More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
have? To give up on life entirely would be like refusing to play a game because we lose sometimes, as if the game would even be worth playing if we knew we were going to win every time we played. There is courage in facing the realities of pessimism and there is strength to be formed in its name. We must be pessimistic about life’s conditions in order to face their realities, but we must also be optimistic about our ability to face their realities and form strength, meaning, and experience through them.
Perhaps there are no ultimate answers in philosophy, perhaps there never will be, but there are no ultimate answers in music, in art, in a beautiful landscape, or in a conversation with a friend, and yet, I know of no one who does not find value, insight, love, and solace in all of these things.
No matter our efforts, every time we believe we have some understanding or control over life, like water in the palm of the hand, the tighter we squeeze, the more it eludes our grip.
“Zen is trying to point to the physical universe so that you can look at it without forming ideas about it.”
the harder one tries, the harder one flails, the more entrenched one becomes.
Stoicism argues that the sign of a truly successful person is someone who can be ok without the things he or she typically desires or depends on for comfort.
“Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.”
“The wise man,” Seneca wrote, “is neither raised up by prosperity nor cast down by adversity; for always he has striven to rely predominantly on himself, and to derive all joy from himself.”
We seem to be some part of the punch line to a cruel joke.
“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”
Life Is Not Short, We Just Waste Most of It
It’s not that we have a short time to live but that we waste most of it. Lucius Annaeus Seneca
It is inevitable that life will be not just very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. They do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it.
Seneca believed that one should spend their time fulfilling their duties and responsibilities, enjoying any wealth and fortune that might come of them, but not work for the purpose of social status or material success beyond one’s minimal needs, because beyond almost everything else, he argued for allocating as much time as possible to leisure—more specifically, a particular type of well-focused leisure in which one finds tranquility, introspection, and stillness.
I find leisure in writing.
I don’t come away from listening to a beautiful piece of music having learned anything concrete or academic about the world, but nonetheless, with the right song, I often feel I have learned all there is to know.
What makes the sad song that I listen to when I’m in my worst of moods work is that it validates my feelings and transmutes them rather than denies them.
Find the River is that song for me.
They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
“If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how,” Nietzsche wrote.
In other words, if someone sees life as negative or meaningless, how can they create goals that have any purpose?
Dealing With Regrets (& What You Might Regret)
I need this.
There is a more obvious reading of Cioran that can reasonably come off as if it were created by someone who outright hates life and lives with a constant bitterness toward everyone and everything.
In one of Kafka’s most famous novels, The Trial, the protagonist Josef K. is suddenly arrested at his home one morning. The officers do not inform Joseph of why he is being arrested, and he is forced through a long, absurd trial in which nothing is really explained or makes much sense. The trial is riddled with corruption and disorderliness, and by the end of the novel, after having meandered through the entire thing, Josef is never told why he was arrested, and yet, he remains guilty of the crime he is charged with.
This is how I feel.
We are born into this world without choosing—without choosing to be born, without choosing the parents we are born to, our location in time and space we are born at, the bodies we are born into, and all the rest.
And soon, to paraphrase existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, we will begin to face the problem of choosing what we do with what’s been done to us.
As humans, we exist with an innate desire for meaning, reason, and order, but yet, we simultaneously exist in a universe that appears to lack all of the above.
Reality Is Just an Illusion We All Agree On
We become angry about everything because we refuse to let ourselves be sad about some things.
In his book, The Denial of Death, twentieth-century cultural anthropologist and writer Ernest Becker argued that death, and more precisely, our denial of death, is the primary, underpinning motivational force responsible for the majority of human behavior.
the more one tries to remove or escape the negative experience of life, the more negative it becomes. Rather, the more one faces it willingly and intentionally, the stronger and more equipped one becomes—the more meaningful and positive the pain and hardship can be made to feel.
It’s not that Bukowski didn’t try, it’s that he didn’t try to be something that he wasn’t.
“if you’re going to try, go all the way.”
“Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness,”
We should want to focus our efforts on intentionally doing as much good in the world as we can, trying to change it for the better.
