Life Ops
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Shadowplay w/ Arran Rogerson and Alyssa Polizzi. Every Friday @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Newly posted event:
The Bridge From Stopping One Game To Starting Another: GameStop, SOCI, and Power w/ Evan McMullen. January 30th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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January 28th, 2021
The fun thing about writing here is I do not know what will emerge. I am often surprised, but it usually feels right at the end.
My shoulder has been messed up, and it has been hurting for the last few months. This has been preventing me from working out. That is an excuse though, and I know it. Today I will work out. I probably should get into yoga or something like that. I will take a cold shower today as well. I have not done that in a while.
There are so many other things to do. I am doing a lot actually. I am doing an artistic collaboration with Rebecca Fox, as well as a collaboration with Rebel Wisdom, which is going to be quite extensive time-wise. Camille and I want to move as well, ideally before summer, and there is some health stuff as well, with myself and other family members. All of this is in addition to doing all of the administrivia of The Stoa, having a coaching call every day, and maintaining a daily writing practice. I would also like to relax a little as well, hang out with my wife and our cat Socrates, and read Byung-Chul Han in a leisurely state.
Am I complaining? Shhhh… Stoics are not allowed to complain. We are supposed to present ourselves as hard-as-fuck philosophers who are poppin’ with 24/7 serenity while rockin’ boyishly handsome resting barbarian faces. Alas, I am no Stoic sage, I am just your humble steward, who is overcommitted because my thumos gets the better of me sometimes, and the daemon is constantly bombarding me with inspiration.
I have not gotten into the right relationship with all of this wild energy. Simplistic advice such as “slow-down” does not resonate, because when I feel past the current frustration, I am very grateful for what is happening. The Stoa is fucking awesome, it pulsates with potential, and most excitingly: it is something new. It also feels deeply rewarding to hear people resonating with me just doing me. I experience it as quite beautiful actually, and it encourages me to keep doing me in front of you.
I am riding something, and now is the time to learn how to ride it well. Sebastian Marshall is coming to mind. His recent talk at The Stoa was my favorite session at the Unsuccess Symposium. It was hyper practical, and the dude is a productivity beast. In his talk he discusses the importance of operations management, or “ops” to use business-speak.
Having “philosophy as a way of life,” or life philosophy, is good to have. I have that, in a "minimum viable philosophy” sort of way. Having a life strategy is also good to have, and while mine could probably be more sophisticated, I have one that is good enough for now. Having life goals is something I have as well. I have more personal goals than “professional” ones, and I do have a spiritual north star that is more felt than thought, which may include opening up a philosophical coffee shop, writing short philosophy books, and other stuff that existentially tickles me.
As Scott Adams says though, “goals are for losers and systems are for winners.” I was musing about a “success system” in the summer, and Sebastian would probably call this “life ops.” Yeah, having a life philosophy, strategy and goals are great, but without a life ops it will not manifest efficiently.
In that success system entry, some of the projects I mentioned never got done. It was probably for the best, but if my life ops system were better designed, and better aligned, maybe they would have been completed, and maybe this sense of frustration that has been nagging me as of late would be ameliorated.
I do have a life ops system, but I do not feel like I am in the right relationship with it. I sense being in relationship with others, while you are in relationship with your system, is the way forward. This is what the Metagame Mastermind (MGM) was partly supposed to address. A communal approach to keep one accountable to their life ops.
I need something more intense than what was presented with the MGM. I fondly recall my old in-person mastermind groups that had the likes of Saint Christoph, Davood Gozli and Daniel “Sexy Armenian” Kazandjian as members. They were not designed perfectly, but they were intense at times. What is an adventure without the experience of intensity? Maybe this is my toxic masculinity showing, but all this thumos has to go somewhere, and it might as well be deployed on the glocal spectrum, in service towards virtue.
As an aside, I do perversely enjoy how a lot of people who play in the metamodern and spiritually adjacent spaces get mildly triggered by my use of the word virtue. Maybe it is because of how the abusive and hypocritical aspects of certain Christian denominations have used that word, which understandably left behind a society-wide trauma.
I do not need you to be virtuous for me to be virtuous. I am not here to proselytize being virtuous, or my weird brand of Stoicism. You do you. I do not know what is best for your sexy transcontextual ass. I am not here to explain my philosophy, I am here for it to be embodied. I do long for more friendships of virtue however, in the Aristotelian sense, where we intensely pursue the good, true, and beautiful together.
I need help in getting my life philosophy, life strategy, and life ops into the right relationship with one another. Receiving this not only requires commitment from another person, but a greater intimacy as well. This is something our anti-culture with its atomized way of relating does not readily afford. In this spirit, Daniel, Khalil, and I have repurposed dialogos and started meeting weekly. Each week, one of us is in the “agape seat,” and whoever is in the agape seat talks about what is most existentially salient for them, while the listeners hold space, in the right way.
This shit cannot be recorded, as it gets raw and messy, and an obvious “spectacle bias” emerges when the record button is on. These have been good, and they are not only useful to us, but they are creating more philia between us as well. I have a desire to combine the intensity of those old mastermind groups, with these philia-infused dialogos sessions.
I was thinking of calling this psychotechnology Stoic Comitatus. The word comitatus is Latin for an armed posse. I do want an armed posse, one that is armed with virtue. Just imagine: an army of weirdly virtuous Stoics, seriously playing in the liminal, ready to die at the fall of “Game A,” in service of starting a new game. Delicious.
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