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April 14 - April 20, 2019
The measure of what is necessary is what is useful. But what standard can limit the superfluous? It is for this reason that men sink themselves in pleasures, and then cannot do without them when once they have become accustomed to them; and it is for this reason they are most wretched – that they have reached such a pass that what was once superfluous to them has become indispensable.
Natural desires are finite; those born of false opinion have no place to stop.
There is no terminus to what is false. When you are travelling on a road, there must be an end; but wanderings have no limit.
The desires that have limits come from Nature. The ones that run away from us and never have an end are our own. Poverty in material things is easy to cure; poverty of the soul, impossible.
Where necessity ends, curiosity begins; and no sooner are we supplied with every thing that nature can demand, than we sit down to contrive artificial appetites.
Disgust with possession. A related but distinct Stoic law of desire: having a thing tends to bring about indifference or contempt towards it. Sometimes this is because finally possessing what one wanted allows its unimportance to be exposed.
To obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless; we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past. Schopenhauer, On the Vanity of Existence (1851)
Do you not realize that all things lose their force because of familiarity?
nothing can strongly strike or affect us, but what is rare or sudden. The most important events, when they become familiar, are no longer considered with wonder or solicitude, and that which at first filled up our whole attention, and left no place for any other thought, is soon thrust aside into some remote repository of the mind, and lies among other lumber of the memory, overlooked and neglected.
Such is the emptiness of human enjoyment, that we are always impatient of the present. Attainment is followed by neglect, and possession by disgust; and the malicious remark of the Greek epigrammatist on marriage may be applied to every other course of life, that its two days of happiness are the first and the last. Johnson, The Rambler no. 207 (1752)
“There are two days when a woman is a pleasure: the day one marries her and the day one carries out her dead body.”
For what will they do to us? What they can do, we don’t care about; what we care about, they cannot do.
Solving the equation in this way (from the right-hand side rather than the left, as we might think of it) is standard Stoic procedure. Freedom is attained not by satisfying desires but by removing them. Epictetus, Discourses 4.1.175
No one can have whatever he wants. What he can do is not want what he doesn’t have, and cheerfully enjoy what comes his way. Seneca, Epistles 123.3
When that renowned Pittacus, whose fame for bravery and for wisdom and justice was great, was entertaining some guests, his wife entered in a rage and upset the table; his guests were dismayed, but Pittacus said, “Every one of us has some trouble. He that has only mine is doing very well indeed.” Plutarch, On Tranquility of Mind 11 (471b)
When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped. Johnson, Letter to Hester Thrale (1770)
