Reflection

Memento Mori – remember you must die. The oldest trick in the Stoic toolbox, and still the one that cuts deepest when you actually let it land. It’s not meant to be morbid. The point isn’t to sit around thinking about corpses, it’s to use the fact of your mortality as a filter for what actually matters. You could leave life right now – not today necessarily, but at some point, and probably sooner than you think. Knowing that changes the weight of things. Most of the stuff you’re worrying about right now will not matter in a year, let alone at the end. That’s not depressing, it’s liberating. ...

Amor fati – love of one’s fate. Nietzsche’s phrase for the attitude that everything that happens to you, including the awful bits, is not just bearable but necessary, and ideally something you can welcome rather than merely endure. I keep coming back to it because it’s the harder half of the Stoic pair. Memento Mori tells you to remember you will die, which is useful for cutting through nonsense. Amor Fati tells you to love what happens to you, which is useful for not going mad while it’s happening. One without the other feels incomplete – mortality without fate is just anxiety, and fate without mortality is just fatalism. ...

You don’t have to be crazy to live on Earth. But to some it helps to be. I saw this somewhere and it stuck because it is quietly true in a way that has nothing to do with clinical anything and everything to do with the simple fact that normal is a setting on a washing machine, not a lifestyle. The people who get anywhere – not necessarily successfully, just somewhere worth being – are the ones who are slightly unhinged about something. Obsessed in a way that makes other people uncomfortable. Willing to look foolish because the alternative is looking exactly like everyone else and going exactly where everyone else is going. ...

“No good deed ever goes unpunished.” I’ve said this more times than I care to admit, usually in the aftermath of trying to help someone and ending up with more problems than I started with. It’s a peculiar thing – the people you’d expect to be grateful are often the ones who punish you most for trying. I think about my parents sometimes, how every time I offer to sort something out or take on a burden, it somehow spirals into getting used. The intention is never in doubt but the outcome always ends up feeling used. ...

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby I read this somewhere and it stuck with me because it’s true in a way that feels obvious until you actually try to live by it, and even then it’s hard. We all have advantages we never asked for and rarely notice – the kind of things that just make life slightly easier, like being born into a family that didn’t struggle to put food on the table, or having parents who went to university and could help you with homework without feeling lost themselves, or arriving in a country where you speak the language and look like most of the people around you. None of these things were earned. They just happened. And they add up in ways that are impossible to quantify but impossible to ignore. ...

Reinhard Selten, the Nobel prize-winning game theorist, noticed something about how we think: we spend most of our mental energy being rational after the fact. We replay conversations, revisit decisions, trace back through the chain of events and ask ourselves what we should have done differently. This is rationality ex post – looking backwards, reconstructing the path we ought to have taken. But game theory is concerned with something else entirely. It asks you to build a strategy before the game begins, to arrive at a good outcome a priori, without the luxury of hindsight. The gap between these two modes of thinking is where most of our failures live. We are brilliant historians of our own mistakes and terrible architects of our own choices.