Dear Readers,
Here is the latest Monday Muse with a meditation from the Dying Every Day series, a perennial reminder, insight, and recommendation to consider. If you’re interested in more tools for the art of living, consider becoming a member to support the project and gain full access to our meditations, podcasts, and courses. Be wise and be well this week!
💀 Dying Every Day
The Dying Every Day series delivers meditations on the art of living (and dying). Each meditation provides a quote, a selected passage (from an original Stoic text), and a daily exercise to contemplate.
“To obtain something we have desired is to find out that it is worthless; we are always living in expectation of better things, while, at the same time, we often repent and long for things that belong to the past.”
— Schopenhauer, On the Vanity of Existence
Selected Reading
In this week’s meditation, we explore the discipline of desire through a selected reading from Seneca.
How much greater joy does one feel who looks without concern, not merely upon the election of a praetor or of a consul, but upon that great struggle in which some are seeking yearly honors, and others permanent power, and others the triumph and the prosperous outcome of war, and others riches, or marriage and offspring, or the welfare of themselves and their relatives!
What a great-souled action it is to be the only person canvassing for nothing, offering prayers to no man, and saying, “Fortune, I have nothing to do with you. I am not at your service.” …
For who was ever satisfied, after attainment, with that which loomed up large as he prayed for it? Happiness is not, as men think, a greedy thing; it is a lowly thing; for that reason, it never gluts a man’s desire. You deem lofty the objects you seek because you are on a low level and hence far away from them, but they are mean in the sight of him who has reached them. And I am very much mistaken if he does not desire to climb still higher; that which you regard as the top is merely a rung on the ladder.
+ Adapted from On the Vanity of Place-Seeking by Seneca
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Daily Exercise
Consider journaling on what you deem as “the highest good” in your life. Once you determine what truly matters, you can use the discipline of desire to let go of what doesn’t. As you navigate daily life this week, how can you remember to utilize the discipline of desire?
📌 Perennial Reminder(s)
The Stoics’ notion that ‘everything is opinion’ becomes, for them, a warrant to examine our usual thinking more closely, department by department, to see whether it squares with reason and with what we know of human nature. To simplify only a bit, Stoicism views most of our miseries as driven by the ways we relate to desires and fears about the future, and to pleasures and pains in the present. … The Stoic’s first observation about desire is that getting what we want tends not to produce the satisfaction that we imagined. It makes us want more. New desires appear when other ones are spent; our minds seem to have an appetite for desire itself, and for the illusion that fulfilling it will bring us to an endpoint. The end never arrives. […]
Source: The Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth
💡 Perennial Insight(s)
People commonly think that the best way to attain happiness is to change their environment—their house, their clothes, their car, their job, their spouse, their lover, their circle of friends. But those who have thought carefully about desire—the people whose views we will examine in the following pages—have unanimously drawn the conclusion that the best way—indeed, perhaps the only way—to attain lasting happiness is not to change the world around us or our place in it but to change ourselves. In particular, if we can convince ourselves to want what we already have, we can dramatically enhance our happiness without any change in our circumstances. […]
Source: On Desire by William B. Irvine (Listen on In Search of Wisdom)
🛋️ Perennial Reflection
This week’s passages reminded me of similar points by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. For Epicurus, many of our fears and anxieties result from failing to see things as they really are. The Epicurean view is that we actually already have everything we need if only we could see it.
My conversation with John Sellars (author of The Pocket Epicurean) discussed Epicurus’s three categories of needs:
Epicurus’s approach to this question was to strip things down to the basics. What do we need? What is essential for our physical survival? Food, water, shelter from the elements—that’s about it. These are nature’s demands. Epicurus called the desire for these things “natural and necessary.”
But what if you want something beyond mere essentials? That’s all fine, Epicurus would say, and perfectly reasonable. The desire for these things grows out of our more basic natural desires for food, water, and shelter, even if it goes beyond what is essential. Epicurus called these sorts of things “natural, but not necessary.”
Then there’s everything else: everything we presumably think we need to live a happy life. For Epicurus, these things would fall into the third category, the “unnatural and unnecessary.”
It can be challenging to see that the only things we need are “natural and necessary” and that everything else is mere window dressing. What we need is actually very little, and because of that, it is relatively easy to secure.
📖 Perennial Book(s)
This week’s book recommendation is Stumbling on Happiness (published in 2006) by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. With wit and wisdom, Gilbert reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there. While most of us think we know what will make us happy, Gilbert explains that we are usually wrong.
“We insist on steering our boats because we think we have a pretty good idea of where we should go, but the truth is that much of our steering is in vain—not because the boat won’t respond, and not because we can’t find our destination, but because the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope. Just as we experience illusions of eyesight and illusions of hindsight, so too do we experience illusions of foresight...”
— Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
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The Discipline of Desire, Satisfaction, and Changing Ourselves