‘Meditations’ is one of my favorite books. I revisit it almost yearly and each time I find new nuggets of wisdom. While videos like this may be useful for some people, I do think it’s worth reading the book on your own to form your own interpretation of it, especially since it isn’t a very long. If you like audiobooks I recommend the audiobook recording by Duncan Steen and George Long.
I often have trouble with challenging people at work.
Me too. Should I demand a joust, or pistols at dawn?'
For the video, I find the format completely destroys the content. Reading the book, I can almost put myself in the situation of a Roman Emperor arriving at these conclusions, after weary days of argument, etc, etc. In video form, they just wash over as meaningless aphorisms.
While there is a rational basis for only focusing on the things you can control, in practice, I've observed that people who adhere to Stoicism as a core part of their philosophy toward life end up using it as a crutch to intellectualize disengagement and shy away from confrontation of all forms.
There is a healthy and rational way to engage in conflict resolution and ignoring the problem, refusing to have difficult conversations, burying one's head in the sand, none of these things accomplish anything other than to result in a gradual surrender to people who have no such qualms.
This strikes me as an objection to people’s interpretation of the philosophy. Even the early stoics believed this would be the wrong way to live. The four core virtues include courage, and the people shying from confrontation would be lacking that virtue. They would also be willfully ignorant, thus lacking wisdom. Then finally, they would be lacking temperance by failing to resist their urge to hide from something that makes them uncomfortable.
I’m not saying stoicism is perfect or anything like it.
I describe what you’re noticing as “inviting death into life”. I do agree a lot of people use philosophies like stoicism to intellectualize and justify this behaviour. It’s a very common kind of psychological illness though, and people find all kinds of ways to do it. They suppress themselves (and those around them) by rationalizing their inability to engage in life.
I find a lot of people who do this can be very intelligent. When I realized how it works it was very eye-opening how little an intellect can protect you from maladaptive behaviours. The brain can seriously undermine itself through defensive and protective behaviour.
Yes, "inviting death into life" is a good way to put it.
The classical philosophy was much purer in many ways than modern practice, agreed on that point.
Although I do often question how much value it was to Marcus Aurelius himself as a father given how his son turned out. I don't intend that as a low blow but as a serious question of the long term value of the implications contained in the philosophy.
No, you're right to ask that. It's an interesting question to me in this era of time and regarding the merits of stoicism in general. One of the most highly regarded stoics (though he never explicitly identified as one) was the father of a horrible megalomaniac.
I don't think it'll be possible to ever know why that happened and how, but it's worth being suspicious of.
One of the main issues with stoicism (from my perspective) is that people can easily think they're engaged in the philosophy internally, yet they'll rarely if ever practice it externally in the world. It's easy to think Aurelius was practicing it externally because of how he expresses himself in text, and how his time as emperor was positively renowned... But this doesn't necessarily mean he was engaged in practicing the philosophy holistically in all aspects of his life. Maybe he was a bad father. There is evidence that Commodus didn't receive as much guidance as Marcus himself did, which is odd. Marcus was ill and facing the worst kinds of things, yet you'd think he'd have the resources and sense to ensure his son was receiving training and guidance to greatest extent possible. It's easy to be critical, though. He faced tremendous losses and stress in his life that would likely wear me into a pulp.
But then there's also the possibility that the winners write history, and those who assassinated Commodus ensured that records of his rule were made to seem horrible. It's hard to be certain of what really occurred.
Still, there are likely more stoics out there who try to think like a stoic but don't act like one. It's the same with any philosophy. Bringing it into practice is the hard part, and most of us fail to some degree or another. I do think stoicism is particularly vulnerable to this mistake though, but that's only based on intuition and anecdotal experience.
I know what you're getting at here, but one should never underestimate the ability of the "self-help" publishers and snake-oil communities in general to commercialize, popularize, and ultimately derail and derange any kind of wisdom they get their hands on. Lots of people involved in "self-improvement" also aren't being honest with themselves and are actually looking to rationalize whatever their existing bad behaviours are with sophisticated-seeming nonsense.
Stoicism is like Buddhism or anything else here, where you're better off with primary sources or certain vetted guides/commentaries. Talking to certain segments of people that loudly consider themselves practitioners may not be the best way to actually get acquainted with the philosophy..
One of the funniest things about modern stoicism hucksters is how steadfastly they're focused on using the philosophy to get more out of wholly external aspects of life. There's very little focus on the hard parts, like being at ease with who and what you are and what your place in the cosmos is, and utilizing your virtues to the best of your ability. It's more like "here's the dichotomy of control... Now use this knowledge to control your sales funnel and maximize profits this quarter!"
I think this is a valid objection and through the years I realized what the best use may be for stoicism: a fallback in difficult times when all other philosophies fail.
Sure, if you can resolve conflicts and engage with problems, go for it and do it. Sometimes though the world around you is falling or you suffer terrible loss or you face impossible situations -- then Marcus Aurelius will still be there waiting for you, with advice to offer. Also worth remembering he wrote the thing itself with war and death all around him.
I just finished reading it for the first time. Good timing! My takeaways:
- It looks an awful lot like Taoism if you squint. s/logos/tao/ and focus on mindfulness and living in the present, and there’s a lot in common.
- I’ve read a lot of mythology over the years, but never heard real people talk about praying to Zeus. That was neat reminder of how much beliefs can change over time.
- The emphasis on accepting what life has given you because that’s what logos/tao/gods have willed is a lot more palatable if you’re an emperor than his slaves. It’s great to accept what you can’t change. It’s not so great to accept the bad things you could change if someone hadn’t convinced you it was the way things were meant to be.
- I couldn’t go along with the how-tos on not enjoying yourself. “Here’s how you deaden yourself to music: …” Uh, no thanks.
- “Art these days is so shallow and silly, unlike back in the day.” Ok, great^100-grand-boomer.
There was a lot of good, practical advise, though.
"- The emphasis on accepting what life has given you because that’s what logos/tao/gods have willed is a lot more palatable if you’re an emperor than his slaves. It’s great to accept what you can’t change. It’s not so great to accept the bad things you could change if someone hadn’t convinced you it was the way things were meant to be."
This is often read as a critic against Stoa. It's not really true though (though you might find a quote of some stoic somewhere that does agree). The tricky thing here is deciding what you can change and what you cannot change. Or in which way you can change things and how attainable that is and how much effort you want to spend.
Many situations and problems are not clear cut and require some attention devoted to them. Sometimes levers to change something are available where you didn't expect them. And sometimes you think you can change something, but it turns out to not be true.
Stoicism is not about being passive, it is about being active. See what you would like to have changed, and in which way can you change things. And no, complaining endlessly, as is common in our society, does not bring much change ;) That is passive behaviour where you set out to be dependent on someone else bringing change.
I didn't mean that as a criticism. Those were just my thoughts as I read the book. I lack deep knowledge on the subject, and I'll leave meaningful debate to the experts. However, if "Meditations" were the root source of stoicism, I think I'd take issue with it as described here alone.
I do disagree with your specific reasoning, though. Humans have an enormous capacity for adapting to horrid conditions by convincing themselves that it's not that bad. That's true in big society-level situations, and small personal ones: "Cut off my arm? I can survive with just one!" "This cancer isn't going to beat me!" "One day we'll rise up!" I'm not talking about Epictetus specifically. It's likely you know more about him than I do. I'm certain his condition as a slave was far different than that of a stolen African person in the Civil War-era American south, or people today in current places around the world. However, in general, I don't think "Epictetus is a former slave" is by itself strong evidence that his philosophy didn't allow for resignation to slavery.
> - The emphasis on accepting what life has given you because that’s what logos/tao/gods have willed is a lot more palatable if you’re an emperor than his slaves. It’s great to accept what you can’t change. It’s not so great to accept the bad things you could change if someone hadn’t convinced you it was the way things were meant to be.
Funnily enough, the founder of stoicism was a slave.
> - I couldn’t go along with the how-tos on not enjoying yourself. “Here’s how you deaden yourself to music: …” Uh, no thanks.
Which is what actually makes it very unlike taoism.
Hindu text Gita has a similar message. You shall act as per your Dharma (roughly between job profile and life principles) and accept the result as will of God.
Which is not surprising, there was a continuous trade/communication between Chinese, Indian, Romans and ready of world. Slow paced but over decades ideas will spill over different cultures.
> The emphasis on accepting what life has given you because that’s what logos/tao/gods have willed is a lot more palatable if you’re an emperor than his slaves.
My dude, one of the most famous Stoics (Epictetus), who was one of the influences on Marcus Aurelius, was a slave.
I'm not saying at all this is AI (although at least some pictures may well be), but I can imagine youtube being filled with AI-generated content in a similar fashion going forward.
Question for HN: How much of this, with the correct prompts, could AI generate right now ?
Follow up question: How much effort, money and skill would the project of creating a video like this take if you allow yourself the use of AI*, vs if you forbid it.
It's hard to define precisely what "use of AI" is. Generating images with midjourney/stable diffusion would count (even if you edit them), having AI-generated code that's executed by the server of a SaaS you use wouldn't.
I wonder if anyone else found Meditations to be pretentious.
I always see people fawn over it. Personally I thought it was rubbish. Especially the part where he describes sex. It’s definitely more than just the rubbing of a membrane, or whatever it was that he said.
This is awesome. Personally I want a modern translation of Nietzsche’s books since it takes such a commitment to get through their current translations. I’m excited for AI to get to the point where this is trivial.
I find it interesting that 'through the flow of information' I spent years on the Greeks, only after 8 years of philosophy I found modern stuff that was relevant to my interests. Nietzsche and Existentialism.
Really makes me wonder if those in Power, have an interest in teaching Virtue based philosophy to intellectuals, and de-emphasizing modern stuff.
>> Verily, you who are good and just, there is much about you that is laughable, and especially your fear of that which has hitherto been called devil.
Which could also be said as:
>> Those of you who are good and fair, there's much about you that's funny, especially how you're scared of what's always been called the devil.
The average modern english speaker would say the latter is easier to understand. I'd personally love for the entire book to be this digestable.
That sounds like it's from Thus Spake Zarathustra? It's translated that way intentionally, because Nietzsche wrote it to sound archaic and reminiscent of Old Testament language, on purpose, as a stylistic choice. The translators are accurately reflecting that. His version of Zarathustra is undoing the "mistake" of the original Zarathustra.
You don't see this in translations of his other works, like The Gay Science or On The Genealogy of Morality, which are better introductions anyway, not being explicitly literary like Zarathustra.
There is already a very popular audiobook service [0] for nonfiction book summaries which was a surprise to me but also not. It feels like just the result of our sped up life, you need to watch this, you need to read this, you need to play this. Of course you don't _need to_ but for some people this is life in the 21st century. And I bet they also happy about it, just read the testimonals ('the concept of being able to grasp a book's main point in such a short time truly opens multiple opportunities to grow every area of your life at a faster rate.')
I agree with your point of "sped up life". Some written content has a main point and exists to transmit you that main point. In those case speeding up that is a good thing. On the other hand, some written content is a journey, and transmit things through experience.
For example, "bad" documentation that forces you to learn a tool from first principles to do anything with it will produce lots of non-users, and some users with a deep understanding of the tool. If you replace that "bad" documentation with a cheatlist or cookbook or how-to, you may produce way more users, but they won't be forced to acquire the level of skill and knowledge that previous users had.
For some people quickly extracting the main point of Meditations will be how the book can have the most impact on them. For others it will be being forced to plan for some reading time to get through the book. For others it may be the process of searching the most useful form of the book, or even creating it. That seems far stretched, but I think you can learn a lot by trying to expose people to Meditations.
I would never use this, when the original is available to read, that too in English! Consider the sheer dumbification at ~27 minute mark, "The universe has it's rhythm, and im vibin' with it".
The original is in classic Koine Greek. Every translation since has been an interpretation and rewriting, often picking up the idioms and standards of the day.
>sheer dumbification
While you clearly just got that from one of the top comments and didn't actually listen to the video, can you explain what is "dumb" about that? If you've read meditations -- and note that this interpretation is basically section by section in order -- it's actually an entirely reasonable, understandable interpretation.
And having read the "original", where the original to me was an English translation performed in the 17th century by Meric Casaubon -- littered with 17th century-isms of English -- I found this video a fascinating listen because it made me reinterpret various sections.
I think what they meant is that you can find a modern translation of the original anywhere you can find books. It’s not some rare, lost tome. It’s right there, ready to be read, if you want it. You don’t have to watch a video summary of it.
Eh, their comment reads more like gatekeeping. And I wouldn't call any translation the "original". Each are doing precisely what this video does, though obviously to different degrees.
Speaking of which, too many are far too focused on this being a "video". It's an "audiobook" with some AI images. The use of YouTube for audio is pretty common.
It's something one might casually listen to in the background while doing other things, marvelling that Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, arguably the most powerful and richest person on the planet at the time -- five hundred years before the birth of Islam and barely after Christ -- had such approachable, reasonable, "modern" thoughts and concerns and outlooks.
You mention something important I left out of my micro-review in another post. I was fascinated that a book so old sounded so utterly modern. It was so candid and intimate with little flowery pontificating (which you wouldn’t expect from it, but still). Instead of a history lesson, it’s a guidebook for modern living.
I'm a big fan of Staniforth's translation. It reads remarkably close to a literal translation. I've done line-by-line, side-by-side comparisons with the Greek & Greek-English dictionary lookup, a painfully-literal English translation, and several major English translations, to see which one belonged on my shelves. It is also a breezy, modern-feeling read—for this sort of work, at any rate. It's new enough that it lacks most of the outdated-feeling English of earlier translations, which earlier translations typically deviate more than Staniforth from the original text, anyway, so it's not like they were in some way better.
Most of the "easier" or "updated" modern translations inject a ton of their own style, erasing that of the original text. One that really irks me is a translation that "fixes" the style of the opening "from so-and-so, I learned such-and-such" sentences by making them clipped little fragments, with the claim that it's more in keeping with the stylistic "quick, dashed-off notes" intent of the original—but it isn't! That is not how it's written! Some translators made those more flowery than necessary, but they definitely aren't written like that! Staniforth's reads damn near identically the original Greek, but without being at all hard to read. It's the closest I could find to ideal fidelity that also isn't clunky—it mutates the language just enough that it's entirely acceptable and easy-reading English.
Part of the charm of reading old works (even translated) is how they clearly phrase themselves in a different way than you. But then you eventually see beyond that and realize that they are 99% like you. The common human experience.
But I don’t get the same vibe from “vibin’ with it”. Ugh.
Between your comment and the one you replied to, I'm starting to think this is a good exercise. It shows how modern language can be used outside of its usual context, i.e. spoken by modern speakers. As a slightly older person than them, I can understand what they mean better, and remind myself that language evolving is a natural part of life. For them, it can make older works more accessible too, not just by translating them, but by showing to them that there's a mapping between the way they express themselves and the way other people do, and that they don't need to be intimidated by older works with different ways of speaking.
Reminds me of how NPR is always like "yup the dow was super gnarly today bro, now over to Steve so we can get an update on our best-video-games-of-the-year report" and it makes me grimace. Then I think maybe I'm getting old, but then I think, no dammit, this is just dumb, and it's probably ok for me to expect a little more professionalism from journalists. The news shouldn't need to sound like a twitch streamer, and words from our best and brightest like Aurelius shouldn't need this kind of obnoxious paraphrase either. In the end a work is relevant or it is not.. giving the work some unnecessary "update" to attempt to become/remain relevant just seems unasked for, and silly, and desperate.
NPR when I was in college used language and an affect very similar to broadcast news from the 60s or 70s, which is before I was born so it's certainly not like it was "speaking to me on my generation's terms" or whatever.
And I preferred it that way. The new "hip", vernacular style they go for sucks. If I want that shit, podcasts exist. I thought it sucked when they were starting to do it and I was still in the young, "hip" demo they were trying to target.
At the risk of ranting.. yeah, it's pretty bad and I also remember how much I used to like it. It's one thing if it was only style changes, but the dumbing-down of much of the content also is pretty hard to miss. Banter, "fun" stories, piles of shameless fluff, the fan-service moving closer to social-media levels of pandering crap, the podcast-level of contempt for the time/intelligence of the viewership. I guess we all become what we hate. Today is actually a pretty good day for them, but above the fold it's still This week's news quiz separates the winners from the losers. Which will you be?, and the search term "Barbie" appears before "Boeing".
I get actively angry with them over their absolutely terrible election coverage ("what are the implications of this event for so-and-so's campaign, and how might they respond? Let's ask our panel..." OH MY GOD MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKING CAMPAIGN STRATEGY IS NOT FUCKING NEWS, I yell at my radio before getting ahold of myself) which is a real problem now that election seasons, which used to be best measured in months, have somehow expanded to encompass the entire calendar of every year.
Good way to describe it. I tend to see it occur on lists alongside The Art of War and The Prince, which have this weird reputation as titanic, dense tomes read by Serious Men but in reality are more like pamphlets that you can go through in about half an hour. The first time I saw a copy of The Art of War in person I actually laughed out loud.
Stoicism is an excellent philosophy for the ancient world but tt's entirely insufficient for the modern era. Ayn Rand's Objectivism is Stoicism plus Aristotelianism refined and refactored. Aaron Smith elaborates well:
And yet it's proven invaluable in each of those areas for the 30 years after. It's clear your knowledge of Objectivism is akin to thinking you understand Stoicism from reading the dictionary definition.
