“Be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast”
19th Century, Jehova Thunders style… translated into 21st century language… “we are our habits, the small differences when you’re 25 become your fate by the time you’re 50”…
There’s a Korean deli I often buy from… they have the younger generation working the cash registers. Early 20s I’d guess. On slow days the kids are reading textbooks… demanding material too… obviously that deli is paying for a whole generation to go through college. There’s a range of customers floating in and out, most a mentally half present, fooling around with games, no clear focus.
I’m sure that soon those kids will own the building that some of their customers will be renting apartments from.
That from Variety of Religious Experience Tacitus?
That guy wasn’t a hedonist lol.
Well i kinda agree,constantly pursuing pleasure as a value is just deadening.Self-Discipline when your young builds good habits that mature into good character.Who can argue with that?
The wisest course is to be a little bit of a hedonist in those possibilities which are best experienced hedonically, and a little bit of a spartan where there is value in being spartan… being all hedonist or all spartan is too narrowing, life is richer than that… too much regulation freezes the soul and too much indulgence rots it.
Hehe, this reminds me of something I read about for increasing confidence. It’s call “Iron Man Conditioning”. Go to a neighboring town, or somewhere you don’t visit, find a public place, and hang out wearing a dress and a sign that says “I am a complete moron”. The idea being that if you can handle a couple of hours of that, you can handle ANYTHING.
Milton Erickson would do this through hypnosis… he was such a master at inducing deep trances that he could give his subject exactly such awful experiences without having to suffer them in reality… these became known as his Hypnotic Ordeals… he could convice you that you were on a subway platorm at rush hour, stark naked and defecating into a hat, holding a sign that read “hitler was misunderstood” and all of this is on prime time national news, while hundreds of passengers spit on you and call you the most horrible things… and you have to do this all day, every day for a month…(in your rich imagination) and also you are the ugliest human being who ever lived and a notorious criminal and… imagine snapping out of that… how freaking thankful you’d be for your normal self…
