Stoicism

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. ...

It seems that perfection would be attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away. —Antoine de St. Exupery, Terre des Hommes, 1939 I keep coming back to this one. Not because it is particularly deep — we have all heard the version about a masterpiece being complete when there is nothing left to add — but because it got me thinking about the opposite direction, which is the one I actually find harder. ...

“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” I came across this quote from Buckminster Fuller a few days ago and it has been sitting with me ever since. Not because it is profound in some new way — I have heard variations of it before — but because it feels increasingly urgent to actually live by it rather than just nod along. The way I read it now, trying to figure out what to do with my life, is less about grand architectural visions and more about the small daily choices that add up to whatever kind of future I end up with. It is easy to drift. It is easy to let other people’s plans for you, or the general momentum of things, carry you somewhere you did not choose. And then one day you look up and you are somewhere you never intended to be and you wonder how that happened. ...