A person is alive when he is of use to many; he is alive when he is of use to himself. Slackers who hide out at home might as well be in the tomb. Go ahead and write it in marble above their door:
Preceded in death by themselves.
Seneca (4 BC – AD 65), Moral Letters to Lucilius (60.4)
This was my weekend watch. It’s a fantastic, far-reaching discussion across the evolution of virtue, morality, free trade and more. It touches on the green revolution and on Ridley’s Rational Optimist perspective (similar to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.
In fact, it’s all that you might expect from a discussion between Peterson and Ridley.
Well worth a watch.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
Viktor E. Frankl (1905 – 1997), Man’s Search for Meaning (p110)
Note: the translation I have is “striving and struggling”, but I’ve also seen it translated as “What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather a striving struggle for a worthwhile goal.” which I think I prefer.
Ground down by lockdown? You could look at this as the ultimate Stoic test and attempt to live by the maxim:
“It isn’t the things themselves that disturb people, but the judgements that they form about them.”
In other words, like it or not, how we respond to things we can’t control is a choice. Nicholas Bate, as ever, has wise and pithy words, here and here and here…
Covid Career Goals, 7
1. To be measured by the value you create not just the time you put in.
…
5. To be constantly learning. Especially through mistakes.
Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash
A bull is filled up by only a few acres of pasturage; a single wood suffices for more than one elephant; yet a human being feeds upon land and sea. Why is that? Has nature given us such an insatiable maw that although the bodies we are given are of modest size, we yet surpass the largest, most ravenous eaters of the animal world? That is not the case … It is not bodily hunger that runs up the bill but ambition. Therefore let us regard those who, as Sallust says, “heed the belly” as belonging to the race of animals rather than of humans.
Seneca (4 BC – AD 65), Moral Letters to Lucilius (60.2 – 4)
Kurt Harden at Cultural Offering has Anton Chekhov’s eight qualities of cultured people…
They have no shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as knowing celebrities, shaking hands with …
Well worth studying and cultivating.
This looks interesting.
Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray in conversation on Peterson’s podcast.
My weekend will be complete.
However, is this 100 minutes isn’t sufficient, there’s an archive of his podcasts, here.