Running Like Tom Cruise
Hey friends,
The Stoic Hustle is back tomorrow from 10 AM to 3 PM ET. You can drop in and out anytime. If you want to get some shit done in a fun way be sure to join us tomorrow. :)
Tomorrow’s events:
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. Every Tues, Wed, and Thurs @ 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Marx's Epicureanism and Peterson's Stoicism w/ Conrad Hamilton. June 16th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Raw Sexuality: No Filter w/ Caveh Zahedi. June 16 @ 8:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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June 15, 2020
I am here this morning with an espresso and a bedhead once again and I am ready to write once again. As usual, I am accompanied by a restless heart and a boyish enthusiasm, but most importantly there is an unknowingness of what wants to be written.
I went for a run last night. I did not plan on it but my body wanted to move, and moving through the empty streets felt exciting and it felt like I had somewhere to go. There was a moment I was running like Tom Cruise, sprinting like a bomb just blew up behind me while I chase down a bad guy, with an efficiency of form that wastes no energy.
Am I really going somewhere though? I imagine former work colleagues and relatives may look at my life and say I lost my way. I only want to give a gentle "fuck you"to them, because they are all in a precarious situation. Their jobs, relationships, and sanity are all on the line. The former foot soldiers of intersubjective normie reality do not know what to do during a liminal time, not to mention a liminal war.
I may have lost my mind but it feels like I found my way, and I sense this is the correct trade-off. I have to keep moving with unknowingness. If I become too smart and start thinking or feeling that I know, then I am fucked, because the daemon will leave me. Richard Rorty said the academy he resided in was plagued by a sense of knowingness. He described it as: "a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm."
Knowingness is the dis-ease. This is what these fuckers do not get: there is a difference between thinking something is true and feeling something is true. They are not one and the same. Having the latter will fossilize the former, and if you move through the world like this you will not be able to run like Tom Cruise.
I was in Athens in October last year, presenting at the annual Stoicon conference. The title of my talk was How to Start a Modern Stoa. I did not know I was going to launch the digital campfire that is The Stoa then, if I did I would have called the talk How to Start a Metamodern Stoa. I found the conference itself was meh, but one of the highlights was meeting Rebecca Fox, my new favorite skeptical woo-chaser.
Rebecca seems to be flirting with mystical agnosticism recently, and she has been running an excellent workshop series at The Stoa called Chapel Perilous. This series is designed to help us build an intimate relationship with unknowingness, so we can navigate the liminal war like an unpredictable soldier of truth, or what my buddy Samo Burja calls a live player.
There is no liveness with the feeling of knowingness, and there is definitely no romantic enthusiasm with it, and a romantic enthusiasm is exactly what we need if we are going to “win” this thing, and this Stoic is here to win this thing.
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