What do you keep living for? Is there a specific person, goal, or idea that you work for? Is there no meaning to life in your opinion?

Context: I’ve been reading Camus and Sartre, and thinking about how their ideas interact with hard determinism.

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    That’s a common misunderstanding and Stoicism is not about detachment. The quote you’re referring is mostly a thought exercise to illustrate that dwelling on past is unproductive even in extreme circumstances.

    Though contemporary Stoicism acknowledges importance of ritual and grief but it still has to be within reasonable context of dichotomy of control as in you can’t change the outcome no matter how hard you grief and you’re just losing finite minutes of your life but you can spend this time to fairly honor the event and memories.

    Temperance is a key virtue here and its heavily inspired by Aristotel’s Golden Mean which says that extremes are really inefficient and should be avoided at all times.

    As for strong feelings - Stoicism has nothing against them either. Justice is one of the virtues and its really impossible to get to a just conclusion without strong feelings like sympathy. Though, just like Buddhism, Stoics practice mindfulness and have to choose to go to strong feelings not obey. This is again due to dichotomy of control where thoughts and feelings just appear and we can’t do anything here to stop that but we can choose how we react once we process them!

    Stoicism is a very powerful framework cause it doesn’t really tell you what to do exactly just gives you a logical framework based on human nature. It doesn’t mean you becoming a robot - quite the opposite - you should become more human not being hijacked by unfair processes.