I watched another Michael Sugrue lecture.
This one was about Stoicism and Marcus Aurelius.
And somewhere between a Roman emperor, Mount Hua Sect, Master Roshi, Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, Paarthurnax and Arnold Schwarzenegger taking ballet lessons, I think I figured out why Marcus Aurelius interests me.
He called his Meditations. I call mine Field Notes.
The thing that immediately got me was that Meditations wasn’t really written as a philosophy book for everyone else.
Marcus Aurelius was writing to himself.
Sugrue describes this incredibly powerful emperor, surrounded by people who wanted something from him, repeatedly writing down the same kinds of reminders:
don’t get angry.
do what you’re supposed to do.
deal with people.
remember you’re going to die.
try to be good anyway.
And I found that strangely relatable.
He called his Meditations.
I call mine Field Notes.
There is, admittedly, a slight difference between running the Roman Empire and sitting at home writing about why Spider-Man was right.
But I think the reason for writing is similar.
I write because I don’t want to forget what I’m trying to become.
The funny part is I don’t actually know what I’m trying to become.
That’s kind of the point.
I have people I admire.
Characters I admire.
Ideas I agree with.
Ideas I completely disagree with.
Berserk.
Vagabond.
The Climber.
Vinland Saga.
Mythology.
Marcus Aurelius.
Spider-Man.
And probably a hundred other things I’m forgetting.
I take something from each of them.
Maybe reject something else.
And slowly figure out what remains.
I’m not trying to become Marcus Aurelius.
I’m trying to become more me.
Whatever that ends up meaning.
Stoicism should not mean becoming a brick
One thing I don’t like about the way Stoicism sometimes gets presented is this idea that the goal is to stop feeling things.
No anger.
No fear.
No sadness.
No grief.
Just:
LOGIC.
I don’t want that.
Negative emotions are important too.
If you’re angry, something probably made you angry.
If you’re afraid, something feels dangerous.
If you’re grieving, you lost something that mattered.
That doesn’t mean every emotion is correct.
It definitely doesn’t mean you should immediately obey whatever emotion appears.
But pretending it isn’t there seems equally stupid.
I don’t want to be engulfed by emotion.
I also don’t want to remove emotion from myself.
This reminded me of Anand Neelakantan’s Asura: Tale of the Vanquished.
The way I read it, Rama is almost pure dharma and control.
Ravana embraces everything.
Love.
Anger.
Pride.
Jealousy.
Desire.
Fear.
All of it.
I don’t really want either extreme.
I don’t want Ravana swallowing himself in emotion.
I don’t want to become pure logic either.
Somewhere in the middle seems more human.
Feel it. Understand it. Then decide what you’re going to do.
Anger can exist without being allowed to run the entire environment around you.
You can be angry and still not make everyone else miserable.
You can be afraid and still act.
You can be sad and still eventually get up.
Fear is important
Fear especially gets treated like something you’re supposed to eliminate.
I think fear is one of the most important emotions we have.
If you’re afraid of something, you should probably ask why.
Maybe the fear is reasonable.
Maybe it isn’t.
But it is telling you something.
And courage doesn’t really mean much without it.
If you aren’t afraid because you don’t understand the danger, you’re not brave.
You’re just unaware.
Courage is being afraid and doing what you believe needs to be done anyway.
Which is probably why I love that Paarthurnax line from Skyrim:
“What is better — to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?”
Because being good when being good costs you nothing is easy.
The interesting part is when it becomes difficult.
Talking is easy. Doing is harder.
There is a scene in Return of the Mount Hua Sect that I kept thinking about.
Chung Myung talks about how hard work matters and how important it is to focus on your foundations.
One of the disciples basically asks:
If that’s so simple, why doesn’t everyone do it?
And Chung Myung points out that respecting your elders is simple.
Eating properly is simple.
Doing good is simple.
There are lots of things everyone knows they should do.
So why doesn’t everyone do them every day?
Because:
simple does not mean easy.
That’s probably one of the most obvious things I’ve ever written here.
But that’s the problem.
Most of the important things are obvious.
Don’t hurt people.
Don’t be stupid.
Treat people properly.
Work hard.
Take responsibility.
Admit when you’re wrong.
Help when you can.
We generally grow up knowing some version of this.
Humanity’s problem isn’t that nobody has discovered:
“Maybe being horrible to everyone is bad.”
The problem is real life.
You’re tired.
You’re angry.
You’re scared.
You need money.
Someone hurt you first.
Doing the right thing is inconvenient.
Nobody will know.
Everyone else is doing it.
And suddenly the incredibly simple thing becomes incredibly difficult.
That’s where I think philosophy becomes useful.
Not necessarily because it gives you some secret rule nobody has discovered before.
Sometimes it just reminds you of something you already knew before life gave you twenty reasons to ignore it.
Maybe that’s why Marcus repeated himself
Marcus Aurelius keeps returning to the same ideas in Meditations.
Sugrue points this out too. It isn’t hundreds of pages of Marcus discovering completely new philosophical systems. He’s repeatedly reminding himself how he believes he should behave.
Which makes sense.
He already knew:
don’t get angry at idiots.
The problem is that tomorrow there will be another idiot.
And then another one.
And apparently several decades worth of idiots if you’re running Rome.
Knowing the principle once doesn’t magically make you live it forever.
You have to return to it.
Again.
And again.
That also changed how I think about hypocrisy.
I don’t think you’re necessarily a hypocrite because you fail to live up to something you genuinely believe.
If someone says:
“I need to be more patient.”
Then genuinely tries to be more patient.
Then loses his temper.
Realises he screwed up.
And tries again tomorrow.
I don’t think that’s hypocrisy.
That’s just someone failing at something difficult.
Hypocrisy, to me, is when you love saying the ideal but don’t seriously try to participate in it yourself.
Talking is easy.
Doing is harder.
Failing while genuinely trying to do it is still doing something.
You also have to forgive yourself
But trying doesn’t mean repeatedly beating yourself into the ground.
If you train every day and then get injured, continuing to train because you want to prove how disciplined you are isn’t impressive.
It’s stupid.
Rest.
Recover.
Then come back.
Which is where Master Roshi somehow joins Marcus Aurelius.
His whole Turtle School philosophy is basically:
work hard.
study.
eat properly.
sleep properly.
Live.
Training isn’t only suffering.
Rest is part of training too.
And before Goku and Krillin enter the tournament, Roshi doesn’t tell them:
You must win or everything you did was pointless.
The tournament is there to show them how much more there is to learn.
I really like that.
Because self-forgiveness shouldn’t mean:
“Whatever. Doesn’t matter.”
It should mean:
“That happened. What do I learn from it?”
You can forgive yourself without excusing yourself.
You can hold yourself accountable without hating yourself.
If you fail today, the goal isn’t to spend tomorrow punishing yourself for failing.
The goal is to get better.
Winning can make you stupid too
Losing isn’t the only thing you have to learn how to handle.
Winning can absolutely get to your head.
You become good at something and suddenly:
I have arrived.
I’m the expert.
I’m the strongest.
I’m the best.
Finished.
But there is always something else you don’t know.
I remember learning about Arnold Schwarzenegger taking ballet lessons to improve his posing.
This enormous bodybuilder standing there learning from ballet dancers probably looked ridiculous.
But that didn’t matter.
He wasn’t the champion in that room.
He was simply a student.
And he was bad at something.
Simple.
I think humility is partly being comfortable with that sentence:
I don’t know this.
Not:
I am useless.
Not pretending you’re bad at things you’re obviously good at.
Just understanding that being excellent in one thing doesn’t magically make you excellent in everything.
And you cannot remain the best at everything forever anyway.
A doctor has to keep refreshing their knowledge.
A fighter eventually sees younger fighters arrive with techniques their generation didn’t have.
A designer eventually watches someone younger use a tool or process that didn’t even exist when they started.
That doesn’t mean the older person was useless.
It means humanity continued.
Eventually the student should become better than you
I actually think if you become good at something, you have some responsibility to teach the next person.
Not make them into a copy of you.
Teach them the foundations.
Show them the stupid mistakes you already made so they don’t have to waste ten years discovering the same thing.
Then let them do something better.
Maybe eventually they’ll know something you don’t.
Good.
Ask them to teach you.
The student should be able to say:
You know more than me. Teach me.
And eventually the teacher should be able to say:
You know more than me now. Show me.
I think both require humility.
And I think there is something comforting about that too.
Because nothing is forever.
Which sounds terrible.
And, I’ll be honest, it kind of is.
But it also means you don’t have to carry everything forever.
Eventually you can hand something over.
We stand on a lot more shoulders than giants
Humanity loves stories about exceptional people.
Einstein.
Oppenheimer.
Emperors.
Conquerors.
Geniuses who supposedly held the entire world in their hands.
They’re good stories.
We like mythology.
But civilisation wasn’t built only by people whose names ended up in history books.
It was also built by the lab assistant who cleaned the room.
The teacher who helped someone understand what they were doing wrong.
The friend who got someone through a horrible year using nothing except jokes and friendship.
The partner who stayed.
The parent who taught something.
The senior who stopped a junior from making the same stupid mistake they made.
The person who quietly did their job properly for forty years.
Most of those people will never get statues.
Eventually their names disappear.
But what they did doesn’t necessarily disappear with them.
Someone learned something because of them.
Then taught someone else.
Then that person changed it.
Then somebody else improved it.
Humanity is built on the shoulders of giants.
Sure.
But I think there are billions of ordinary shoulders underneath them too.
That doesn’t make death less scary
Marcus talks constantly about death and being forgotten.
Soon you’ll forget everything.
Soon everyone will forget you.
That’s part of the Stoic argument: don’t behave as though all of this lasts forever.
Does thinking about that make death less scary to me?
No.
Of course not.
One day you just don’t wake up.
And the world keeps going.
People go to work.
Buses run.
Somebody is complaining about traffic.
Someone is ordering lunch.
The world continues as if nothing happened.
That’s terrifying.
I’m not going to pretend I have philosophised my way out of that.
But I don’t think being forgotten means you didn’t matter.
You don’t have to become historically important to affect the world.
You can matter enormously to five people.
Maybe one person.
Maybe someone remembers one thing you taught them.
Maybe they don’t even remember where they learned it eventually.
It still happened.
Beneath the emperor is just a guy
And I think that’s finally why Marcus Aurelius matters to me.
Sugrue spends a lot of the lecture describing how extraordinary Marcus was.
Absolute ruler.
Enormous power.
Very little stopping him from indulging himself.
And yet he kept trying to behave according to what he thought was right.
That’s admirable.
But strangely, that isn’t the part I admire most.
It’s the notebook.
Because beneath:
MARCUS AURELIUS, EMPEROR OF ROME
there’s a human being.
Someone who gets frustrated.
Someone who thinks about death.
Someone who has to remind himself how to deal with people.
Someone who repeats the same lessons because apparently yesterday’s reminder wasn’t enough.
Someone trying to become better while everything else is happening around him.
He would probably be horrified that we’re reading what was essentially his private diary.
Sorry Marcus.
I’m still glad we did.
Maybe that’s why I love Spider-Man
I think this is also why Spider-Man has always worked so well for me.
And probably why millions of people love him.
He’s responsible.
But he’s human.
He gets angry.
He gets hurt.
He screws up.
He has his own problems.
Sometimes helping somebody is incredibly inconvenient.
But if he can help, he feels responsible for trying.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Unfortunately, Spider-Man continues to be right.
Superman represents something slightly different to me.
Hope.
What does being human look like when you have almost absolute power?
You could dominate everyone.
Instead you choose to help.
There is something strangely Marcus Aurelius about that.
Batman is vengeance.
Pain and anger turned into purpose, but always with the danger that vengeance could swallow everything else.
Different characters.
Different answers.
But the ones I care about aren’t interesting because they’re flawless.
They’re interesting because there is something underneath the symbol struggling to live up to it.
And I think that’s what responsibility really is.
You don’t wait until you’re fearless.
Or perfectly disciplined.
Or completely healed.
Or completely certain.
Sometimes you are scared.
Sometimes you’re exhausted.
Sometimes you fall.
And then, when you can,
you get back up.
Not because there’s necessarily a reward waiting.
Not because you’re guaranteed to win.
Not because somebody is watching.
Sometimes simply because you believe it is the right thing to do.
Insert Superman theme here.
I don’t think there is a finished version
I said earlier that I write these because I don’t want to forget what I’m trying to become.
But maybe there isn’t a final version.
Maybe I’ll eventually reach a point where I’m content.
I hope so.
And even then I’ll probably look backwards and go:
ehh. could have done better.
Not because everything was terrible.
Maybe I’ll actually be completely happy with what I did.
But there will always be things I could have understood earlier.
Things I could have done better.
People I could have treated better.
Things I should have learned.
That’s okay.
Contentment doesn’t have to mean:
I did everything perfectly.
Maybe it just means:
I know I could have done better, but I’m at peace with what I managed to do.
What would make me feel like my life was enough?
I don’t know.
I guess I’ll find out.
No conclusion
Maybe that’s what I’ve taken from Marcus Aurelius more than Stoicism itself.
The rules aren’t particularly mysterious.
Be responsible.
Be decent.
Learn.
Don’t let ego stop you from becoming a student again.
Rest when you need to.
Feel things.
Don’t let those feelings destroy everything around you.
Help when you can.
When you learn something worth teaching, pass it on.
Accept that somebody after you will probably do it better.
And when you fail at all of this, which you absolutely will,
try again.
Talking about being good is easy.
Actually trying to be good while you’re angry, scared, tired, embarrassed, successful, powerful, grieving, failing or simply having a terrible day is much harder.
And maybe that’s why Meditations survived.
In a world where we love stories about geniuses, emperors, alpha males, superheroes and extraordinary people who seem to have everything figured out, there is something comforting about looking underneath the emperor and finding a human being.
A human being who was afraid of death.
Who struggled.
Who wrote things down.
Who needed reminders.
Who tried his best in the middle of everything.
Just like billions of other people.
Just like me.
Maybe the goal was never to become some perfect person.
Maybe it’s simply to keep trying to be as human as possible.
