I found and watched this this morning. Phenomenal documentary on the life and ideas of Rene Girard.
A lot of direct interviews with Girard himself, as well as many of his colleagues, collaborators, and those influenced by his ideas.
āTruth is beauty, and beauty, truthā āJohn Keats
Iāve been on a kick lately trying to understand what informs the concept of ātaste.ā When we say someone āhas good taste,ā what do we mean?
Iāll have more to say on taste later. But this thread of curiosity led me to reading on aesthetics and what constitutes beauty. Sir Roger Scrutonās Beauty is a great introduction to the subject, one I just finished earler this week.
In this short lecture, poet laureate Dana Gioia investigates the subject.
Is ābeautyā a physical characteristic? Does it just mean something that ālooks niceā? Something deeper is going on here thatās worth exploring.
Experiencing beauty happens in 4 stages:
Initially weāre attracted to an unstateable something about the beautiful. The work of art, the pleasant mountain valley, the few lines from CS Lewis that get stuck in our brains. Then comes the pleasurable sensation; we want to stay in that place and absorb it. We notice something about the beautiful thing that seems to connect to a richer underlying reality ā as when a mathematical fractal resembles the braided river or the veins in our bodies. Then before we can capture it the moment disappears, leaving us wanting to find it once again.
He also discusses the tension between beauty and practicality, suggesting that beauty has the power to transform and inspire, fulfilling a deep human longing.
In the latest issue of Res Extensa, I dove into āGallās Lawā, which says:
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
Too often I see a team propose a solution to a problem that involves making what weāve got more complicated. Adding more people, more processes, more tools. āMaybe if we start using Salesforce itāll get better.ā āPerhaps if we bring in Consultant X theyāll help us through.ā
Muddling through is part of the process of building. Donāt get upset about it, just get back to first principles and simplify:
Like most great mental models, Gallās Law follows its own logic and keeps it simple. Itās a basic principle that helps filter your approach and ask yourself the question when faced with a complex problem: Is my approach simple enough? Does what weāve already pieced together work before we add more parts, people, or processes?
Jonah Goldberg on the brittleness of authoritarianism:
Authoritarian regimes are often very, very strong. But like marble theyāre brittle. They can withstand enormous pressures, from within and without, but thereās no flexibility.
Iād say itās like Aesopās Oak and the Reed, except I think thatās a bit inapt as well. America aināt no stinking reed. But to at least get some use out of the metaphor, authoritarian societies are like stands of oaks. They can withstand all the wind in the world so long as the wind isnāt very strong. A field of reeds can withstand any wind, because reeds bend while oaks rely on their strength and their strength alone.
And in there somewhere is the point. Itās not the bending of the reeds thatās relevant, itās the oakās reliance on a single factor thatās the problem with authoritarian societies. The answer to every problem is strengthāas manifested in fear, intimidation, etc.
A great analogy for appreciating the resilience of liberalism. Like the reed from Aesop, open societies often feel in flux, moving back and forth trying to work through compromises and challenges, reacting fluidly to feedback. Totalitarian ones feel stable and strong when thereās minimal stress, until suddenly they crack.
This is a repost from my newsletter, Res Extensa, which you can subscribe to over on Substack. This issue was originally published in November, 2020.
In our last issue, weād weathered TS Zeta in the hills of Georgia, and the dissonance of being a lifelong Floridian sitting through gale-force winds in a mountain cabin. Last week a different category of storm hit us nationwide in the form of election week (which it seems weāve mostly recovered from). Now as I write this one, Eta is barreling toward us after several days of expert projections that itād miss by a wide margin. Weāre dealing with last-minute school closures and hopefully dodging major power outages. 2020 continues to deliver the goods.
Thereās a lot in store for this week, so letās get into it:
Iāve been deep in James C. Scottās Seeing Like a State lately, so I wanted to riff this week on Scottās notion of ālegibility,ā the bookās central idea. His thesis in SLAS is that central authorities impose top-down, mandated designs on societies in order to make them easier to understand through simplification and optimization techniques. Examples in the book range from scientific forestry and naming traditions to urban planning and collectivist agriculture.
Scott calls this ideology āauthoritarian high modernism,ā wherein governments, driven by a zealous belief in knowledge and scientific expertise, determine they can restructure the social order for particular gain: higher crop yields, more compliant citizenry, more efficient cities, or crime-free neighborhoods (a dangerous proposition when a ācrimeā is redefined at will by authorities). Heās ruthlessly critical of these ideas, as evidenced by the bookās subtitle, and presents dozens of cases of top-down-design-gone-wrong, the most extreme case being the Soviet Unionās collectivization program that led to widespread famine.
An interesting factor to think about is how and when to apply intentional design in service of legibility and control. Itās not an all goodāall bad proposition, to be sure. Even though Scott levels a pretty harsh review of high modernist ideology, even he acknowledges its value in small, targeted doses for specific problems.
I linked to a piece a while back by Venkatesh Rao, the source where I first learned of Scottās work.
The post is largely an introduction to the bookās themes, but adds a few interesting notes on the psychology behind legibility. Given all the history we have that demonstrates the failure rate of high modernist thinking, why do we keep doing it?
I suspect that what tempts us into this failure is that legibility quells the anxieties evoked by apparent chaos. There is more than mere stupidity at work.
InĀ Mind Wide Open,Ā Steven Johnsonās entertaining story of his experiences subjecting himself to all sorts of medical scanning technologies, he describes his experience with getting an fMRI scan. Johnson tells the researcher that perhaps they should start by examining his brainās baseline reaction to meaningless stimuli. He naively suggests a white-noise pattern as the right starter image. The researcher patiently informs him that subjectsā brains tend to go crazy when a white noise (high Shannon entropy) pattern is presented. The brain goes nuts trying to find order in the chaos. Instead, the researcher says, they usually start with something like a black-and-white checkerboard pattern.
If my conjecture is correct, then the High Modernist failure-through-legibility-seeking formula is a large scale effect of the rationalization of the fear of (apparent) chaos.
Scott also points out in the book how much of the high modernist mission is driven by āfrom aboveā aesthetics, not on-the-ground results. He analyzes the work of Le Corbusier and his visionary model for futuristic urban planning, most evident in his designs for Chandigurh in India and the manufactured Brazilian capital of BrasĆlia (designed by his student, LĆŗcio Costa).
While BrasĆlia projects a degree of majesty from above, life on the street is a hollowed-out, sterile existence. Its design ignored the realities of how humans interact. Life is more complex than the few variables a planner can optimize for. Itās telling that both Chandigurh and BrasĆlia have lively slums on their outskirts, unplanned neighborhoods that filled demands unmet by the architected city centers.
He juxtaposes the work of Le Corbusier with that of Jane Jacobs, grassroots city activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was a lifelong advocate of āstreet life,ā placing high emphasis on the organic, local, and human-scale factors that truly make spaces livable and enjoyable. She famously countered the ultimate high modernist visions of New York City planner Robert Moses.
This contrast between failure in legible, designed systems and resilience in emergent, organic ones triggers all of my free-market priors. The truth is there is no ābestā mental model here. Certain types of problems lend themselves well to top-down control (require it, in fact), and others produce the best results when markets and individuals are permitted to drive their own solutions. Standard timekeeping, transportation networks, space exploration, flood control āĀ these are all challenges that are hard to address for a variety of reasons without centralized coordination.
Imposing legibility demands an appreciation of trade-offs. Yes, dictated addressing schemes and fixed property ownership documentation do enable state control in the form of taxation, conscription, or surveillance. But in exchange for the right degree of imposed structure, we get the benefit of property rights and land tenure.
Byrne Hobart touched on this idea in an issue of his newsletter. (The Diff is some of the best tech/business/investing writing out there, I highly recommend subscribing). He makes the point that wherever scale is required, abstraction and legibility are highly valuable. He calls up Scottās usage of the term mÄtis, translated from the classical Greek to mean roughly āknowledge that can only come from practical experience.ā The value of this local knowledge is Scottās counter to legibility-seeking schemes: that practical knowledge beats the theoretical every time.
I like this point that Hobart makes, though, on seeking larger scale global maxima: that a pure reliance on the practical can leave you stuck in a local maximum:
But mÄtis is a hill-climbing algorithm. If itās based on experience rather than theory, itās limited by experience. Meanwhile, theory is not limited by direct experience. By the 1930s, many physicists were quite convinced that an atomic bomb was possible, though of course none of them had ever seen one. Because some things canāt be discovered by trial and error, but can be created by writing down some first principles and thinking very hard about their implications (followed by lots of trial and error), the pro-legibility side has an advantage in inventing new things.
He also brings up its implications in the modern tech ecosystem. The Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons are like panoptic overseers that can force legibility even on the most impenetrable, messy datastreams through machine learning algorithms and hyper-scale pattern recognition. The trade-off here may not be conscription (not yet anyway), but there is a tax. Thereās an interesting twist, though: the tech firms have pushed these specialized models so far to the edge that they themselves canāt even explain how they work, thereby reconstituting illegibility:
Fortunately for anyone who shares Scottās skepticism of the legibility project, the end state for tech ends up creating a weird ego of the mÄtis-driven illegible system we started with. The outer edges of ad targeting, product recommendations, search results, People You May Know, and For You Page are driven by machine learning algorithms that consume unfathomable amounts of data and output a uniquely well-targeted result. The source code and the data exist, in human-readable formats, but the actual process can be completely opaque.
While legibility interests me in its applicability to society as a whole, Iām even more intrigued by how this phenomenon works on a smaller scale: within companies.
Org charts attempt to balance productivity and legibility, which often pull in different directions. Organizational design is driven by a hybrid need:
Companies spend millions each year doing āreorgs,ā often attributing execution failures to #2: the illegibility of the orgās activities. Therefore you rarely see a reorg that results in drastic cutback of management oversight.
Former Microsoft product exec and now-VC Steven Sinofsky wrote this epic piece a few years back comparing the pros and cons of function- and unit-based organizational structures. Each has merits that fit better or worse within an org depending on the product line(s), corporate culture, geographic spread, go-to-market, and headcount. The number one objective of an optimum org chart is to maximize value delivery to customers through cost reduction, top-line revenue gains, lower overhead, and richer innovation in new products. But legibility canāt be left out as an influence. The insertion of management layer is an attempt to institute tighter control and visibility, a degree of which is necessary to appropriately dial-in costs and overhead investment.
Look at this statistic Sinofsky cites about the Windows teamās composition when he joined:
One statistic: when I came to Windows and the 142 product units, the team overall was over 35% managers (!). But the time we were done āgoing functionalā we had about 20% managers.
Even corporate teams arenāt immune to the pull of legibility. When its influence is stretched too far, you end up with Dilbert cartoons and TPS reports.
It was serendipitous to encounter this same theme in Devon Zuegelās podcast, Order Without Design. The show is a conversation with urbanist Alain Bertaud and his wife Marie-Agnes, an extension of his book on urban planning and how āmarkets shape cities.ā
In episode 3 they discuss mostly sanitation and waste management in cities around the world, but my favorite bit was toward the end in a discussion on how different cities segment property into lots and dictate various uses through zoning regulation. Some cities slice property into large lots, which leads to fewer businesses and higher risk for large, expensive developments. But others, like Manhattan, segment into smaller chunks, resulting in a more diverse cityscape that mixes dining, retail, services, and many other commercial activities.
The shopping mall was an innovation that allowed developers with limited local knowledge to have tenants respond to customer demand in smaller, less risky increments. Malls in Asia notably differ from ours in the west in the breadth of goods and services they typically offer. Hereās Marie-Agnes from the episode:
ā¦Remember the Singapore mall. In Singapore the malls have not only retail, but you find also dental offices, notaries, kindergarten schools, dispensaries, and all sorts of activities. Up to now and in general the concept of a mall in the US is for mainly shopping. You may have food court and some restaurants, but nothing like a real city where you have all sort of business.
Devon points out that this quality might make these malls more resilient to market stress than our retail-focused American versions.
Malls are by no means a modern innovation, of course. Ad-hoc congregations of commercial activity have been around for 5,000 years, evolving from purely organic bazaars of the Near East into the pseudo-planned, air conditioned behemoths we have today. Even in our technocratic culture, planners still realize that the flexibility to market demand is crucial to sustainability. Trying to pre-design and mandate a particular distribution of stores and services is a foolās errand.
In Byrneās newsletter, he says āonce you look for legibility, you start to see it everywhere.ā This has certainly been true for me as Iāve been reading Scottās work. The deepest insights are the ones that cut widely across many different dimensions.
Thereās no silver bullet in how to apply legibility-inducing schemes to any of these areas. But until youāre aware of the negative consequences, thereās no way to balance the scales between legible/designed and illegible/organic outcomes.
I recently finished Arnold Klingās excellent Three Languages of Politics, which attempts to build a model to describe why different political viewpoints are so often not disagreeing as much as they are talking about different things entirely.
At one point Kling references this thought experiment proposed by economist Bryan Caplan ā a Turing test for probing a personās true ideology:
We donāt have to idly speculate about how well adherents of various ideologies understand each other. We can measure the performance of anyone inclined to boast about his superior insight.
How? Hereās just one approach. Put me and five random liberal social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let liberal readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isnāt really a liberal. Then put Krugman and five random libertarian social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let libertarian readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isnāt really a libertarian. Simple as that.
Iāve been reading some of Hayekās famous articles this week. This one is all about what he probably considered one of the most important concepts, since these basic ideas form a central thesis for most of his works. His argument was for bottoms-up, decentralized systems of decision-making instead of centralized, top-down systems:
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate āgivenā resourcesāif āgivenā is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these ādata.ā It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
This short film of drone footage showcases the amazing, almost-alien, landscapes of Iceland. This guyās channel has a lot of interesting quick films like this.
A fuzzy finder for the command line. Just install it from Homebrew with brew install fzf and improve your file searching on the shell. No more having to remember find command syntax.
I thought this was a fantastic interview on EconTalk. David Deppner is a listener of the podcast that sent Russ a thought-provoking email question on the subject of leadership and what traits make for āgoodā qualities in a leader ā whether a CEO, presidential candidate, or parent.
Anyone in a form of leadership role like this (which likely includes everyone in some context) struggles with this question. Do those you lead that look to you for guidance really want the truth? The truth is that no leader really has it all figured out. Thereās a boatload of uncertainty everywhere. But certain people when looking to a CEO or politician for āleadershipā arenāt really asking for raw honesty; they often want confidence and vision. This explains the phenomena of the politician making claims they canāt uphold, or the CEO that has pie-in-the-sky ideas about what their company will become, or the parent that tells white lies to their kids to protect them from a perhaps-complex reality.
All around a fascinating conversation. Props to Russ Roberts for always having interesting conversations no matter where the ideas come from.
Seneca had great advice 2000 years ago on how to calm ourselves down:
āIt is not to your benefit to see and hear everything. Many injuries ought to pass over us; if you ignore them, you get no more injury from them. You want to be less angry? Ask fewer questions.ā
I read āask fewer questionsā metaphorically as ādonāt feel compelled to engage in every single dialogā. Much of the media discourse fans these flames: show everyone incendiary content, get them annoyed, make it easy to respond, beget another response ā an ever increasing turning of the dial toward destructiveness, anger, and negativity.
Itās a daily reminder to, when seeing something that irks you, disengage and redirect attention.
A list of broad laws that apply to all fields. Thoughtful stuff as always from Morgan Housel:
6. Parkinsonās Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
In 1955 historian Cyril Parkinson wrote in The Economist:
IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street. The total effort which would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.
His point was that resources can exceed needs without people noticing. The number of employees in an organization is not necessarily related to the amount of work that needs to be done in that organization. Workers will find something to do ā or the appearance of doing something ā regardless of what needs to be done.
This is a neat collaboration tool for distributed teams that just launched. Itās built on Slack and has integrations built for many of the common productivity tools that modern remote teams are familiar with. Iām keen to take a look at this for doing more real-time work with my remote co-workers.
As computer vision continues its advance, machines are getting better and better at converting images and video into structured data. Computers have historically had sensor data feeds through text, binary data streams, and user inputs; eventually theyāll all have visual inputs, as well.
Jonathan Haidtās The Righteous Mind was one of my favorite recent nonfiction books Iāve read in the last few years. Itās one of the most objective, deep analyses of a question thatās interested me for years: why do people have such fundamental and deep disagreements on how the world works or should work? Why are political left and right seemingly so far apart from one another on such fundamental levels? Haidtās perspective as an expert in moral psychology provides insights into the foundations of how weāre different and how weāre the same.
Haidt argues that reason often serves our emotions rather than the mind being in charge. We can be less interested in the truth and more interested in finding facts and stories that fit preconceived narratives and ideology. We are genetically predisposed to work with each other rather than being purely self-interested and our genes influence our morality and ideology as well. Haidt tries to understand why people come to different visions of morality and politics and how we might understand each other despite those differences.
This is an EconTalk interview with Haidt on the book from 2014. Itās a good primer on the ideas and hopefully whets the appetite to read ā a highly recommended book, for sure.
I love EconTalkās show notes. Each episode contains an additional many hours worth of interesting reading material, links, books, and more. Great stuff.
Many people are familiar with Occamās razor, the principle summarized as:
Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
Thereās a tendency you notice all over for people to overcomplicate situations early. Before even fully understanding a problem, they often dig into their toolbox of knowledge for the most involved, and āpowerfulā weapon in the arsenal. There must be a reason for this ā perhaps the propensity to convolute problems makes people feel more comfortable with their lack of a solution? āI donāt know what to do because problem X is incredibly complex.ā
The post has examples from medicine, physics, crime, and more. Itās a useful heuristic when approaching novel problems.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
But of course there are cases when oversimplification can be dangerous. Itās crucial to put your problem into context. If the stakes are life-and-death, in-depth analyses and study are essential. As the Einstein quote goes (one of my favorites):
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
āMost people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.ā
My post from yesterday got me thinking about this piece I read recently on Farnam Street that dovetails with the thoughts on long-term benefit and the compounding nature of good habits.
The idea of āGatesā Lawā1 is that investments for the long-term can bear fruit sooner than you think. Why does this happen so frequently? And what does this have to do with playing the long game?
I donāt mean to imply that all long-term investments (like exercise or reading) compound so quickly that youāve underestimated the results you can achieve over a shorter time period ā you wonāt start running and suddenly in a month have lost 60 pounds. But where Gatesā Law is related to compounding effects of good habits is in what the gradual gains enable that you couldnāt do before. In the running example, think about how shedding those first 10 pounds makes your future running that much easier2.
The article mentions the biologist Stuart Kauffman, who calls this concept āThe Adjacent Possibleā. I love this idea:
Each new innovation adds to the number of achievable possible (future) innovations. It opens up adjacent possibilities which didnāt exist before, because better tools can be used to make even better tools.
Humanity is about expanding the realm of the possible. Discovering fire meant our ancestors could use the heat to soften or harden materials and make better tools. Inventing the wheel meant the ability to move resources around, which meant new possibilities such as the construction of more advanced buildings using materials from other areas. Domesticating animals meant a way to pull wheeled vehicles with less effort, meaning heavier loads, greater distances and more advanced construction. The invention of writing led to new ways of recording, sharing and developing knowledge which could then foster further innovation. The internet continues to give us countless new opportunities for innovation. Anyone with a new idea can access endless free information, find supporters, discuss their ideas and obtain resources. New doors to the adjacent possible open every day as we find different uses for technology.
Not only is there potential for the long-term gains on your positive habits, but you can even unlock adjacent, undiscovered potential along the way.
The quote has been popularized by Bill Gates, but probably apocryphally.Ā ↩
As my friend Bill Dollins has said regarding losing weight and running: itās easier if thereās āless youā to lug along for the ride.Ā ↩
āIt may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk,ā the authors wrote in the study. In this case, that would be a floppy disk that holds about 1.5 megabytes of information, or the equivalent of about a minute-long song as an Mp3 file. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain] The researchers estimate that in the best-case scenario, in a single day, an adult remembers 1,000 to 2,000 bits of their native language. In the worst-case scenario, we remember around 120 bits per day.
My friend and co-worker Joe Larson has been doing some cool experiments with Blender for generating hillshades, jumping off of work from Andy Woodruff, Daniel Huffman, and Scott Reinhard. Iāve seen a few different hillshade / topo composites that look super cool.
Nassim Talebās concept of āantifragility is a fascinating philosophical framework; one which Iāve linked to and mentioned here before. This Farnam Street post summarizes 10 thinking concepts to help orient your own life and decision making toward antifragility:
In short, stop optimizing for today or tomorrow and start playing the long game. That means being less efficient in the short term but more effective in the long term. Itās easy to optimize for today, simply spend more money than you make or eat food thatās food designed in a lab to make you eat more and more. But if you play the long game you stop optimizing and start thinking ahead to the second order consequences of your decisions.
I love this brief piece from Shane Parrish about the decaying respect for experience and authority on intellectual topics:
This overwhelming complexity of modern life āproduced feelings of helplessness and anger among a citizenry that knew itself increasingly to be at the mercy of smarter elites,ā writes Nichols. And Hofstadter warns, āWhat used to be a jocular and usually benign ridicule of intellect and formal training has turned into a malign resentment of the intellectual in his capacity as expert. Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.ā
Donāt get me wrong. Reasoned skepticism and disagreement are essential to progress and democracy. The problem is that most of whatās happening isnāt reasoned skepticism. Itās the adult equivalent of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.
Sometimes experts are wrong and the common citizen is right, but those occasions are few and far between. Whatās growing is our inability to distinguish between experts being wrong occasionally and experts being wrong consistently. Participants in public debate search for loopholes and exceptionsāanything that provides an excuse to disregard opinions they donāt like.
This sets up binaries and polarities, demanding that things be either true or false. This eliminates nuance. The reality is that most expert opinions are true at least in part, and the real value in disagreement is not dismissing the thing entirely, but taking the time to argue the weak points to make the overall better.
Social media and the modern internet culture of ādunking onā people through the single-sentence response that sounds good is a poison that infects a system where there could be reasoned dialogue. I believe itās less the platform and more the cultural norms at fault for getting us to this point, where nuance is invisible and itās all about viewing things through simplistic binary lenses. This leads to an anti-intellectualism where anyone is ready and enabled to tear down viewpoints they donāt agree with (or even ones they only semi agree with), even if presented by those with orders of magnitude more knowledge and experience.
I think our coddled culture of āyouāre always rightā and āyou can be anything you want when you grow upā is creating an environment where itās not only okay to have any opinion you want, but where people (from any walk) canāt challenge you.
The nearly 2000 year old Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is likely the first ever entry in the āself helpā publishing genre. During his last days as Roman Emperor, reigning from 161-180 AD, he wrote the 12 ābooksā that comprise the Meditations. Itās a personal journal he wrote to himself, never intended for publication, with thoughts, ruminations, reminders, and short stories from his life, all with the objective of serving his future self as a reminder of how to live and act.
Thereās not much of a thematic arc from book to book ā each numbered paragraph entry largely stands on its own. Some are single, to-the-point declarations, some are longer stories about people in his life, including things he admired about them.
As a practitioner of Stoic philosophy, many of the original players from the Stoic school are mentioned, and their belief system is present throughout. Aurelius was clearly a devout follower of the Stoics, at least later in life. The writing is full of great quips that are helpful for readers of any age or generation to remember whatās important and to direct attention in productive and meaningful ways. Aurelius counsels to live according to a set of principles, avoid distractions, donāt think about what other people think of you, and to maintain a rational mind without letting emotion overcome you. I doubt that he knew what āmindfulnessā was in the way we think of it today, or that the Buddhist tradition has, but much of the writing speaks to the act of being āpresentā in the moment and not dwelling on the things outside of your control ā just like the array of mindfulness practices.
āYou have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.ā
One item of note that I didnāt discover until starting the book was how many varying translations are out there of the original work. It was originally written in Greek and has been translated hundreds of times in various languages over the centuries. I started out reading an older translation (not sure the source) that I found difficult to follow, unnecessarily given that there are more modernized versions. I eventually found the recently published translation by Gregory Hays and started over with his much more readable prose. Contrast the versions and see the simplicity of the text from Hays in this part from Book 2:
Original:
āWhy should any of these things that happen externally so much distract thee? Give thyself leisure to learn some good thing and cease roving and wandering to and fro. Thou must also take heed of another kind of wandering, for they are idle in their actions, who toil and labour in this life, and have no certain scope to which to direct all their motions, and desires.ā
Hays:
āDo external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their timeāeven when hard at work.ā
The same idea comes across, without the arcane English that muddies the meaning for the novice modern reader.
I thoroughly enjoyed Meditations and itās a quick read. Itās a great candidate to become regular reference material for self-reflection and meditation practice.
This is a 2005 commencement address delivered by the late David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. Worth going back and listening to from time to time.
