It has to be moral. Give a man money and he will take it. But he will resent you, because you didn’t give him more.

Let a man (or, I guess we let women earn money nowadays, and even own property and vote) earn money? That will provide both support for him (or her or it, whatever the cool kids say nowadays) and self-worth. So, generosity is good. Charity is corrosive.

The really cool thing about being a stoic is realizing the beauty you can find in the weird, small bits of life that you often ignore. The smoothness of a straw. The stark sharpness of the edges of the clouds on a crisp winter night. The wear marks on a keyboard you’ve typed a million words on. The ability to take satisfaction out of nearly every experience you have is there.

If you let it. And if Tommy will stop pounding the tin can on the top of your head with a rock for a moment.