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March 28, 2024, 01:49:29 PM

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Recommending the app called "The Stoic"

Started by Retinend, April 21, 2021, 07:52:50 PM

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Retinend

Google "Stoic app" and you will find it.

Every day you get a new nugget of ancient wisdom. It adds to your feed of rubbish with gentle reminders to get away from it.

Our world and modern lifestyle of the internet, and the sedentary lifestyle that accompanies it, would be a stoic's worst nightmare: a world of other people's creation, that features no long walks, no trees, and no manual labour. The stoics are the nagging conscience of academic philosophy: a philosophy that centres upon living, instead of thinking.

Academically minded philosophers and literary people tend to scorn the genre known as self help, or specifically the more modern genre of philosophical self help, including Alan Watts Alain, Alain de Boton, and Robert M. Pirsig. The stoics, however, are in ancient sympathy with them . The stoics are the least intellectual intellectuals, at least they aim to overcome the intellect and its shortcomings.














"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity"

                                                                                                          -Seneca




"Only the educated are free"

                                                 -Epictetus




"Think of yourself as dead.

You have lived your life.

Now live the rest of it properly."

                                                      -Marcus Aurelius






Twit 2

I just read loads of books of aphorisms; it's where stoicism meets poetry for me. Don't feel the need for an app, but whatever works I guess.

I am going back through the Wastebooks of Lichtenberg.[nb]Avatar text dutifully amended with one of the shorter ones. [/nb] Hearty recommendation.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Perhaps it shows an absence of imagination on my part but the utility of these quotes seems quite vague in terms of practical application, ie. how to approach mundane tasks of 21st century existence, both in the immediate and the wider sense, while staying conscious of these philosophies.

With an app, what is the average user doing with it? Switching on, reading "For every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness" and going, 'Oh right yeah - cheers'? If I read that at 7am on waking I definitely wouldn't be keeping it in mind by whatever annoying thing has happened at work 3 hours later.

I also have some distaste of self-help in generally, the media in the West broadcasting that personal disquiet and dissatisfaction is an individual malady and all you have to do is be in the right mindset and you can cope with being a debt laden wage slave reliant on a system you despise for survival, with no democratic representation or way of making people above you accountable.

That western society has fostered an industry in self-help, and addiction/over-use of prescription meds,  suggests that there is something fundamentally hollow and lacking about a significant number of Western lives, probably the average life, that neither is fixing, but a collective response challenging how society is structured would improve. Funnily enough, that isn't encouraged.

Also, to declare a certain partiality here, due to my own contrarianism and iconoclastic urges, whenever I hear even a smidgen of self-help - particularly in aphorism form - I want to punch the person really hard into a ditch, or overlay the quote over an image of a smiling Saddam Hussain. "Believe in yourself and you can achieve anything."

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Also forgot to add but I favour stoicism as an approach, so hope the above wasn't seen as a criticism of it by proxy.

Twit 2

There is a gulf between PROPER aphorisms and LIVE LOVE LAUGH sunset pictures.

^ not an aphorism

Retinend

This was a good one today:

Give your heart to a the trade you have learned, and draw refreshment from it.
- Marcus Aurelius

Retinend

#6
The app really likes Marcus Aurelius recently:

A limit of time is fixed for thee, which if not used for clearing away the clouds of thy mind, will go and will never return.

edit: typo

Twit 2

I am very fond of aphorisms about the scope/limit/futility of aphorisms:


bgmnts

A lot easier to be stoic back then because they hadn't invented as many words.

If had bollocks, your aunt, your uncle she would be.

Retinend

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering