I think this is why lots of people are unhappy nowadays. Think about life in a small community. It’s easy to be the guy who is special because he’s the best at baking, or juggling, or playing an instrument, or telling stories. Whatever it is. Wanting to be especially good at something and recognised for it seems like a pretty basic human need to me. How is anyone going to feel special now when everyone’s seen a hundred YouTube videos of people doing your special thing infinitely better than you ever will? No wonder people get addicted to ‘fake specialness’ at work. Relationships can also make people feel special. But the nagging feeling that you’re not REALLY special may remain...
It's almost like the problem is wanting to be special? Stoicism and tangential philosophies are more critically important than ever, in my opinion. I've also found a great deal of benefit from not participating in social media.
EDIT: There's a related and quite important concept in the contemporary well-being discourse often referred to as 'the dispassionate pursuit of passion [or success]'. I think many of the people who show up on HN would benefit from understanding it. Choosing to not desire being special is not the same thing as being inert. There is a balancing point. Here's a resource (albeit maybe a bit too self-helpy) that talks about this: https://www.happinessacademy.eu/blog-en/the-6th-happiness-si....
You desire to LIVE ‘according to Nature’? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, ‘living according to Nature,’ means actually the same as ‘living according to life’—how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature ‘according to the Stoa,’ and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise— and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is selftyranny—Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? ... But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to ‘creation of the world,’ the will to the causa prima.
I don’t really subscribe to stoicism (and a lot, but not all, of mindfulness and CBT) for precisely this reason: it seems to me to be telling people that it doesn’t matter if their needs aren’t being met, the real problem is that they have any needs. If it helps you personally, that’s great! But to me stoicism texts often feel like they’re written by some dismissive parent, the kind who would just tell you “only the boring get bored” instead of playing with you when you were a kid :)
To me stoicism is helpful in the sense of the advice one gets in jujitsu: If taking one grip on something isn't getting you the leverage you want, don't grip it harder, let go and take a different grip.
Stoicism can't help if you're just getting traumatized, but a lot of "I feel awful about the world generally" sentiment boils down to having a tense grip on one's worldview, a rigid set of norms leading to the judgment that it is all wrong and terrible and thus to a kind of flagellatory self-harm. Nature as a whole, on the other hand, is indifferent - the "is" instead of the "ought". We learn many oughts when we're young, but they all deserve examination.
It's interesting that you say that. Bertrand Russell writes in "The History of Western Philosphy" that the backdrop against which Stoicism (and Epicureanism for that matter) first flourished was a Greek civilization in decline. Life was becoming harder and harder for a majority of people, so people sought refuge in these two philosophies.
Hmm I think I wasn't clear enough with "Stoicism and tangential philosophies". I didn't mean to imply any one philosophy is necessarily a definitive prescription. Rather, they include various good ideas that should be borrowed and amalgamated into a composite that best fits the individual.
> Wanting to be especially good at something and recognised for it seems like a pretty basic human need to me
You would be surprised. I for one I know I don't want to be "especially good at anything", I've started calling this recently "the George Costanza-way of looking at life", when I was younger I was calling it after a very great novel I had read as a teenager, Musil's "The Man Without Qualities" [1]
My guess is that wider and more open communities only make it easier for everyone to become "special" at their own little thing, with their own little (but still quite large given the scale we're looking at!) following of admirers. But most people are failing to recognize this, because they expect the kind of dynamic that would apply in a tiny community - where you can be "the best" at something as broadly defined as 'telling stories', and be respected for that.
