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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The good citizen has become the good consumer who is never satisfied with what he or she has. Once, the good citizen was parsimonious, conscientious and acknowledged the value of self-restraint. Nowadays, the good citizen is all-consuming, knows no boundaries and never stops striving to get ahead. If you are satisfied, there is no incentive to acquire more – which, in a consumer society and economy based on us constantly wanting more, makes satisfaction a vice rather than a virtue.
To be liberated, we must be prepared to miss out – in other words, we must will one thing rather than will everything and succumb to an amorphous formlessness.
Being brave is not the same as being reckless or entirely free from anxiety and worries, rather it is a question of daring to do the right thing, even if you fear doing so.
we are defined at least as much by what we do not do as by what we do. Character is about, among other things, the ability to resist, to opt out, to say no.
We only have free will to the extent that we are able to distance ourselves from our impulses, assess them in the light of our values and other considerations, and then make a decision.
Socrates compares human desire to a leaky bucket: no matter how much we fill it, the water leaks out again, leaving only a hole and a craving for more.
The point of Stoicism is that there really are things we cannot change, which is why it is important to learn to live with them instead of engaging in a never-ending pursuit of ways to optimise the self.
From the Stoic perspective, it is not in itself invidious to have desires and dreams, but they would insist that we have a duty to consider the ethical value of those dreams. The point is not that we learn to miss out in order to prove that we have a particularly strong degree of self-control. No, the point is that we should miss out on that which poses a threat to our moral fortitude and psychological integrity, such as constantly hunting for new experiences, relationships and objects that provide a fleeting rush of happiness as we continue to plod away on the hedonic treadmill.
