The invisible man

Eskişehir, Türkiye

Wednesday (Çarşamba) 25 December (Aralık) 2024

“There is such a sameness in my life at present it is not worthwhile to keep a journal.“

Nicholas Cresswell, Monday 13 October 1777

Above: British diarist Nicholas Cresswell (1750 – 1804)

Cresswell was the son of a landowner and sheep farmer in Crowden-le-Booth, Edale, Derbyshire.

Above: Holy Trinity Parish Church, Edale, Derbyshire, England

In 1774, at the age of 24, he sailed to Virginia after becoming acquainted with a native of Edale, who was now resident in Alexandria.

Above: George Washington Masonic Monument, Alexandria, Virginia, USA

For the next three years Cresswell kept a journal of his experiences, along with comments on political and social issues.

He described slaves in Maryland dancing to a banjo, fashioned out a gourd, as “something in the imitation of a guitar, with only four strings“.

After a failed attempt to receive a provincial commission from Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s British governor, during the American Revolutionary War, Cresswell returned to Edale to resume farming.

Above: John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunsmore (1730 – 1809)

Cresswell died in Idridgehay in 1804.

Above: St. James Church, Idridgehay, Derbyshire, England

I think of Migjeni, the Albanian poet who wrote about the poverty of the years he lived in the mountain village of Puka, conveying the indifference of the wealthy classes to the suffering of the people.

In 1936, he was transferred to Puka and began his activities as the headmaster of the rundown school there.

The clear mountain air did him some good, but the poverty and misery of the people of Puka was overwhelming.

Many children came to school barefoot and hungry.

Teaching was interrupted for long periods because of outbreaks of contagious diseases.

After 18 difficult months in the mountains, he was obliged to put an end to his career in order to seek medical treatment for himself.

Above: Puka, Albania

The main theme of Migjeni was misery and suffering, a reflection of the life he saw and lived.

His poetry was of acute social awareness and despair.

While previous generations of poets had sung of the beauties of the Albanian mountains and the sacred traditions of the nation, Migjeni opened his eyes to the harsh realities of life, to the appalling misery, disease and poverty he discovered all around him.

He was a poet of despair who saw no way out, who cherished no hope that anything but death could put an end to suffering:

“I suffer from the child whose father cannot buy him a toy.

I suffer from a young man who burns with unslaked sexual desire.

I suffer from the middle-aged man drowning in the apathy of life.

I suffer from the old man who trembles at the prospect of death.

I suffer from the peasant struggling with the soil.

I suffer from the worker crushed by iron.

I suffer from the sick suffering from all the diseases of the world.

I suffer with man.“

He paints a grim portrait of earthly existence:

Sombre nights, tears, smoke, thorns and mud.

Rarely does a breath of fresh air or a vision of nature seep through the gloom.

There is only indignation and the clenched fist – a strangled crushed will longing to transform itself into ardent desire.

“We show our consolation only in tears.

Our inheritance from all these years is misery, because within the womb of the Universe, our world is a tomb, where mankind is condemned to sneak like snakes, their will squeezed and broken in the fist of a giant.

One eye glitters with distilled drops of the deepest pain, glimmering from far across the vale of tears.

Sometimes an instinctive pulse of frustrated thought flashes out across the spheres seeking an outlet for anger overwrought, but the head sags and the sorrowing eye is hid and a solitary tear squeezes through the lid, rolls down and off the face, a single drop of rain.

And from the tiny raindrop of that tear, a man is born again.

And each such man must take his fate into his own hands, hoping for the slightest victory and seek out distant lands where all the roads are laid with thorns and on every side walled in by gravestones all besmeared with tears and lunatics who, silent, grin.“

Above: Albanian poet Millosh Gjergj Nikolla (aka Migjeni) (1911 –1938)

“My name is Hachiro.

I am 26 years old and I am one of the proverbial salarymen of Japan, part of a culture of nonstop work.

Salarymen are basically white collar workers.

We are hired for life by a corporation.

Our incomes are salary-based.

I believe that we are probably the most hard-working employees in the world.

I have been living this life for five years now and it isn’t getting any easier, but it is not good to complain.

We all need our jobs.

In order to have a career as a salaryman we have to toe the line, but after five years life has become an endless round of repetitive meetings and business lunches, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

I would love to step off the treadmill, but if I did, I would have nowhere to go.

In Japan, most people view jobs as jobs for life and never even dream of applying to a different company for a change of job.

Leaving a job is seen as a failure and lack of commitment.

If someone is crazy enough to leave his job, it is highly unlikely that he will be hired by another company.

I am a good and loyal worker following company policy to the letter, not daring to stand out from the crowd or to be different.

In other cultures one plans to stand out, to make one’s mark and to be noticed by senior management, but it is not like that here in Japan.

Here conformity is bred into us from the time we are small.

As children our lives are usually already planned out before us by our fathers.

We are expected to follow in our fathers’ shoes.

Working hard as children is essential if we want to be able to go to a good school and have a secure job for life.

By the time we start our working lives, we are already conditioned to a culture which doesn’t include time to relax or time for personal development.

An average day in the life of a salaryman includes no room for flexibility or a personal life.

For those of us who are married, time with our wives to delegated to Sundays and special holidays.

Commuting is an integral part of our lives too.

I spend about 15 hours a week commuting.

The number of hours I work usually exceeds 75 hours per week.

Most of us start around 0900 in the morning through until 2100 or 2300 at night Monday to Friday, then 0900 through to 1700 or 1900 on Saturdays.

When I stop and contemplate my life and my future, I realize that I am just existing, not living, and I cannot see anything changing in the future.

Our only real escape from the mundane boredom of everyday life is drinking with other salarymen on a Saturday night.

As a kind of escapism, we party hard after working in completely non-stimulating jobs with no hope of salvation all week.

At least for a few hours at the end of the week we try to escape from the reality of our never changing mediocre lives.”

“Salaryman” is an originally Japanese word for salaried workers.

In Japanese popular culture, it is portrayed as a white collar worker who shows unwavering loyalty and commitment to his employer, prioritizing work over everything else in their life often at the expense of their family.

Above: Flag of Japan

Salarymen are expected to work long hours, whether overtime is paid or not.

They socialize with colleagues and bosses, including singing karaoke, drinking and visiting hostess bars.

Salarymen typically enter a company after graduating from college and stay with corporation for the duration of their career.

In conservative Japanese culture, becoming a salaryman is a typical career choice for young men as parents map out their son’s education path in order to make sure they can attend a prestigious university which in turn will lead to recruitment by a major company.

Those who do not take this career path are regarded as living with a stigma and less prestige.

On the other hand, the word “salaryman” is sometimes used with derogatory connotation for his total dependence on his employer and lack of individuality.

Other popular concepts surrounding salarymen include karoshi – death from overwork.

The most common medical causes of karoshi deaths are heart attacks and strokes due to stress and malnourishment or fasting.

Mental stress from the workplace can also cause workers to commit suicide (karojisatsu).

Karoshi is also widespread in other parts of Asia.

Deaths from overwork are a worldwide occurrence.

The death toll is expected to increase in the future.

Employees cannot work for 12 or more hours a day, six to seven days a week, year after year, without suffering physically as well as mentally.

A typical description of the salaryman is a male white-collar employee who typically earns his salary based on individual abilities rather than on seniority.

Companies typically hire the salaryman straight out of high school.

They are expected to stay with the company until retirement at age 60.

As a reward for their loyalty, companies rarely fire salarymen except in special dire circumstances.

Once a salaryman reaches age 30, they are typically promoted to their first supervisor role (kacho) overseeing new hires who are younger than them.

Traditional Japanese companies do not allow employees to supervise people who are older than themselves due to respect.

At age 40 they would become a bacho (department head).

Between 40 and 50 they would be promoted to senior management (although these posts are considered middle management, below the top executives / directors.)

Salarymen retire at age 60.

Underperforming employees in the over-40 age bracket are sidelined with some of their responsibilities taken away, although they do not formally receive a pay cut or a demotion.

They are the madogiwa-zoku – the window tribe.

It is ımportant to treat madogiwa-zoku well, because many young people think about their future in terms of the way these older people are treated, in line with business orientation where employees are expected to show loyalty to their companies and be shown loyalty in return.

No longer productive employees are kept around to raise the morale of productive employees, since the young and productive would be able to look forward to the day in which they too could sit by the window and collect a salary for doing nothing.

Salarymen are known for working long hours, sometimes over 80 hours per week.

Often because of his busy work schedule, the salaryman does not have time to raise a family.

His work becomes a lifelong commitment.

There is also a belief that the amount of time spent at the workplace correlates to the perceived efficiency of the employee.

As a result of this intense work-driven lifestyle, salarymen may be more likely to suffer from mental or physical health problems, including heart failure or suicide.

A salaryman‘s typical outfit consists of a dark suit, a white shirt and a simple tie in neutral colours like navy, black or grey.

Dressing in such a manner is not only part of professionalism, but also following the cultural emphasis on group harmony where dress uniformly shows everyone belongs to a team as opposed to standing out which is often seen as potentially disruptive to this harmony.

Companies often have specific dress codes.

Employees follow these guidelines as part of their role.

There is a certain expectation among the middle and upper classes for Japanese people to become salarymen.

For many young Japanese men, accepting anything less than becoming a salaryman and conforming to its ideal is considered a failure, not only of him, but also of his parents.

The life of a salaryman revolves around work.

The activities that he does outside of his working hours typically involve his coworkers, which lessens the distance between him and work.

Due to this expectation, there have been a variety of derogatory names given to salarymen to ridicule them:

• shachiku (corporate livestock)
• kaisha no inu (company’s dog)
• kigyou senshi (corporate soldier)

Extreme pressure on salarymen can lead to death by overwork (karoshi).

Salarymen feel intense pressure to fulfill their duty to support their family because of the gendered expectations placed on men.

Approximately 2,000 annual applications are filed by the families of salarymen that die of karoshi.

However, the death toll may be much higher.

As many as 8,000 of the 30,000 annual suicides each year are thought to be work related with as many as 10,000 non-suicide karoshi deaths per year.

Men love to work.

Late in the evening if you drive through working men’s suburbs, you will always see garage lights on.

Inside, groups of men labour over old cars, lovingly modifying, repairing and maintaining late into the night.

Others are busy building furniture in their workshops or working in metal and wood.

These are mostly men who have worked hard all day in uninteresting jobs but who, with passion and intelligence, apply themselves at night to their real interests.

Among the middle classes, the focus shifts to ‘renovating‘.

In other countries, a plethora of exotic and weird hobbies seem to draw men out from the stifling ordinariness of their daytime lives.

In 1952, William H. Whyte coined the term “groupthink“.

Above: American sociologist William H. Whyte (1917 – 1999)

We are not talking about mere instinctive conformity – a perennial failing of mankind – but rather a rationalized conformity – an open articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well.

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome.

Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs.

This causes the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation.

Groupthink requires individuals to avoid raising controversial issues or alternative solutions.

There is a loss of individuality and creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking.

The dysfunctional group dynamics of the in-group produces an illusion of invulnerability (an inflated certainty that the right decision has been made).

Thus the in-group significantly overrates its own abilities in decision-making and significantly underrates the abilities of its opponents (outliers).

Furthermore, groupthink can produce dehumanizing actions against the out-group.

Individuals can often feel under peer pressure to go along with the crowd for fear of rocking the boat or of how speaking out will be perceived by the rest of the group.

Group interactions tend to favour clear and harmonious agreements.

It can be a cause for concern when little or no new innovations or arguments for better policies, outcomes and structures are called into question.

Group activities and group projects in general make it extremely easy to pass on not offering constructive opinions.

Groupthink can be considered by many to be a detriment to companies, organizations and in any work situations.

Many positions that are senior level need individuals to be independent in their thinking.

Groupthink also prohibits an organization from moving forward and innovating if no one ever speaks up and says something could be done differently.

Groupthink is a quick and easy way to refer to the mode of thinking that people engage in when concurrence-seeking becomes so dominant in a cohesive in-group that it tends to override realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action.

Groupthink is a deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing and moral judgments as a result of group pressure.

The more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policymaking in-group, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outliers.

Average Americans subscribe to a collectivist ethic rather than to the prevailing notion of rugged individualism.

Above: Flag of the United States of America

People become convinced that organizations and groups could produce better decisions than individuals.

Thus serving an organization became logically preferable to advocating one’s individual creativity.

This is counterfactual.

Individual work and creativity can produce better outcomes than collectivist processes.

This system of groupthink led to risk-adverse executives who faced no consequences and could expect jobs for life as long as they made no egregious missteps.

Everyone should have more freedom.

America replaced the Protestant ethic of individualism and entrepreneurialism with a social ethic that stressed cooperation and management:

The individual subsumed within the organization.

Where is a sense of individual purpose in a world dominated by big business?

How can one find contentment in such a hectic and materialistic culture?

Marriages and family life have been ruined by overwork.

A marriage needs mutual emotional support not just mutual financial ambition.

We know that for hundreds of thousands of years, men have admired each other and have been admired by women in particular, for their activity.

Men and women alike once called on men to pierce the dangerous places, carry handfuls of courage to the waterfalls, dust the tails of the wild boars.

All knew that if men did that well, the women and the children could sleep safely.

Men have been loved for their astonishing initiative, embarking on wide oceans, imagining a new business, doing it skillfully, working with new beginnings, doing what has never been done.

In actual corporate practice, personnel managers prefer “the organizational man” over the individualist.

“For on these matters we should not trust the multitude who say that none ought to be educated but the free, but rather to philosophers, who say that the educated alone are free.“

Epictetus

Above: Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus (50 – 135)

Working hard and enjoying it comes naturally to men.

Yet it has been somewhat debased.

D.H. Lawrence described how, in industrial England, the men working in the coal mines took satisfaction and found comradeship in their work and were proud of being good providers.

Above: English writer David Herbert Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

Then schooling was introduced.

Rather than working with their fathers, boys began going to school.

There they were taught by white-collared teachers that their fathers’ world – the sweaty, difficult world of physical labour – was demeaning and that by applying themselves the boys could aspire to a clean, educated “higher” world.

The fact that the “advancement” meant an adult life spent doing dreary tasks was not really questioned.

One was “bettering oneself“.

There was something virtuous in being clean, in never exerting one’s body.

Above: Scene from The Razor’s Edge (1984)

“Wage slavery” is a term used to criticize exploitation of labour by business, by keeping wages low or stagnant in order to maximize profits.

The situation of wage slavery can be loosely defined as “a person’s dependence on wages (or a salary) for their livelihood“, especially when wages are low, treatment and conditions are poor, and there are few chances of upward mobility.

Wage slavery is often used by critics of wage-based employment to criticize the exploitation of labour and social stratification, with unequal bargaining power between labour and capital, particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, such as in sweatshops.

There is a lack of workers’ self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure.

The criticism of social stratification covers a wide range of employment choices bound by the pressures of a hierarchical society to perform otherwise unfulfilling work that deprives humans of character, not only under threat of extreme poverty and starvation, but also of social stigma and status diminishment.

Similarities between wage labour and slavery were noted as early as Cicero in ancient Rome.

Above: Marble bust of Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 – 43 BC)

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labour and slavery and engaged in critique of work, while Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines.

Above: French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865)

Above: German philosopher Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

Above: Luddites destroying factory machinery

The introduction of wage labour in 18th century Britain was met with resistance, giving rise to the principles of syndicalism and anarchism.

Above: Symbol of syndicalism

Above: Symbol of anarchism

Analysis of the psychological implications of wage slavery goes back to the Enlightenment era.

In 1763, the French journalist Simon Linguet published an influential description of wage slavery:

The slave was precious to his master because of the money he had cost him.

They were worth at least as much as they could be sold for in the market.

It is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm labourers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live.

It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him.

What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him?

‘He is free’, you say.

Ah!

That is his misfortune.

These men have the most terrible, the most imperious of masters, that is, need. 

They must therefore find someone to hire them, or die of hunger.

Is that to be free?”

Above: French journalist Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet (1736 – 1794)

Powerful symbols soon divided men.

A necktie symbolizes something very profound – a willingness to fit in, to submit.

No one is fooled.

Everyone knows that this is a requirement to “look” like you are trying to be a respectable person.

To do otherwise would be to invoke the wrath of the system.

The symbolism is clear.

It says:

“See, I am willing to go through the motions.

I will be a good boy.“

At work a tie says:

“I am willing to put up with discomfort.” and therefore “I am willing to put up with other indignities and constraints to get and keep this job.“

It is important to see a tie for what it is:

A slave collar.

“Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice or is only the result of instruction and guidance does not enter into his very nature.

He does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness, and so when the labourer works under external control we may admire what he does but we despise what he is.“

Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action

Above: German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 – 1835)

If you are a blue collar worker, the company wants your body, but your soul is your own.

A white collar worker is supposed to hand over his spirit as well..

Suits and the men who wear them are characterized by their lack of colour, their lack of individuality.

Above: Edward Lewis (Richard Gere), Pretty Woman (1990)

Modern work provides people with a sense of personal and social identity that is tied to the particular work role, even if it is unfulfilling and entails a social role that is not embraced.

To be in a life situation where one experiences relentless demands by others, over which one has relatively little control, is to be at risk of poor health, physically as well as psychologically.

Under wage labour, a relatively small elite demands and gets empowerment, self-actualization, autonomy and work satisfaction which partially compensates for long hours.

Meanwhile, lower-paid, lower-status workers workers are more likely to experience the most clinically damaging forms of stress, in part because they have less control over their work.

Above: War on Want joined UK and US fast food workers at McDonald’s in Whitehall, London, on Wednesday 13 January, as part of a global campaign for fast food workers’ rights.

The demonstration was followed by a fast food forum at Parliament, hosted by Fast Food Rights.

UK and US fast food workers were joined by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP, who founded the Fast Food Rights campaign alongside the Bakers and Allied Food Workers Union (BFAWU) in 2014, and other leading figures from the trade union and anti-austerity movement.

War on Want has long fought for the rights of workers in the global struggle for a living wage, better working conditions and union rights.

The Demon

When I awoke this morning exhausted from my rest,

A demon dark and terrible was sitting on my chest.

He pinned me to the mattress and seized me by the head.

He pressed his knees against my heart and overturned the bed.

He dragged me to the mirror and showed me my disgrace,

Then took a razor in his claw and dragged it down my face.

Some faded rags he bound around my shoulders and my hips

And poured a cup of steaming muck between my faded lips.

And then he took those wilted lips and in his evil style

He paralyzed the corners up into a pleasant smile.

A masterpiece in wickedness, this last sadistic joke,

He sends me out into the world, a smiling sort of bloke.

Wage slavery, and the educational system that precedes it, implies power held by a leader.

Without power, a leader is inept.

The possession of power inevitably leads to corruption, in spite of good intentions.

Leadership means power of initiative, this sense of responsibility, the self-respect which comes from expressed manhood is taken from the workers and consolidated in the leader.

Bear witness to the suppression of the individual from being an independent thinker into becoming merely one of many obedient workers.

The leader is compelled to become an autocrat and a foe to democracy.

For the leader, such marginalization can be beneficial, for a leader sees no need of any high level of intelligence in the rank and file, except to applaud his actions.

Indeed, high intelligence, from his point of view, breeds criticism and opposition, is an obstacle to his goals and causes confusion among the ranks.

Wage slavery implies erosion of the human personality, because some men submit to the will of others, arousing in these others instincts which predispose to cruelty and indifference in the face of the suffering of their fellows.

The threat of starvation forces those without property to work for wages.

Professional workers are trusted to run organizations in the interest of their employers.

Because employers cannot be on hand to manage every decision, professionals are trained to ensure that each and every detail of their work favors the right interests or skewers the disfavored ones in the absence of overt control.

The resulting professional is an obedient thinker, an intellectual property whom employers can trust to experiment, theorize, innovate and create safely within the confines of an assigned ideology.

Above: Lithuanian anarchist Emma Goldman denounced wage slavery by saying:

“The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves.“

Your obligation is not to people but to institutions.

Lose your job, fail to pay and faceless institutions will throw you out.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age.“

Ephesians 6:12 (New King James Bible)

“Employee / worker” has been replaced by the soft language of “associate / partner“.

This rebranding plays up the allegedly voluntary nature of the interaction, while playing down the subordinate status of the wage laborer as well as the “worker / boss” class distinction emphasized by labour movements.

Advertisements consistently show low-wage workers with smiles on their faces, appearing happy.

The more workers depend on low wages and the less skilled or desirable their job is, the more employers screen for workers without better employment options and expect them to feign motivation for work that does not adequately provide sustenance financially or emotionally.

As long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them as long as their role in production is simply that as tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful.

The contract argument is unassailable all the time it is accepted that abilities can acquire an external relation to an individual and can be treated as if they were property.

To treat abilities in this matter is also implicitly to accept that abilities can acquire an external relation to an individual and can be treated as if they were property.

To treat abilities in this matter is also implicitly to accept that the exchange between employer and worker is like any other exchange of material property.

The answer to the question of how property in the person can be contracted out is that no such procedure is possible.

Labour power, capacities or services, cannot be separated from the person of the worker like pieces of property.

If ever in your life you get the urge to do something risky, exciting, different or adventurous, chances are you will not.

With technological progress, in the desire to become simultaneously more efficient and productive, the labor force finds itself more increasingly redundant, superfluous.

Human life, human emotion, humanity has become superfluous.

We do not fit into the norms that we ourselves created.

Existence has become futile and death more certain.

Not for just one of us, but for all of us.

Precious finite resources are perpetually wasted and destroyed in the name of profit.

The social values of society have been reduced into a base artificiality of materialism and mindless consumption.

To get more, to pay for more, we need to earn money.

As machines replace men, the ability to earn money will diminish.

It isn’t the fact of working that does harm.

Work is good – it is what men love to do.

It is the nature of the work that is the problem.

If you do a job that lacks heart, it will kill you.

The strongest predictor of life expectancy in a man is whether he likes his job.

Two elements – the lack of real purpose and the lack of personal control – are the main problems.

Our ancestors laughed as they worked and sang.

They enjoyed the rush of the hunt, the steady teamwork of digging for yams or the discovery of a honey-filled tree.

Watch any documentary or archival footage of preliterate people, you will see the same thing.

Life was often hard but it was rarely without laughter.

In time, though, cultures evolved away from the forest and the coast and into villages and towns and cities.

We did the work that others commanded and it became a grind – increasingly repetitive.

It was a numbing of human senses and a subjugation of ourselves beneath the need just to survive.

Today, in the 21st century, work has become more comfortable but not more fulfilling.

Work is still a separate compartment in life – something you tolerate in exchange for “real” living in the time left over from doing your job, getting to your job and recovering from your job.

Work today drives an unhealthy wedge into the very core of life.

Most people today, men and women, do work they do not much like – jobs that are beneath them.

Most surveys in the West reveal that at least 1/2 the workforce are unhappy in their jobs.

One cross-European study showed that 60% of workers would choose a different career.

In the United States, job satisfaction is at its lowest level – 45% – since recordkeeping began two decades ago.

When I was a teenager, there was an idea being introduced in schools called “career guidance“.

Its aim was to help you find something you liked to do, but underneath it all we dimly sensed the real purpose.

Since you had to work to purchase the good life, the aim was just to find the best paying job you could tolerate.

That is what jobs were.

Why else would you do them?

(At least in those days there was a choice – with unemployment rates today, to have any job is seen as a privilege and being choosy a sin.)

In a modern liberal capitalist society, the employment contract is enforced while the enslavement contract is not.

The employment contract is considered valid because of its consensual and noncoercive nature and the enslavement contract is considered inherently invalid, consensual or not.

Since slavery was abolished, human earning power is forbidden by law to be capitalized.

A man is not even free to sell himself.

He must rent himself at a wage.

If he can find someone to rent himself to.

Above: Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times (1936)

We have to fight this selling-short of human potential.

The aim is to have work that your heart is in.

Work that makes you jump out of bed in the morning, keen to get started.

Wage slavery results from inequality of bargaining power between labor and capital, which exists when the economy does not allow labor to organize and form a strong countervailing force.

The two main forms of socialist economics perceive wage slavery differently:

• Libertarian socialism sees wage slavery as a lack of workers’ self-management in the context of substituting state and capitalist control with political and economic decentralization and confederation.
• State socialists view wage slavery as an injustice perpetuated by capitalists and solved through nationalization and social ownership of the means of production.

The Eight Levels of Fulfilling Work

1. Do you do your share?
2. Can you support yourself?
3. Is your job one that allows you to improve the lives of others?
4. Are you a provider for others?
5. Does your work provide an infrastructure for the work of others?
6. Do you train and develop other people, enhancing their lives and futures?
7. Does your work help protect the Earth, its people and its life?
8. Does your work use your innate abilities and talents so that it is unique and powerful in its effect on the world?

Above: Australian therapist / author Steve Biddulph

“Although life is a matter of indifference, the use which you make of it is not a matter of indifference.”

Epictetus

Realistically, for many men, the trick is finding the heart in the work you already do.

We have a recession because there is no growth in the economy.

Yet we live in a finite world that cannot sustain growth anyway – so an economic boom would be a disaster too!

When mainstream men abandon their urge to compete – and simply enjoy being and doing what is useful, as opposed to profitable – then we will have the kind of stable economy the world needs.

Instead of more factories and office towers, we will build a spiritual, intellectual and social infrastructure that will make us healthy, secure and self-sufficient – qualities that even measured in dollar ($) terms will be impressive.

There are three states of human activity:

• Labour: a state of subsistence.

Doing what it takes to stay alive.

This is the lowest form of human activity.

All living creatures are capable of this.

• Work: the process of creation

A painter may create a great work of art.

A writer may create a great work of fiction.

Working is a worthwhile endeavor.

Through works, people may remember someone.

If one’s work is great enough, one may be remembered for thousands of years.

• Action: Only by interacting with others in a public forum can your legacy be passed down through the generations.

Only by doing something memorable for others can a person achieve immortality.

“Great ambition and conquest without contribution is without significance.

What will your contribution be?

How will history remember you?“

William Hundert (Kevin Kline), The Emperor’s Club (2002)

Let us look at the three states more closely:

We need to survive.

Our survival hinges on our ability to provide ourselves with the basic needs of food, water and shelter.

But as we possess emotions and cannot meet our survival needs solely ourselves, there is also a need for human interaction.

It is in the way we provide ourselves with these needs that determines how dependent we are on our earning capacity.

If we could make our lives more Spartan, more simplistic, we can reduce the expenses needed to survive.

Where the naysayers feel the need to object is that if we shop less than we hurt the economy.

But if we spend more than we earn, if we live beyond our means, if we desire more than we actually need, than we hurt only ourselves by casting ourselves into debt and make ourselves vulnerable and needing to bind ourselves to a wage.

If we consume more than we need, we contribute to the diminishment of the limited resources that the planet possesses.

Mark Boyle took a degree in Business at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, before moving to Britain in 2002.

Above: Irish writer Mark Boyle

During the final year of his degree, Boyle watched the 1982 film Gandhi, about the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Boyle has frequently cited this as the moment that changed his life.

Above: Indian politician Mahatma Gandhi (1869 – 1948)

During his first six years in Britain, Boyle lived in Bristol and managed two organic food companies.

Above: Clifton Suspension Bridge and Observatory, Bristol, England

In 2007, after a conversation with a friend during which they decided “money creates a kind of disconnection between us and our actions“, Boyle set up the Freeconomy Community.

The Freeconomy Community was created to allow people to share, moving away from exchange economies towards a pay it forward (do unto others the good that was done unto you) philosophy.

The original www.justfortheloveofit.org site shared similarities with websites such as The Freecycle Network (giving away what might otherwise might be thrown away), Freegle (same idea as Freecycle) and Streetbank (item sharing).

In 2014, Streetbank and Freeconomy decided that “the two projects would be so much stronger if they came together” and merged.

A few months after creating the Freeconomy Community, Boyle set out on a two-and-a-half-year trek from Bristol to Porbandar in India, the birthplace of Gandhi.

Above: Kirti Mandir, birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi

Inspired by the nonviolent salt march led in India by Gandhi in 1930, and by the woman in America known as Peace Pilgrim, he set off in January 2008, carrying no money and only a small number of possessions.

Above: Gandhi during the Salt March (12 March – 6 April 1930)

Above: American activist Mildred Lisette Norman (aka Peace Pilgrim) (1908 – 1981)

Peace Pilgrim was an American spiritual teacher, mystic, pacifist, vegetarian activist and peace activist.

In 1952, she became the first woman to walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in one season.

Starting on 1 January 1953, in Pasadena, California, she adopted the name “Peace Pilgrim” and walked across the United States for 28 years, speaking with others about peace.

She was on her 7th cross-country journey when she died.

A transcript of a 1964 conversation with Peace Pilgrim from a broadcast on KPFK radio in Los Angeles was published as “Steps Toward Inner Peace“.

She stopped counting miles in that year, having walked more than 25,000 mi (40,000 km) for peace.

However, Boyle was forced to turn back only a month into the trip, as language barriers and difficulties in persuading people he would work for food and a place to stay halted his journey shortly after he arrived in Calais.

Above: Calais, France

One of his travelling companions had travellers cheques for emergencies, which allowed them to travel back to the UK.

He had not planned the trip, believing it was best to let fate take its course.

Above: Flag of the United Kingdom

Later in the same year, Boyle developed an alternative plan: to live without money entirely.

After some preparatory purchases (including a solar panel and wood-burning stove), he began his first year of “moneyless living” on Buy Nothing Day (Black Friday – the day after US Thanksgiving) 2008.

Boyle has received considerable positive and negative publicity for his moneyless lifestyle, appearing on television, radio and other media in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Australia, South Africa, United States and Russia.

Much of the attention has focused on his day-to-day routine, including food, hygiene, and traditionally expensive aspects of life, such as Christmas.

Mark Boyle is one of a small number of individuals who have lived without money in recent times.

These include Heidemarie Schwermer, Tomi Astikainen and Daniel Suelo.

Above: German teacher / psychoanalyst / writer Heidemarie Schwermer (1942 – 2016)

However, Boyle frequently reminds his readers that a moneyless life is not a new idea.

Indeed it is the system of money itself that is the new development, having existed for only a small fraction of humanity’s 200,000-year existence.

Other observers note that for nearly all of recorded human history (the 5,000 years since the invention of writing) there has been a system of money or currency in place.

Boyle gave up his moneyless lifestyle in 2011 and the first item he bought with money in three years was a pair of shoes from a charity shop. 

He was so used to not using money at that time that he felt that “it felt as strange as giving money up in the first place had“.

Also in 2011, Boyle had a vasectomy done on himself by a doctor because he was worried about the fate of the world and did want to bring children into a world which he claimed was an overpopulated “artificial intelligence world“. 

This vasectomy was voluntary and he had it done “against all sorts of advice“.

In 2017, Boyle noted that the trip to the doctor for the voluntary vasectomy was his only trip to a medical facility in the previous 20 years.

In 2013, he moved back to Ireland. 

In 2015, Mark Boyle opened a moneyless pub on a three-acre permaculture smallholding in County Galway, Ireland. 

The moneyless pub is called the “Happy Pig” as the building it’s in was formerly a pigsty before Boyle bought the farm that he converted into a smallholding. 

The renovations needed for the Happy Pig were all done using inexpensive natural materials such as cob, cordwood as well as wattle and daub.

The Happy Pig serves all food and drink there for free.

Also in 2015, Mark Boyle gave up reading newspapers, watching television and listening to radio. 

Boyle notes that the exclusion of newspapers includes even The Guardian for which he was a columnist, though this didn’t stop him from getting columns of his published in the paper.

Around this time, Mark Boyle reached a turning point in his thinking.

Boyle decided that more radical means of means were needed for the environmental movement and that merely peaceful protest wasn’t working to stop eco-catastrophe.

In 2016, Mark Boyle spent the summer hand-building a straw bale house at the permaculture smallholding in County Galway and had moved in there by December that year.

Above: Mark Boyle

On 19 December 2016, Boyle made an announcement in his Guardian column that starting on Wednesday 21 December 2016, he will stop using all “complex technology” which he names as computers, the internet, phones, washing machines, water from taps, gas, fridges, televisions and anything requiring electricity to run.

Boyle says there are two reasons why he chose to do this:

The first is because he feels happier without technology.

The second is that he feels that technology is the direct cause of modern-day environmental and social problems.

He rejects technology to set an example.

He also announced that he will still continue to write for The Guardian by writing down his articles by hand and posting them to The Guardian. 

An article on The Guardian website by Sarah Marsh posted on the same day as Boyle’s article announced that users can still communicate with Boyle by posting a letter to The Guardian head office address labeled “Opinion Editors” or by posting in the comments section of the article where once a month, the staff will select some comments from the page, print them off and post them to Boyle. 

Mark Boyle’s last day of technology was Tuesday 20 December 2016.

He stopped using it shortly before midnight when he checked his last ever e-mails and turned off his phone for the last time.

I cannot answer to the need of human interaction beyond what a person can derive from himself.

I am only advocating that we take personal responsibility for our own person.

When the opportunity arises for interaction, when love becomes possible, embrace it.

If you love, if you are loved, let that love enhance your life.

While we live in a world that is more interconnected than ever before, we are so preoccupied with trying to survive on wages that barely support the average man that we have become slaves with less and less time for the leisure needed to love.

“Keep love in your heart.

A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

The consciousness of love and being loved brings warmth and richness in life.“

Oscar Wilde

Above: Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)

We have become by choice and circumstance more isolated than ever before.

The extravert needs to network more.

The introvert needs to learn to embrace solitude.

For our materialistic society determines a man’s worth, not based on who he is, but on what he has.

Sometimes it feels futile and senseless to pursue lost happiness.

Nietzsche proposed that life consists of a master – slave morality.

Master morality is the morality of the strong-willed, disguising its bottomless greed with notions of nobility, openmindedness, courage, truthfulness, trustworthiness and an accurate sense of one’s self-worth.

In truth, they define what is good on whether it benefits the pursuit of power and wealth for themselves.

Slave morality is utility.

The good is what is most useful for the whole community not just the strong.

By saying that their humility is voluntary, slave morality avoids admitting that their humility has been forced upon them.

And given the choice the needs of the one must selfishly take precedence over the needs of the many.

Above: German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

The Men’s Movement gives great weight to leadership – what it calls Zeus Energy.

This is the ideal of leaders with no ambition other than the wellbeing of their community.

At present, idealists don’t see leadership as attractive or even a sound idea.

And so the leadership roles are taken by power freaks and egotistically driven men – the people with the worst possible reasons for being in charge.

Too often our leaders and managers make the fatal mistake of thinking that leadership is all about economics.

They misunderstand that people are led by the heart.

True leadership means getting involved with people – it is an interpersonal job, a parenting job.

As nations, we select people with the wrong motivation.

True leaders have as their goal the wellbeing of their team and, beyond that, the wellbeing of humanity.

They view themselves as servants.

Dave Kovic (Kevin Kline):

“I forgot that I was hired to do a job for you and that it was just a temp job at that.

I forgot that I had 250 million people who were paying me to make their lives a little better and I didn’t live up to my part of the bargain.

See, there are certain things you should expect from a President.

I ought to care more about you than I do about me.

I ought to care more about what’s right than I do about what’s popular.

I ought to be willing to give this whole thing up for something I believe in.”

Dave (1993)

Real leaders are like little children, playful and emotionally available, yet when the need arises, they can muster fierce intelligence and purpose.

They have good brains, but are driven by their hearts.

Most leaders today are not even oriented in this way.

Pompous and stiff, they see their teams as people to stand on, their consciousness is outwards and upwards – to “furthering their own career” or “covering their own tail“.

Above: US President-elect Donald J. Trump

A truly good leader is driven by one maxim:

“How can I help these people who have placed their trust in me?”

They are not egotistical – leadership is a cloak they put on, a job they do and which they then step back from.

To be a leader, one has to draw on basic parental qualities – nurturing, praising, challenging, disciplining, teasing, following the individual development of their staff.

The leader needs to unite and inspire and give purpose.

Most organizations, most nations, are mismanaged.

“Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and discipline.

Reliance on intelligence alone results in rebelliousness.

Exercise of humaneness alone results in weakness.

Fixation on trust results in folly.

Dependence on the strength of courage results in violence.

Excessive discipline and sternness in command result in cruelty.

When one has all five virtues together, each appropriate to its function, then one can be a leader.“

Sun Tzu, Art of War

It would be easy at this point to embrace nihilism when one considers the world today.

Human values are baseless.

Life is meaningless.

Knowledge is impossible.

Nihilism is a condition of tension, as a disproportion between what we want to value or need and how the world appears to operate.

When we find out that the world does not possess the objective value or meaning that we want it to have or long since believed to be, we find ourselves in a crisis.

We have become decadent.

We need sensationalism.

We have become egocentric and bizarre.

We seek perverse and exotic sensations to free our minds from the mundane existence we barely tolerate.

Art, literature, music, science and technology have declined along with work ethics in a wave of self-indulgent behaviour.

We have emptied the world, and especially human existence, of all that sustains it.

We judge the world as it ought not to be and despair of rediscovering a world as it ought to be.

Men yearn to believe in themselves and in something greater.

If a leader can identify such a purpose and convey it to his team, then they will follow passionately.

The larger purpose takes over their immediate self-interest and lends wings to their efforts.

People under these conditions work wonders.

They actually help each other.

They become creative.

They awaken in the early hours of the morning inspired.

Play with it while you have hands
Dust settles, cities turn to sand
Trespassing, this is their land
Time flies, make a statement, take a stand

Come along now, come along with me
Come along now, come along and you’ll see
What it’s like to be free
Come along, come along with me
Come along now, come along and you’ll see
What it’s like to be free, yeah

Come along now, come along with me
And I’ll ease your pain
Come along, come along with me
And let’s seize this day
Come along, come along with me

Stay out, stay clear, but stay close
Friends, foes, God only knows
Let’s be the thorn on the rose
Time flies, make a statement, strike a pose

So come along now, come along with me
Come along now, come along and you’ll see
What it’s like to be free, yeah
Come along, come along with me
Come along now, come along and you’ll see
What it’s like to be free, yeah

Come along now, come along with me
And I’ll ease your pain
Come along, come along with me
And let’s seize this day
Oh, come along with me

Time flies, make a statement, take a stand
Time flies, make a statement, take a stand
Time flies, make a statement, take a stand
Time flies, take your chance

Come along now, come along with me
Come along now, come along and you’ll see
What it’s like to be free
Come along, come along with me
Come along now, come along and you’ll see
What it’s like to be free, yeah

Come along now, come along with me
And I’ll ease your pain
Come along, come along with me
And let’s seize this day
Oh, come along with me

Above: Swedish musician Titiyo Yambalu Felicia Jah

Men have worked in teams for so many millions of years that the template is in every cell of our bodies.

The pattern of the hunting clan just needs to be reactivated.

Today, most men have become compulsive loners in their work, with superficial camaraderie but no real sharing.

Think how much better we will feel as we begin to pull together for goals we believe in.

Perhaps only by peering into Dystopia, into the abyss of human suffering, can we one day passionately and joyously reaffirm life and finding it worth living.

Above: Kowloon Walled City, British Hong Kong (1898 – 1994), China

Perhaps only by crossing the bridge from the comfortable across the chasm to uncertainty can we awaken.

Above: Queshuachaca Inca rope bridge, Quehue, Peru

We are characters of Wodehouse, Dickens and Chaplin, the comic resistance of the individual against superior forces to which we are all subject.

Above: English writer P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse (1881 – 1975)

Above: English writer Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

Above: English entertainer Charlie Chaplin (1889 – 1977)

We long to discover the necessity for human sympathy in an uncaring world.

Can human nature survive the social environment that influences it?

People are led by the heart.

I didn’t know what day it was
When you walked into the room
I said hello unnoticed
You said goodbye too soon

Breezing through the clientele
Spinning yarns that were so lyrical
I really must confess right here
The attraction was purely physical

I took all those habits of yours
That in the beginning were hard to accept
Your fashion sense, Beardsley prints
I put down to experience

The big bossed lady with the Dutch accent
Who tried to change my point of view
Her ad lib lines were well rehearsed
But my heart cried out for you

You’re in my heart, you’re in my soul
You’ll be my breath should I grow old
You are my lover, you’re my best friend
You’re in my soul

My love for you is immeasurable
My respect for you immense
You’re ageless, timeless, lace and fineness
You’re beauty and elegance

You’re a rhapsody, a comedy
You’re a symphony and a play
You’re every love song ever written
But, honey, what do you see in me?

You’re in my heart, you’re in my soul
You’ll be my breath should I grow old
You are my lover, you’re my best friend
You’re in my soul

You’re an essay in glamor
Please pardon the grammar
But you’re every schoolboy’s dream
You’re Celtic, United, but, baby, I’ve decided
You’re the best team I’ve ever seen

And there have been many affairs
Many times I’ve thought to leave
But I bite my lip and turn around
‘Cause you’re the warmest thing I’ve ever found

You’re in my heart, you’re in my soul
You’ll be my breath should I grow old
You are my lover, you’re my best friend
You’re in my soul

I think of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa:

“I always want to be the thing I feel kinship with, to feel everything in every way, to hold all opinions, to be sincere contradicting myself every minute.

I am nothing.

I will always be nothing.

I cannot wait to be something.

I have in me all the dreams of the world nevertheless.

In every altar of my soul stands an altar to a different god and the impulse toward a state of isolation and a sense of nothingness.“

To contain multitudes…

Sheer vitality…

The zest for experience…

The entire cosmos might yet not have succeeded Pessos’ capacity to contain…

Of all the places, all the ports, all the sights he has seen, all this, which is so much, is nothing next to what he wants…

An existentially anguished search for meaning…

At once nostalgic and self-mocking.

Laid bare in them are despair, terror and a poet’s self-questioning…

An atmosphere of unreality conjured up by an insistence on denial, negativity, absence and loss.

He does not know what he is.

The problem is not that he doesn’t know what to be.

On the contrary, he wants to be too much.

Everything.

Failing to achieve this, he despairs.

“How should I know what I will be,

I who don’t know what I am?

Be what I think?

But I think of being so many things!“

Pessos quests for nowhere and everywhere at once.

His is an agonized doubt at the wasting of life, of life itself, of everything.

He is appalled by the emptiness of his own existence, lethargic, lacking in willpower, seeking inspiration or in any event finding inspiration in semiconsciousness in the twilight between awake and asleep, in dreams and in drunkenness.

Everything ends in silence and poetry.

Above: Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)

His heart is a walking grandmother begging for alms at the gates of joy.

He is a sleepwalking poet, a useless person, who only wants faith and calm and have all his confusing feelings.

The disappointment of the world in which he lives, the sadness, the fatigue….

“What a nausea of life!

How abject this regularity is!

How sleepy it is to be like this!

My days are adding up.“

Above: Pessoa’s last writing – Friday 29 November 1935:

“I know not what tomorrow will bring.”

He died the next day.

“The thought once occurred to me that if one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, one at which the most fearsome murderer would tremble, shrinking from it in advance, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of uselessness and meaning.“

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Above: Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881)

In a sense, Pessoa is like a man who succumbs to something that appears natural and beautiful but actually disappoints him.

What story down there awaits its end?

Above: Pessoa drinking a glass of wine in a downtown tavern, Lisboa, Portugal, 1929

He lives in his own world and is unable to share his thoughts with anyone else.

His are the mutterings of a stammerer bordering on a language crisis.

The reality is that we cannot know anything external to ourselves by going beyond ourselves.

The Universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know within ourselves.

All day
Starin’ at the ceilin’, makin’
Friends with shadows on my wall
All night
Hearin’ voices tellin’ me
That I should get some sleep
Because tomorrow might be good for somethin’

Hold on
Feelin’ like I’m headed for a
Breakdown
And I don’t know why

But I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell
I know right now you can’t tell
But stay awhile and maybe then you’ll see
A different side of me
I’m not crazy, I’m just a little impaired
I know right now you don’t care
But soon enough you’re gonna think of me
And how I used to be

Me
I’m talkin’ to myself in public
And dodgin’ glances on the train
And I know
I know they’ve all been talkin’ ’bout me
I can hear them whisper
And it makes me think there must be somethin’ wrong

With me
Out of all the hours thinkin’
Somehow
I’ve lost my mind

But I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell
I know right now you can’t tell
But stay awhile and maybe then you’ll see
A different side of me
I’m not crazy, I’m just a little impaired
I know right now you don’t care
But soon enough you’re gonna think of me
And how I used to be

I’ve been talkin’ in my sleep
Pretty soon they’ll come to get me
Yeah, they’re takin’ me away

I’m not crazy, I’m just a little unwell
I know right now you can’t tell
But stay awhile and maybe then you’ll see
A different side of me
I’m not crazy, I’m just a little impaired
I know right now you don’t care
But soon enough you’re gonna think of me
And how I used to be.

The problem is that we cannot truly understand one another.

A person’s life consists of a set of events, the last of which could even change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because, when included in a life, the events are arranged in an order that is not chronological, but responds to an internal architecture.

A lifetime of wandering has taught me that when I stand as a tourist in silent amazement before the gigantic enterprises created there, as I stand before the wonders of the world, only seldom does the thought occur to me what enslavement, what lowering of self-esteem was connected with the construction of these mammoth monuments.

Above: The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (from left to right, top to bottom): Great Pyramid of Giza, Hanging Gardens of Babylon, Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Statue of Zeus at Olympia, Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (also known as the Mausoleum of Mausolus), Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria, as depicted by 16th-century Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck.

They extracted the means for their creation by destroying the most essential productive force of all – the labour of man.

Every man kills the thing he loves:

His freedom.

How could I be this way when I pray to God above?
I must love what I destroy and destroy the thing I love.
Oh, you’ll never see my shade or hear the sound of my feet,
While there’s a moon over Bourbon Street.

Of the three levels of life, there is creation.

Above: The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo (1511), Sistine Chapel, Vatican City

“It is through art and through art only that we can realize our perfection.

Through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.“

Oscar Wilde

Above: Oscar Wilde

I see “art” as the deep knowledge that one possesses, the knowing something so well that the revelation of all that you know results in a unique manifestation of that knowledge.

The production of a work of art is a creation only possible once the understanding of creation is complete.

“I have one piece of advice for you not just for success in this business, but personally.

Begin AT ONCE – not today or tomorrow or at some remote indefinite date, but right now, at this precise moment – to choose some subject, some concept, some great name or idea or event in history on which you can eventually make yourself the world’s supreme expert.

Start a crash program immediately to qualify yourself for this self-assignment through reading, research and reflection.

I don’t mean the sort of expert who avoids all the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy.

I mean one has the most knowledge, the deepest insight and the most audacious willingness to break new ground.

Such a disciplined form of self-education will give you prestige, eminence and worldwide contacts.

You will enjoy correspondence and fellowship with other people interested in the same specialty.

It will add a new dimension and a new unity to your entire education.

It will give you a passionate sense of purpose.

The cross-fertilization of ideas will become an exciting and unending adventure that will add a new total perspective to your entire life.“

Max Schuster

Above: US book publisher Max Schuster (1897 – 1970)

“That is the real practical use of self-education and self-culture.

It converts a world which is only a good world for those who can win at its ruthless game into a world good for all of us.

Your education is the only thing that nothing can take from you in this life.

You can lose your money, your wife, your children, your friends, your pride, your honour and your life, but while you live you cannot lose your culture, such as it is.“

Cornelius Hirschberg

“Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

It must be learned.“

Oscar Wilde

Above: Oscar Wilde

“For the recognition of private property has really harmed individualism and obscured it by confusing a man with what he possesses.

It has led individualism entirely astray.

It has made gain not growth its aim, so that man thought that the important thing was to have and did not know that the important thing is to be.

The true perfection of man lies not in what man has but in what man is.

What a man really has is what is in him.

What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.“

Oscar Wilde

Above: Oscar Wilde

We should not waste life in accumulating things and the symbols for things.

We need to live.

I want to live, I want to give
I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold
It’s these expressions I never give

That keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold
And I’m getting old
Keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold
And I’m getting old

I’ve been to Hollywood, I’ve been to Redwood
I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold
I’ve been in my mind, it’s such a fine line

Keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold
You keep me searchin’ and I’m growing old
Keep me searchin’ for a heart of gold
I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold

“To live is the rarest thing in the world.

Most people exist, that is all.

For what man has sought for is indeed neither pain nor pleasure, but simply life.

Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly.

Do not imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things.

Your perfection is inside of you.

If only you could realize that, you would not want to be rich.

Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man.

Real riches cannot.

In the treasure house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things that may not be taken from you.

Try to shape your life that external things will not harm you.“

Oscar Wilde

Above: Oscar Wilde

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Henry David Thoreau

Above: American philosopher Henry David Thoreau

“Why, then, do we wonder any longer that, although in material things we are thoroughly experienced, nevertheless in our actions we are dejected, unseemly, worthless, cowardly, unwilling to stand the strain, utter failures one and all?“

Epictetus

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.“

Oscar Wilde

I do not believe we should live for other people.

It has been my experience that those who love you can hurt you the deepest.

“The things people say of a man do not alter a man.

He is what he is.

Public opinion is of no value whatsoever.

A man who does not think for himself does not really think at all.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Most people are other people.

Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

The only possible society is oneself.”

Oscar Wilde

Most people do not give us a second thought.

When we sacrifice ourselves to the fickleness of others’ opinions, we give our lives to nothing.

Something dies within us and what is dead is hope.

We do not belong anywhere, for we are already home, as prisoners within our minds, trapped within our bodies.

Above: Album cover, Pink Floyd, The Wall

Hello? (Hello, hello, hello)
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?
Come on (Come on, come on), now
I hear you’re feeling down
Well, I can ease your pain
And get you on your feet again
Relax (Relax, relax, relax)
I’ll need some information first
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?

There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying
When I was a child, I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I’ve got that feeling once again
I can’t explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am

I have become comfortably numb

Okay (Okay, okay, okay)
Just a little pinprick
There’ll be no more
But you may feel a little sick
Can you stand up? (Stand up, stand up)
I do believe it’s working, good
That’ll keep you going through the show
Come on, it’s time to go

There is no pain, you are receding
A distant ship, smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move, but I can’t hear what you’re saying
When I was a child, I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I’ve got that feeling once again
I can’t explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am

I have become comfortably numb.

“Each day is a cage in which he finds himself trapped, but inwardly unsubdued.”

Eugene O’Neill

Above: American playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888 – 1953)

Phil Connors (Bill Murray):

“What would you do if you were struck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing you did mattered?“

Ralph (Rick Overton):

“That about sums it up for me.“

Groundhog Day

Above: Phil Connor, Ralph and Gus (Rick Ducommun), Groundhog Day (1993)

They will not see your worth.

They will measure your value by the work you accomplish, not by the person you have been, are, or could potentially be.

We need to consider how far we have come, count the blessings of this moment, and dream about becoming more than we are.

To do this we need to discover who we are.

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful
A miracle, oh, it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily
Oh, joyfully, oh, playfully watching me
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible
Logical, oh, responsible, practical
Then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable
Oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical

There are times when all the world’s asleep
The questions run too deep
For such a simple man
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned?
I know it sounds absurd
Please tell me who I am

I said, now, watch what you say, they’ll be calling you a radical
A liberal, oh, fanatical, criminal
Oh, won’t you sign up your name? We’d like to feel you’re acceptable
Respectable, oh, presentable, a vegetable
Oh, take, take, take it, yeah

But at night, when all the world’s asleep
The questions run so deep
For such a simple man
Won’t you please (oh, won’t you tell me)
Please tell me what we’ve learned?
(Can you hear me?) I know it sounds absurd
(Oh, won’t you tell me) please tell me who I am
Who I am, who I am, who I am

“Has the talent but doesn’t dare.

Afraid he will meet himself somewhere.

One of those poor devils who spend their lives trying not to discover where they belong.

Whom do they fool?

Not even themselves.“

Eugene O’Neill

Above: Eugene O’Neill

“I listen to people talking about this universal breakdown we are in and I marvel at their stupid cowardice. 

It is so obvious that they deliberately cheat themselves, because their fear of change won’t let them face the truth.

They don’t want to understand what has happened to them.

All they want is to start the merry-go-round of blind greed all over again.

They no longer know what they want this country to be, what they want it to become, where they want it to go.

It has lost all meaning for them except as pig-wallow.

And so their lives as citizens have no beginnings, no ends. 

They have lost the ideal of the Land of the Free. 

Freedom demands initiative, courage, the need to decide what life must mean to oneself.

To them, that is terror. 

They explain away their spiritual cowardice by whining that the time for individualism is past, when it is their courage to possess their own souls which is dead — and stinking!

No, they don’t want to be free. 

Slavery means security — of a kind, the only kind they have courage for.

It means they need not to think.

They have only to obey orders from owners who are, in turn, their slaves!”

Eugene O’Neill

Above: Eugene O’Neill

A cornerstone of any sensible life philosophy is there are things you can control and there are things you cannot control.

99% of all world events are outside your control.

You have no influence on what is happening in the world, where or how.

It is much more sensible to focus your energies on things you CAN control.

You can influence what happens in your life, your family, your neighbourhood, your city, your job, but the rest you simply have to accept.

“When I see someone in anxiety, I say to myself:

“What can it be that this fellow wants?

For if he did not want something that was outside of his control, how could he still remain in anxiety?“

Epictetus

“You become what you give your attention to.”

Epictetus

If you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will.

To achieve wisdom, we should choose a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works.

The freedom to choose for ourselves what is relevant is fundamental to a good life.

We are connected to each other because we cooperate, trade, cultivate friendships and relationships, fall in love.

Genuine concern entails action.

“If you would be a good reader, read.

If a writer, write.“

Epictetus

But first we must accept that we don’t understand the world.

Nobody knows what is happening.

Everyone pretends that they do.

To see the bigger picture, you need the connecting lines.

You need the context, the mutual dependencies, the feedback, the immediate repercussions and the consequences of these repercussions.

Nearly everything that happens in the world is complex.

We need to read books and long articles that do justice to the complexity of the world.

Know your circle of competence and stick within it.

The size of that circle is not important.

Knowing its boundaries is vital.

Organize your life rigorously around that circle.

You will save time, because you won’t keep having to decide where to direct your attention.

In concrete terms, all the information that matches your circle of competence is valuable.

Everything that is outside your circle of competence is best ignored.

Thinking outside the circle will only waste your time and affect your concentration.

Create a deep knowledge base by reading textbooks and completing courses, reading long articles and talking to people in the know is imperative.

You will only find professional success in a niche.

The greater your knowledge and the greater your ability within that niche, the greater your success.

If you are the best in the world within your niche, you have made it.

Go deep, not broad.

Above: American businessman Warren Buffet

“Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.“

Epictetus

There are the Stoics who talked about what it means to be free.

And then there is Epictetus.

Most of these Stoics were rich.

They were famous.

They were powerful.

Some never had to work a day in their lives.

And then there is Epictetus.

Born in 55 AD in Hierapolis (near Pamukkale, Türkei), Epictetus knew slavery from birth.

His name in Greek is “acquired one“.

Somehow, despite this, his tenacity, his perspective, and his sheer self-sufficiency would make Epictetus – not just in his life, but in history and for all time – the ultimate symbol of the ability of human beings to find true freedom in the darkest of circumstances.

And they were dark circumstances.

Above: Hierapolis, Türkei

Epictetus was born the son of a slave woman in a region that as part of the Roman Empire was subject to brutal laws.

One of those laws, Lex Aelia Sentia, made it impossible for slaves to be freed before their 30th birthday.

It is a disturbing irony that Augustus, then, who passed the law and was advised by not one but two Stoic philosophers, stole three decades of Epictetus’ life.

Above: Statue of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus (63 BC – AD 14)

As a young boy, Epictetus was purchased by a man named Epaphroditus – a former slave himself – who went on to become Nero’s secretary and served alongside the Stoic philosopher Seneca.

Two Emperors, with three Stoic philosophers advising them, and apparently not so much as a question about whether it was right to own a human being.

Above: Roman Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (37 – 68), being instructed by Seneca (4 BC – AD 65), Eduardo Barrón (2021), Museo de Zamora, España

Epictetus had little time to ponder the fairness of his fate.

He was too busy being a slave.

What he could do and what he couldn’t do was overtly controlled.

The fruits of his labour were stolen and his body abused.

Rome was not known for treating its slaves gently.

He was a vessel to be used up and then discarded, like a horse ridden into the ground and then put down.

That Epictetus even survived into adulthood is a surprise.

Even by Roman standards, Epictetus had a cruel master.

Epaphroditus was violent and depraved, at one point twisting Epictetus’ leg with all his might.

As a punishment?

As a sick pleasure?

Trying to get a disobedient young kid to follow instructions?

We don’t know.

Above: Funerary inscription for Epaphroditos, Museo Epigrafico, Roma, Italia

All we hear is that Epictetus calmly warned Epaphroditus about taking things too far.

When the leg snapped, Epictetus made no sound and cried no tears.

He only smiled, looked at his master and said:

“Didn’t I warn you?“

Why does this make us shudder?

Empathy or pain?

A horror at the senselessness?

Or is it as the sheer self-mastery?

With Epictetus it is all this and more.

All his life, Epictetus walked with a limp.

He was hobbled by slavery, yet somehow unbroken all the same.

He would later say:

“Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will.“

The Stoics believed we decide how we react to what happens to us.

Epictetus, as we each hold the power to do, chose to see his disability as only a physical impediment.

In fact, it was that idea of choice that defines the core of his philosophical beliefs.

Well, I won’t back down
No I won’t back down
You could stand me up at the gates of Hell
But I won’t back down

No I’ll stand my ground
Won’t be turned around
And I’ll keep this world from draggin’ me down
Gonna stand my ground
And I won’t back down

Hey baby
There ain’t no easy way out (I won’t back down)
Hey I will stand my ground
And I won’t back down

Well, I know what’s right
I got just one life
In a world that keeps on pushin’ me around
But I’ll stand my ground
And I won’t back down

Hey baby
There ain’t no easy way out (I won’t back down)
Hey I will stand my ground (I won’t back down)
And I won’t back down

Hey baby
There ain’t no easy way out (I won’t back down)
Hey I won’t back down

Hey baby
There ain’t no easy way out (I won’t back down)
Hey I will stand my ground (I won’t back down)
And I won’t back down (I won’t back down)
No I won’t back down

To Epictetus, no human is the full author of what happens in life.

Instead it is as if we are in a play.

If it is the playwright’s “pleasure you should act a poor man, a cripple, a governor or a private person, see that you act it naturally.

For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you.

To choose your character is another’s choice.“

And so Epictetus did.

Above: An image showing direct comparisons between the Shakespeare of the Cobbe Portrait, the Chandos Portrait and the Droeshout Engraving.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.”

Jaques in As You Like It, William Shakespeare

In Nero’s court in the 60s AD, Epictetus would have seen all of the opulence, insanity and contradictions of Rome.

He would later tell a story of witnessing a man come to Epaphroditus begging for help because he was down to his last million and a half sesterces (at least $3 million by today’s standards).

Was it with sarcasm or genuine bafflement that Epictetus’ rich owner replied:

“Dear man, how did you keep silent?

How could you possibly endure it?“

It must have also been revealing for Epictetus to watch Epaphroditus – this man who had incredible power over him – contorting himself to remain on Nero’s good side, down to flattering even the Emperor’s cobbler in hope of winning favour.

Epictetus saw aspiring candidates for the office of consul working themselves to the bone to earn the position.

He saw the gifts that were expected, the spectacles that had to be performed, the chain of offices that needed to be held for years in order to get ahead.

“That’s freedom?“, he must have thought.

“For the sake of these mighty and dignified offices and honours you kiss the hands of another man’s slaves and are thus the slaves of men who are not free themselves.“

The rich in Rome were no different than the rich today.

Despite all their wealth, ambition turns even a powerful person into a supplicant in the hope of gaining more.

“Freedom is the prize we are working for:

Not being a slave to anything – not to compulsion, not to chance events.“, Seneca had written.

What would Epictetus have thought watching Seneca in the flesh – whose works would have been featured in the home of a well-read man like Epaphroditus – working for such a deranged boss?

As a writer, Seneca may well have been the person who introduced Epictetus to Stoicism, but by his example he clearly influenced Epictetus more:

Freedom is more than a legal status.

It is a state of mind, a way of living.

Above: Statue of Roman Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, Cordoba, España

Seneca, unable to walk away from Nero’s service, ultimately forced to submit to suicide, was not trapped in the same slavery as Epictetus, but Seneca was not free all the same.

Epictetus was horrified by what he saw in the palaces and imperial offices of Rome and resolved to live differently.

“It is better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind than to live anxiously amidst abundance.“

Above: Nero walks on Rome’s cinders, Karl Theodor von Piloty (1861), National Gallery, Budapest, Hungary

Seeing someone like Paconius Agrippinus would have been a powerful counterexample, reminding Epictetus that those who march to their own beat can be free despite the tyranny that surrounds them.

“For no man is a slave who is free in his will.“

(Paconius Agrippinus was a Stoic philosopher of the 1st century.

His father was put to death by the Roman emperor Tiberius on a charge of treason.

Agrippinus himself was accused at the same time as Stoic Senator Thrasea, around 67 AD, and was banished from Italy.

As a philosopher he was spoken of with praise by Epictetus.

Though Agrippinus’s works are not known or preserved, much of our knowledge comes from the discourses of Epictetus.

In order to explain to his learners how a Stoic should behave, Epictetus also used popular historical figures.

Agrippinus, because of his ability to go against popular sentiment and remain oblivious to happenings beyond his influence, was one of those figures.

It may seem curious that while there are no great works or books credited to his name, Agrippinus is known as a philosopher.

“For this reason it is right to praise Agrippinus, because, although he was a man of the very highest worth, he never praised himself, but used to blush even if someone else praised him.  

His character was such, said Epictetus, that when any hardship befell him he would compose a eulogy upon it.

On fever, if he had a fever.

On disrepute, on exile, if he went into exile.  

And once, he said, when Agrippinus was preparing to take lunch, a man brought him word that Nero ordered him into exile:

“Very well,” said he, “we shall take our lunch in Aricia.” “

The town of Aricia was apparently the first stop outside of Rome, for those travelling south and east.)

At some point, Epictetus came formally to philosophy.

In 78 AD, when Gaius Musonius Rufus returned from his third exile, Epictetus was there to study under him.

Did Epictetus sneak off to his lecturer?

Did Epaphroditus let him attend out of guilt?

(Gaius Musonius Rufus was a Roman Stoic philosopher of the 1st century AD.

He taught philosophy in Rome during the reign of Nero and so was sent into exile in 65 AD, returning to Rome only under Galba.

He was allowed to stay in Rome when Vespasian banished all other philosophers from the city in 71 AD although he was eventually banished anyway, returning only after Vespasian’s death.

A collection of extracts from his lectures still survives.

He is remembered for being the teacher of Epictetus.)

Above: Papyrus fragment showing a section of Discourse 15 of Gaius Musonius Rufus

We don’t know, but clearly Epictetus found a way.

He would not be stopped, not even by Musonius, who was a difficult teacher.

Like the best teachers, Musonius made each of his students feel like he truly understood them at their core.

Musonius said a good teacher should seek to penetrate to the very intellect of his listener.

Epictetus described a teaching style that was so pointed and so personal that it felt as if another student had whispered all of your weaknesses in the teacher’s ear.

Musonius was a teacher who demanded the absolute best from his students.

Epictetus came to understand philosophy not as some fun diversion but as something deadly serious.

“The philosopher’s lecture hall is a hospital.

You shouldn’t walk out of it feeling pleasure, but pain, for you aren’t well when you enter it.“

Although Musonius was not a slave, he and Epictetus had long conversations about the human condition.

Both, clearly, had experienced the worst of what men could do to each other – Musonius with his repeated exiles and Epictetus living through bondage.

Yet instead of taking bitterness from this, instead of losing their sense of control over their lives, they were both pushed by these painful events toward realizing that the only power they actually had was over their mind and their character.

“If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you would be furious“, yet we so easily hand our mind over to other people, letting them inside our heads or making us feel a certain way.

Which of these forms of slavery is more shameful?

Which of these can we stop?

At some point in his 30s, Epictetus was made free by fact and law as well as spirit.

Now life presented him with new choices, the same choices each of gets when we enter the world as adults.

What would he do for a living?

How would he spend his freedom?

What would he do with his life?

Above: The Thinker, Auguste Rodin (1904)

Epictetus chose to dedicate himself to philosophy, the academic route.

Almost immediately, he gained a large following.

His school and his standing were enough that by 93 AD, when Domitian banned philosophers from Rome, Epictetus was one who was driven to exile.

He chose to go to Nicopolis (near Preveza, Greece).

Above: Nymphaeum, Nicopolis, Greece

Epictetus’ life was no soft affair and he could expect no tenure, but in choosing to teach, he was explicitly turning away from the imperial court.

He would not be complicit in some deranged Emperor’s plans.

He would not be a cog.

He would instead pursue truth where it could be found.

This hardly meant he was fleeing the responsibilities or the reality of the world:

He just had no interest in political machinations or acquiring wealth.

It was wisdom he was after:

How to get it, how to apply it, how to pass it on to others.

“If we philosophers apply ourselves to our own work as zealously as the old men in Rome have applied themselves to the matters on which they have set their hearts, perhaps we too could accomplish something.“

Above: Roma, Italia

Epictetus’ most powerful insight as a teacher derives directly from his experiences as a slave.

Although all humans are introduced at some point to the laws of the Universe, almost from the moment he was born, Epictetus was reminded daily how little control he had, even of his own person.

As he came to study and understand Stoicism, he adopted this lesson into what he described as our “chief task in life“.

It was simply “to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control and which have to do with the choices I actually control” – what is up to us and what is not up to us.

Once we have organized our understanding of the world into this stark categorization, what remains is to focus on what is up to us.

Our attitudes.

Our emotions.

Our wants.

Our desires.

Our opinions about what has happened to us.

Epictetus believed that as powerless as humans were over their external conditions, they always retained the ability to choose how they responded.

“You can bind up my leg, but not even Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice.“

Above: Statue of Zeus, father of the gods

“Every situation has two handles.“

No matter our condition, no matter how undesirable the situation, we retain the ability to choose which one we will grab.

This decision determines what kind of life we have and what kind of person we will be.

Epictetus’ focus on powerlessness was not only an insight about the power structures of his time.

He was looking at what makes us fundamentally human.

So much is out of our hands.

And yet so much remains within our grasp, provided that we decline to relinquish it.

If a person wants to be happy, wants to feel fairly treated, wants to be rich, they don’t need life to be easy, people to be nice and money to flow freely.

They need to look at the world right.

“It is not things that upset us.

It is our judgment about things.“

Above: Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Dep), Pirates of the Caribbean

Our opinions determine the reality we experience.

Epictetus did not believe that it was possible to be offended or frustrated, not without anyone’s consent.

“Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed.

If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.

Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions.

Take a moment before reacting and you will find it easier to maintain control.“

And what of the situations that are outside our control?

How is one supposed to deal with that?

Epictetus used to say that there were two faults which were by far the worst and most disgusting of all:

• Lack of endurance
• Lack of self-restraint

…when we cannot put up with or bear the wrongs which we ought to endure or cannot restrain ourselves from actions or pleasures from which we ought to refrain.

“Therefore if anyone would take these two words to heart and use them for his own guidance and regulation, he will be almost without sin and will lead a very peaceful life.

These two words are persist and resist.“

Persist and resist.

The ingredients of freedom, whatever one’s condition.

Figure out how to make the most of the hand you have been dealt, play the role assigned to you with the brilliance of a character actor.

The ability to accept life on life’s terms, the need to not need things to be different, this is power.

“Remember that it is not only the desire for wealth and position that debases and subjugates us, but also the desire for peace, leisure, travel and learning.

It does not matter what the external thing is, the value we place on it subjugates us to another.

Where our heart is set, there our impediment lies.“

For Epictetus, ambition should not be focused on externals but on internals.

A person’s greatest, most impressive triumph is not over other people but over oneself –

Over our limitations, our tempers, our egos, our petty desires.

We all have these impulses.

What sets us apart is if we rise above them.

What makes us impressive is what we are able to make of this crooked material we were born with.

How rare but glorious the man who manages to do so.

How much better are the lives of those who try to rise above than those of the masses, who complain and whine, who sink to the level of their basest instincts.

“From now on, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside.

Whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable, highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now.

You are at the Olympic Games.

You cannot wait any longer.

Your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event.“

Above: Logo of the Olympic Games

It was the experience of having been deprived of so much that formed Epictetus’ detachment from worldly possessions.

It was as if he said to himself:

“No one will ever take anything from me again.“

Last night, I had the strangest dream
I sailed away to China
In a little rowboat to find ya
And you said you had to get your laundry clean
Didn’t want no one to hold you, what does that mean?
And you said

Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride
Nobody gonna slow me down
Oh no, I got to keep on moving
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break-a my stride
I’m runnin’ and I won’t touch ground
Oh no, I got to keep on moving

You’re on a roll and now you pray it lasts
The road behind was rocky
But now you’re feeling cocky
You look at me and you see your past
Is that the reason why you’re runnin’ so fast?
And she said

Ain’t nothin’ gonna break-a my stride
Nobody gonna slow me down
Oh no, I got to keep on moving
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride
I’m runnin’ and I won’t touch ground
Oh no, I got to keep on moving

(Never let another girl like you)
Work me over
(Never let another girl like you)
Drag me under
(If I meet another girl like you)
I will tell her
(Never want another girl like you)
Have to say, oh

Ain’t nothin’ gonna break-a my stride
Nobody gonna slow me down
Oh no (Oh no), I got to keep on moving
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride
I’m runnin’ and I won’t touch ground
Oh no, I got to keep on moving
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break-a my stride
Nobody gonna slow me down
Oh no (Oh no), I got to keep on moving
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break-a my stride
I’m runnin’ and I won’t touch ground
Oh no, I got to keep on moving
(Woah)
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break my stride
Nobody gonna slow me down
Oh no, I got to keep on moving
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break-a my stride
I’m runnin’ and I won’t touch ground
Oh no, I got to keep on moving
Ain’t nothin’ gonna break-a my stride
Nobody gonna slow me down
Oh no (Oh no), I got to keep on moving

One evening a thief entered Epictetus’ home and stole an iron lamp that he kept burning in a shrine in his front hallway.

While he felt a flash of disappointment and anger, he knew that a Stoic was not to trust these strong emotions.

Pausing, checking himself, he found a different way through the experience of being robbed.

“Tomorrow, my friend, you will find an earthenware lamp, for a man can only lose what he has.“

You can only lose what you have.

You don’t control your possessions, so don’t ascribe more value to them than they deserve.

Whenever we forget this, life finds a way to painfully call it back to our attention.

Yet even with this rejection of materialism, Epictetus was cautious not to let his self-discipline become a vice, to become some sort of context with other people.

“When you have accustomed your body to a frugal regime, don’t put on airs about it.

If you only drink water, don’t broadcast the fact all the time.

If you ever want to go in for endurance training, do it for yourself and not for the world to see.“

Above: US actress / Monaco Princess Grace Kelly (1929 – 1982)

Progress is wonderful.

Self-improvement is a worthy endeavor, but it should be done for its own sake – not for congratulations or recognition.

Epictetus never had children, but we know he adopted a young orphan and raised him to adulthood.

It is haunting then, to imagine him practicing steeling himself against the loss even of the joy being a father brought him.

Above: Epictetus

“As you kiss your son ‘good night‘, whisper to yourself:

‘He may be dead in the morning.‘

‘Don’t tempt fate‘, you say.

By talking about a natural event?

Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?“

It cannot have been easy for Epictetus to think these thoughts about a boy he loved, but he knew from experience that life was cruel.

He wished to remind himself that his precious son was not his possession nor were his friends or his students nor his health.

The fate of these things remained, for the most part, outside his control.

Which for a Stoic means only one thing:

Cherish them while we have them, but accept that they belong to us only in trust, that they can depart at any moment.

Because they can.

And so can we.

This was what Epictetus practiced philosophy for.

A man who had seen life in real and hard terms had no room or time for dialectics or for sophistry.

He wanted strategies for getting better, for dealing with what was likely to happen to a person in the course of a day or in an empire ruled, far too often, by tyrants.

“Appearances to the mind are of four kinds: 

Things either are what they appear to be or they neither are nor appear to be.

Or they are and do not appear to be.

Or they are not and yet appear to be. 

Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.“

If this practical bent put him at odds with other Stoics, so be it.

“What is the work of virtue?

A well-flowing life.

Who, then, is making progress?

The person who has read many works?

What?

Is virtue nothing more than that?

To have attained a great knowledge of many works?“

Action was what mattered.

Not reading.

Not memorization.

Not even publishing impressive writing of your own.

Only working toward being a better person, a better thinker, a better citizen.

“I can’t call a person a hard worker just because they read and write, even if working at it all night.

Until I know what a person is working for, I can’t deem them industrious.

I can, if the end they work for is their own ruling principle, having it be and remain in constant harmony with nature.“

As a thinker and a teacher, Epictetus preached humility.

“It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks they already know.“

In Zen, there is a parable of a master and a student who sit down for tea.

The master fills up the cup until it overfills.

This cup is like your mind.

If it is full, it cannot accept anything more.

“It is this whole conceit of knowing something useful that we ought to cast aside before we come to philosophy.

Otherwise we will never come near to making any progress, even if we plow through all primers and treatises.“

Above: Logo for French language book series (What do I know?)

Each morning Epictetus had a dialogue with himself, checking his progress, evaluating whether he had properly steeled himself for what may come.

It was then he journaled or recited philosophy to himself.

“Every day and night keep thoughts like these at hand.

Write them, read them aloud, talk to yourself and others about them.“

While other Romans were getting up early to pay obeisance to some patron or to further their careers, Epictetus wanted to look in the mirror, to hold himself accountable, to focus on where he was falling short.

“What do I lack to achieve tranquility?

What to achieve calm?

Where did I go wrong in matters conducive to serenity?

What did I do that was unfriendly or unsocial or unfeeling?

What to be done was left undone in regard to these matters?

In a word, neither death nor exile nor pain nor anything of this kind is the real cause of our doing or not doing any action, but our inward opinions and principles.“

William Shakespeare has Casca say in Julius Caesar that every slave holds the source of their freedom in their hand and it is with that weapon that Brutus would free himself of Caesar’s reign in 44 BC.

He would not need to resort to murder.

He would not need a literal weapon.

Instead he would create another kind of freedom, a deeper freedom that could be possessed in one’s hand (Encheiridion).

Above: The Assassination of Julius Caesar (15 March 44 BC)

And so it was that Toussaint Louverture would be in part inspired by Epictetus’ ferocious commitment to freedom – literal and otherwise – when he rose up and led his fellow Haitian slaves to freedom against Napoleon’s France.

Above: Haitian General Toussaint Louverture (1743 – 1803)

Just as it was that in 1965, as Colonel James Stockdale was shot down over Vietnam, knowing he would almost certainly be taken prisoner, he would arm himself with Epictetus’ teachings, which he had studied as a student at Stanford and say to himself while he parachuted down:

“I am leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.“

Above: Prisoner of war James Stockdale (1923 – 2005) receiving the Medal of Honor from US President Gerald Ford (1913 – 2006)

Stockdale claims he was able to retain his sanity during capture by relying on the philosophy of Epictetus.

“It is difficulties that show what men are.“

So, 2,000 years apart the same teachings were helping a man find freedom inside captivity, making him unbreakable despite the worst circumstances.

Which is the only way future generations can possibly thank or pay the proper homage to someone like Epictetus.

Forget everything but action.

Don’t talk about it.

Be about it.

“Don’t explain your philosophy.

Embody it.“

I think of Nicholas Cresswell.

I feel sad.

I think of Migjeni.

I feel sad.

I think of Hachiro, the Japanese salaryman.

I feel sad.

I think of Groupthink.

I feel sad.

I think of wage slavery.

I feel sad.

I think of Eugene O’Neill and Fernando Pessoa.

I feel sad.

I think of Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde and Henry David Thoreau.

I feel sad.

To Epictetus, all external events are beyond our control.

“Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.“

Above: US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945)

I cannot make another man feel happy about the bleakness of his life.

I cannot solve anyone’s poverty, (including my own, if I am not favored by fortune).

I cannot help Hachiro find the joy of life lost in making a living.

I have seen Groupthink in most organizations for whom I have worked.

They have created their own prisons and have imprisoned themselves.

Above: Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) and Ellis “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

I have been a wage slave and may possibly be one until the end of my working life.

Salvation from this bondage might be possible once I learn the art and science of being a digital nomad.

Meanwhile…

I will try to give meaning into the job I have.

I will act on improving my future.

I want to invent my own job.

“I don’t want to join the rat race.

I don’t want to be enslaved by machines, bureaucracies, boredom and ugliness.

I don’t want to be a moron, a robot, a commuter.

I don’t want to become a fragment of a person.

I want to do my own thing.

I want to live simply.

I want to deal with people, not masks.

People matter.

Nature matters.

Beauty matters.

Wholeness matters.

I want to be able to care.“

E.F. Schumacher, Good Work

I have harkened to the wisdom of Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde whose final fates were sad but whose words still speak volumes.

I have pondered the pessimism that Thoreau felt about civilization and I find solace in the solitude he suggested.

Epictetus argues that we should accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately.

However, individuals are responsible for their own actions, which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline.

“Self-discipline without talent can often achieve astounding results, whereas talent without self-discipline inevitably dooms itself to failure.“

Sydney J. Harris, Pieces of Eight

“First say to yourself what you would be and then do what you have to do.“

No thing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig.

If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time.

Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.

Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake, in little things.

And thence proceed to greater.

If we are not stupid or insincere when we say that the good or ill of man lies within his own will, and that all beside is nothing to us, why are we still troubled?”

Epictetus

I can change my world by changing my perspective.

I don’t feel sad anymore.

Sources

Sheila Bender, A Year in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery

Steve Biddulph, Manhood

Richard M. Bolles and Katherine Brooks, What Color Is Your Parachute?

Rolf Dobelli, The Art of the Good Life

Rolf Dobelli, Stop Reading the News

Neil Gaiman, Art Matters

Ronald Gross, The Independent Scholar’s Handbook

Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Shirley Hudson, Real World English C1

Roman Krznaric, How to Find Fulfilling Work

Matchbox Twenty, “Unwell“

Tom Petty, “I Won’t Back Down“

Pink Floyd, “Comfortably Numb“

Lonely Planet, The Digital Nomad Handbook

Rod Stewart, “You’re In My Heart“

Sting, “Moon Over Bourbon Street“

Supertramp, “The Logical Song“

Titiyo, “Come Along“

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Wikipedia

Wikiquote

Matthew Wilder, “Break My Stride“

Neil Young, “Heart of Gold“