Amor fati (despite it being our fate not to know our futures until they happen - and maybe not even then, only in hindsight)! :death: :flower:

Btw, Freddy surely knew his Horace too and, if I recall correctly, recommends him more than a few times.

I agree that Nietzsche as guru is questionable indeed. Nietzsche as a complex, brilliant personality wrestling with the death of God is something else entirely. To understand Nietzsche as a guru or guide for life is like understanding Hamlet or Stavrogin as a guide for life.

'Be patient with whatever comes.' Maybe, maybe not. What's the deep justification for this? In the name of what X do the old, wise men condescend to the angsty boys? In the name of what grand principle do we prefer the aging actuary to a Hendrix or Cobain who dies young ?

One reason to live long is to hang around for the great art about and by those who don't.

Our species can contemplate its own extinction. Yet the gurus will keep selling Jesus or rational moral progress or good digestion stoicism or even anti-natalism.

Amor fati (despite it being our fate not know our futures until they happen - and maybe not even then, only in hindsight)! — 180 Proof

I like this. The genuine future is the one that's not conquered or denied with a system. Death lurks somewhere in that darkness.

most of our behaviors operate on cruise-control, so we don't have to pay attention to what's going on. — Gnomon

I agree very much with this.

When the "pilot" is weakened by stress (doubts, depression, drugs, etc), it's easier to "veg-out" and offload your responsibilities to a mindless machine ("let go, and let God"). — Gnomon

I think it depends on the drug. With the right dose of a CNS,...

But I agree with broken-down people tending to veg out. This is brilliantly described in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. The overwhelmed personality just flops down and becomes passive. Junkfood for the body, junkfood for the mind. Nothing long and difficult. Nothing that requires cooking. Everything bitesized and instant.

That's why suicide is often viewed as the easy-way-out. It also takes heroic (or Stoic) Character to take charge of a bad situation. — Gnomon

I'm not against your identification of the heroic and the stoic, but I don't take it for granted. My complaint is that such a position refuses to process limit experiences. Is it irrational to die in a duel? (These days it would be silly, but back then?) Is it irrational to fight, actually risk life and limb, against those who would dominate you? Is it 'irrational' to risk everything for the possibility of something great?

I'm influenced here by Kojeve's interpretation of the master-slave dialectic. Slaves rationalize their slavery. They can do this by projecting a master of their master (a God), before whom the master is one more slave of equal status. Or they can do this by settling for a virtual mastery, a self-mastery that nevertheless obeys the worldly master. Their slavery is an 'illusion' to their freed mind. All of these rationalizations are a substitute for the risk of life.

Now that's were at the (pseudo-) end of history with capitalism and do-it-yourself religion, it's just a jungle out there. Speech is free because it hardly matters. But pay your taxes and don't steal!

We enjoy virtual rebellions. Bread and circuses. I'm no revolutionary. I'm a slave with own do-it-yourself ideological opiate. And who exactly is the master? Where's the bad guy? The system itself is letting go and letting God. The invisible hand is God. No one is driving, though conspiracy theorists demand some extra-terrestrial lizards to target. But that's OK, as long as we navigate our little meat puppet safely and comfortably and rationally through the maze. I'm not even complaining (complicit of course), but only polishing the complexity so that it gleams. It's a poem for the jungle.

I don't think that "get over it" is the right thing to say. I mean, that's pretty callous. Of course, you don't really want to talk about it with many people, do you? They won't understand. — uncanni

I think you read that line out of context. If you read more of my posts in this thread, I think you'll see that I am defending angst. I am criticizing the Brave-New-World-style response of offering pills and platitudes. Our 'great books' are about angst, about the big issues that don't help us sell widgets. Have you read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism:_Is_There_No_Alternative%3F
?

This is roughly where I'm coming from. The 'tough' response to capitalism is just embracing the jungle. The 'tender' response is 'nihilism' or angst. For me it's not about choosing one but rather about closing neither down and trying to understand both.

From that book:

In his dreadful lassitude and objectless rage, Cobain seemed to have give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realising it is a cliché.
...
Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.
...
To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our co-operation. The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.

He knew a great deal, especially of the classics, but it was never enough for so intolerant a man.

The justification for patience regarding what comes, if justification is required, is that for the most part what comes will come whether we wish it to or not, whatever we may do or not do, and to be wretched and miserable about what is outside our control is unwise.

to be wretched and miserable about what is outside our control is unwise. — Ciceronianus the White

:clap: :up:

180 Proof
He knew a great deal, especially of the classics, but it was never enough for so intolerant a man. — Ciceronianus the White

Perhaps. Uncharitable of you though. Freddy, after all, didn't live in the days of those classics and neither do we. He certainly lived quite 'the Stoic life' as he strove to improve upon, even exceed it, in 'philosophical rebellion' against the prevailing zeitgeist.

to be wretched and miserable about what is outside our control is unwise. — Ciceronianus the White

That may be so, but it also blends very well with deciding that more and more is out of our control.

How does one after all determine what is in and out of our control?

Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions. — Epictetus

I of course don't hold you to this particular quote, but let's consider it. Our desires are under our control? And all the other stuff isn't at all? It's a fantasy, a point at infinity.

Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things. Death, for instance, is not terrible, else it would have appeared so to Socrates. But the terror consists in our notion of death that it is terrible. When therefore we are hindered, or disturbed, or grieved, let us never attribute it to others, but to ourselves; that is, to our own principles. An uninstructed person will lay the fault of his own bad condition upon others. Someone just starting instruction will lay the fault on himself. Some who is perfectly instructed will place blame neither on others nor on himself. — Epictetus

I think that's a great passage. Stoicism == 'be cool, bitch!' Don't be resentful, envious, etc. All of this is great, but the pursuit of a bland version of cool still seems less interesting than the cool surface of a soul that can at least inwardly laugh at the mad scenes in Dostoevsky or recognize its own complexity in Nietzsche's texts. I want my stoic to able to laugh at himself and his mad project.

How does one after all determine what is in and ou[t] of our control? — jellyfish

Part of it is interpersonal...

Paying close attention to the affect/effect that one has on others, and recognizing the fact that others have the same power regarding us...

Knowing oneself is the best start. You are the sole character that is on each and every page of your own life. Acknowledge the role you play, seek to understand it(here is where we get a better grasp of what's in our control and what's not), and then realize the life you want.

Of course having attainable goals helps too... It is better to have no goals than to have unattainable ones...

Thanks for jumping in.

Part of it is interpersonal. — creativesoul

To put it mildly.

Knowing oneself is the best start. You are the sole character that is on each and every page of your own life. Acknowledge the role you play, seek to understand it, and the realize the life you want. — creativesoul

Know thyself. Indeed. I love Kojeve's take on the philosopher as a type. Philosophy is the (anti-)religion of self-consciousness. Dissecting 'bland' stoicism is part of that. The dismissal of Nietzsche, for instance, looks to run in the opposite direction. I don't personally give a damn (obviously) whether any particular stranger out there enjoys Nietzsche. That's out of my control, see.

Acknowledge the role you play. Acknowledge that the cool stoic is one more role, one more project. That 'my' position is one more role shouldn't have to be mentioned.

To zoom in on a previously quoted passage:

The recluse does not believe that a philosopher—supposing that a philosopher has always in the first place been a recluse—ever expressed his actual and ultimate opinions in books: are not books written precisely to hide what is in us?—indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual" opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." — Nietzsche

To become more and more self-conscious is to 'tarry with the negative' on the way of death and despair. Any plausible sage has to confess at least this and then justify it and tie it all up in a sleepy system...

Of course having attainable goals helps too... It is better to have no goals than to have unattainable ones... — creativesoul

Well I can't follow you here, though I get it. Isn't having no unobtainable goals itself an unobtainable goal? We simplify our own 'wicked' and complex nature and call it self-knowledge? Is wisdom just self-satisfaction? Complacency? Maybe it is. We can theoretically repress our angry itch for the impossible object. We can refuse to know about it. I am skeptical however about its eradication.

Self-satisfaction, genuine wisdom, completeness... this is like the end of history applied not to the world but to the knowledge-swollen ego.

How does the sage (Hegel, for ex.) handle the challenge of irony? Note how close the Hegel's ironist is to the stoic and the stoic's fantasy of controlling what he values (his desires.) 'Real' mastery is a mastery of ghosts, the control only of one's mediation of cancelled, ordinary reality. In sleep a king, but waking no matter. Yet life is a dream, a novel with the ego on every page.

But on this principle [that of the The Irony], I live as an artist when all my action and my expression in general, in connection with any content whatever, remains for me a mere show and assumes a shape which is wholly in my power. In that case I am not really in earnest either with this content or, generally, with its expression and actualization. For genuine earnestness enters only by means of a substantial interest, something of intrinsic worth like truth, ethical life, etc., – by means of a content which counts as such for me as essential, so that I only become essential myself in my own eyes in so far as I have immersed myself in such a content and have brought myself into conformity with it in all my knowing and acting. When the ego that sets up and dissolves everything out of its own caprice is the artist, to whom no content of consciousness appears as absolute and independently real but only as a self-made and destructible show, such earnestness can find no place, since validity is ascribed only to the formalism of the ego.

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free) as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical.
...
This irony was invented by Friedrich von Schlegel, and many others have babbled about it or are now babbling about it again. — Hegel

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm#s7-3

Here's some of Schlegel's take.

If a literary form like the fragment opens up the question of the relation between finite and infinite, so do the literary modes of allegory, wit and irony—allegory as a finite opening toward the infinite (“every allegory means God”), wit as the “fragmentary geniality” or “selective flashing” in which a unity can momentarily be seen, and irony as their synthesis (see Frank 2004, 216). Although impressed with the Socratic notion of irony (playful and serious, frank and deeply hidden, it is the freest of all licenses, since through it one rises above one's own self, Schlegel says in Lyceumfragment 108), Schlegel nonetheless employs it in a way perhaps more reminiscent of the oscillations of Fichtean selfhood. Irony is at once, as he says in Lyceumfragment 37, self-creation, self-limitation, and self-destruction.

“Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty,” Schlegel writes in Lyceumfragment 42: “for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated.” The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives: “Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe” (KA 18.128); irony is the “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” (Ideas 69).
— SEP

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/

Self-satisfied system versus onanistic irony?

Thanks for jumping in.

Part of it is interpersonal.
— creativesoul

To put it mildly. — jellyfish

Well, some of it's not interpersonal.

I don't find the question to have some rarely known 'magical' answer that is beyond the grasp of most. Rather, I would think that we all know quite a bit about what's in our control and what's not. It's simple really, or at least the simple beginnings if understood, lead to better more realistic expectations(attainable goals).

All of us know quite a bit about what sorts of things we can affect/effect and what sorts of things we cannot.

Acknowledge the role you play. Acknowledge that the cool stoic is one more role, one more project. That 'my' position is one more role shouldn't have to be mentioned. — jellyfish

I wasn't saying that your position was one more role. Rather, when I mentioned the role one plays, it had neither negative nor disingenuous connotations. I meant, quite matter of factly... we all play a role in our own lives... the primary one!

That said, there's much to be gleaned by looking at all 'the different hats' one sometimes wears as a means to successfully interact with others, to act appropriately according to the situation one finds themselves in, attain some goal or another, and/or just follow the rules of conduct. We all must do this(to some degree or other) in order to navigate the world we find ourselves in.

The degree to which one does(or must) can be an interesting conversation...

Isn't having no unobtainable goals itself an unobtainable goal? — jellyfish

Seems so. I did not make that claim though.

:smile:

I do not share your enthusiasm about those excerpts. I'm much less enthusiastic about philosophers who employ rhetoric as argumentation in what is nothing other than their own anecdotal stories about others... reminds me of some of the dialogues that are more like monologues in Plato...

Meh.

Well, some of it's not interpersonal. — creativesoul

Well, sure, but I'm suggesting that the autonomous ego is something like a useful fiction, a piece of being-in-language and being 'one of us.' Language is social down to its bones. My most private monologue is potentially intelligible to those not yet born. The self is a function of language, one might say, though this is hardly the last word (not that I think there is a last word.)

All of us know quite a bit about what sorts of things we can affect/effect and what sorts of things we cannot. — creativesoul

Sure. We all have a loose sense of what's intended by Stoicism 101. But then it's as deep as 'no use crying over spilt milk.' And it's also (potentially) the 'religion' of a 'slave' (an imaginary freedom justifying conformity to a system ('master') that it's convenient for us to understand as beyond our control. I'm not pretending to be a revolutionary. I'm more of a 'skeptic' (as presented by writers like the one I quoted).

I wasn't saying that your position was one more role. — creativesoul

I know. I was just preemptively 'confessing.'

Rather, when I mentioned the role one plays, it had neither negative nor disingenuous connotations. I meant, quite matter of factly... we all play a role in our own lives... the primary one! — creativesoul

I know. I was squeezing the juice from your dead metaphor. I agree that in a certain sense we play the primary role in our own lives. But who is this 'we' or this 'I'? Peel the onion. What do we find but attachments to others and crystalline structures made from the language of the tribe?

As a mildly-educated individual (life's too short), what is my head filled with but the discoveries of others? The dried spit of those who came before? Surely it's not this particular bag of blood that denotes me truly. Personality is a quilt of ghosts.

That said, there's much to be gleaned by looking at all 'the different hats' one sometimes wears as a means to successfully interact with others, to act appropriately according to the situation one finds themselves in, attain some goal or another, and/or just follow the rules of conduct. We all must do this(to some degree or other) in order to navigate the world we find ourselves in.

The degree to which one does(or must) can be an interesting conversation... — creativesoul

I agree, and that IMO is precisely the realm of rhetoric. 'Ethics is first philosophy.' To me that means that the 'ego ideal' is central. And we can consider also the dominant ideals of a culture. If you want to understand someone, look to their notion of what kind of person they should be. If you want to understand a culture, look to what those with high status like to be seen doing.

Now someone might claim that some kind of universal reason can tell us this without rhetoric. Another person might say that 'universal reason' is tangled up in the first person's 'ego ideal.' How is authority established? What is to count as reason in the first place? IMV it's something like rhetoric or abnormal discourse that establishes a nice safe space for those 'seduced' by that (always false?) foundation. This position is, however, haunted by 'the irony.' The human is an abyss --who likes to pretend otherwise --or so certain humans like to pretend....

I do not share your enthusiasm about those excerpts. I'm much less enthusiastic about philosophers who employ rhetoric as argumentation in what is nothing other than their own anecdotal stories about others... reminds me of some of the dialogues that are more like monologues in Plato...

Meh. — creativesoul

Fair enough. Plenty of people are put off by freewheeling interpretative philosophy. I have a 'meh' reaction to philosophy that hides from this. To me it dies into dreary, 'normal' discourse. It presupposes a 'spirituality' and fidgets with dead things, worries itself over linguistic issues detached from great human passions. For me the metaphysical project decays or blossoms into cultural criticism. It's 'continuous' with literature and religion or cares about the same things.

It's hard to think of the author of Beyond Good and Evil as a tolerant man, but I may not be giving him his due, true.

I'm not against your identification of the heroic and the stoic, but I don't take it for granted. — jellyfish

I wasn't equating "heroic" with "stoic" -- merely rhyming. The intended point was that it takes a strong personal character (virtue) to exercise self-discipline. And that was the message of Stoicism. A heroic character might be ideal, but not necessary, to practice stoicism. We don't have to be super-heroes in order to overcome depression or nihilism or temptation. But moral wimps will give-in to gravity dragging them down, whereas those with a minimum of moral fiber will resist. And even the drowning weakling can reach-out in desperation for help from a stronger swimmer. Stoicism can be communal, so we don't have to go it alone. But ultimately, my psychological survival is my responsibility. :cool:

I think you read that line out of context. If you read more of my posts in this thread, I think you'll see that I am defending angst. — jellyfish

I knew that, because I did read you carefully. I have been in an existential funk for weeks and if anyone said to me right now, "get over it," I'd go medieval on their ass:

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

Pablo Neruda, "Walking Around"

... if anyone said to me right now, "get over it", I'd go medieval on their ass:

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

Pablo Neruda, "Walking Around" — uncanni

Glorious! :clap: :death: :flower:

I'd say there's nothing heroic about Stoicism, or at least my version of it. It's merely to take the universe as it is, without imposing on it any of our expectations, hopes, dreams, longings for purpose or meaning. it seems to me to be "merely" a sensible perspective. The universe is worthy of reverence and awe, and we're parts of it, but there's no reason to think we have a special place in it which makes it dance to our various tunes, so to speak, and so no reason to be shocked to learn it won't do so. Things just are. Maybe some day we'll learn why, maybe not, maybe it will make no difference whether we do or not.

One must have a mind of winter, as Wallace Stevens wrote in The Snowman, to understand that winter simply happens, no matter what we think, feel or do. The same as winter on Horace's Tuscan seas. So...what? What is extraordinary or unbelievable about this, what is there to contend/despair over? What alternatives are available that we've been deprived of?

Ah, OK. And nice poem! I've wrestled with some funk, too. Some people have died, are sick. Doing this ol' philosophical thing is a bright spot.

What alternatives are available that we've been deprived of? — Ciceronianus the White

This is actually part of what's sometimes made the existential dread I've been suffering from this past year so horrible. Usually, when I have some kind of practical problem in life, I calm myself at night by just imagining it being better, fantasizing in a way that I imagine serves a similar function to prayer in religious people. But when it came to suddenly feeling awful about facts of the universe I'd always known, there was no alternative I could imagine that would make it better. I even tried to just imagine that a religious worldview was true, which was a little comforting to think of for a bit, but in the end I found myself feeling like even if that worldview was true, it still wouldn't actually solve the problems that were really worrying me.

But moral wimps will give-in to gravity dragging them down, whereas those with a minimum of moral fiber will resist. And even the drowning weakling can reach-out in desperation for help from a stronger swimmer. — Gnomon

Ah, but look at how you can't resist words like 'weakling' and 'wimps.' We also get 'moral fiber.' That's fine, of course. My point is that this is the guts of the position, a morally complacent machismo. Now I accuse myself of the same thing, but he who accuses himself stills respects himself as one who surprises.

As far as I can tell, there's a tendency to read the skeptic/ironist as someone who is not waving but drowning. IMV that's the fantasy of the anti-Nietzschean --that all this thought that plays with fire does so out of weakness rather than strength.

I'm not trying to be rude. I enjoy our jousting, and I think this is fair response.

Ah, but look at how you can't resist words like 'weakling' and 'wimps.' — jellyfish

Since I have no formal training in Philosophy, I tend to speak plainly, and to avoid beating around the bush. I'm aware that we live in "politically correct" times, but a philosophical forum should be more concerned with "factual correctness".

One of the "four cardinal virtues" of Stoicism is "andreia", which is translated as "courage" or "manly virtue". So I think "heroic" was not too far off-base. And "weakling" is just a way to illustrate the difference between those who sink and those who swim. I didn't label any person with those general terms, so I hope no one here was offended by the kinds of distinctions made by ancient macho Greeks.

I'm not trying to be rude. — jellyfish

Nor was I.

I'd say there's nothing heroic about Stoicism, or at least my version of it. — Ciceronianus the White

Apparently, my pathetic attempt to rhyme "heroic" and "stoic" struck a nerve. The modern meaning of "hero" has been skewed by all the comic-book Übermensch. See my reply to --jellyfish.

What is extraordinary or unbelievable about this, what is there to contend/despair over? — Ciceronianus the White

Since many posters on this forum admit to some degree of depression, anxiety, or existential dread, they seem to find things to "contend/despair over". A Stoic doesn't have to be a super-hero, but merely someone who perseveres in the face of challenges and uncertainties.

One of the "four cardinal virtues" of Stoicism is "andreia", which is translated as "courage" or "manly virtue". So I think "heroic" was not too far off-base. And "weakling" is just a way to illustrate the difference between those who sink and those who swim. I didn't label any person with those general terms, so I hope no one here was offended by the kinds of distinctions made by ancient macho Greeks. — Gnomon

Oh I'm not at all complaining that you used those words. Far from it. Courage and/or manly virtue is central to my own thinking. I've only been challenging a certain style of stoicism to look into its deeper motivations. It's not, in my opinion, some coldly rational minimization of suffering. It enacts a particular image or notion of masculine virtue for the mirror. It seems to not see its own narcissism. But this isn't to accuse it of narcissism but only of the not-seeing-it, and only from the perspective that understands itself to include but transcend a pre-ironic stoicism.

Since many posters on this forum admit to some degree of depression, anxiety, or existential dread, they seem to find things to "contend/despair over". — Gnomon

You tempt the gods, my friend. While a system of thought and habits clearly helps determine one's happiness or misery, as long as this gory machine is 'to us' we are vulnerable. If the sage's digestion goes to pieces, it takes his fragile wisdom along with it.

To live without anxiety or dread might be easier for a settled/retired person than someone in the middle of their lives largely worrying about what they can control --figuring out who they want to be, falling in and out of love, empathizing with friends and family exposed to the disasters that are just part of life.

To be passionately alive is to wrestle sometimes with anxiety and dread. I care therefore I think.