The Stoic Hustle
Hey beautiful people,
I hope you're well. :)
A few dope announcements:
My buddy Yancey Strickler, the author of This Could Be Our Future and co-founder of Kickstarter will be joining the Stoa’s Wisdom Gym for regular Bentoism check-ups every Monday @ 6:00 PM ET. You can RSVP to tomorrow’s session here.
The Stoic Hustle psychotechnology will be prototyped on Tuesday and Thursday. You can RSVP on the website. You can also watch my presentation on it here.
James Carse, the author from Finite and Infinite Games, is coming to the Stoa!!! This will be posted soon. :)
One-off events for this week:
The High Weirdness of COVID w/ Erik Davis. June 10th @ 4:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Sensing the New Myth: Saving Beauty w/ Andrew Sweeny. June 11th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
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June 7, 2020
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
I never thought about love when I thought about home
I still owe money to the money to the money I owe
The floors are falling down from everybody I know
I have no idea what these lyrics mean, but I like them, and they are from the song Bloodbuzz Ohio from The National. I am listening to a cover of this song right now. It is a lovely cover for a lovely song. When the original version came out, from the album High Violet, I was listening to it on repeat. I loved that album.
I was also listening to this album when I had my first break with reality, which happened seven years ago. I was flooded with intrusive thoughts that day, and I visited hell. I do not want anyone to experience what I experienced that day. I retold this story to Jordan Peterson during my first session with him. He said I had a holy moment. Maybe he was right.
Peterson’s ethical framework is pretty simple:
1) We do not know what heaven is like, but we know what hell is like. 2) If there is hell then there must be heaven. 3) If we move away from hell, then we move towards heaven.
Visiting hell that day motivated me to visit heaven. I do not know if I have been successful, but I do know I have become more strong, more confident, and more loving. After my first break with reality, I started my first mastermind group, with some of my best friends. We kept each other accountable, and moved away from hell, and tried to become heavenly together.
The spirit of these mastermind meetings lives on through the Metagame Mastermind (MGM) that Daniel facilitates at The Stoa. During yesterday's session at the MGM I introduced a new psychotechnology: The Stoic Hustle. In a previous letter exchange Daniel and I talked about how the word 'hustling' has this unhealthy Game A connotation.
There are people who work 80 hours a week, who instrumentalize their relationships and sacrifice their health to get money, sex, and fame. The intense effortfulness of this hustle is in service of the rivalrous games that are destroying this world, and the underlying psychological inadequacies that motivate them.
I do think this hustler term and its spirit can be co-opted and made holy if we inject some Stoicism into it. The Stoics are outcome-independent and they do not lose their serenity when things do not go according to plan.
To circle back to those strange lyrics that started off this entry: the floors are falling down from everybody I know. The floors are falling, and people are losing their jobs, and their relationships, and their minds. I am grateful for losing my mind a few times now and finding my way back to it.
The daemon has spoken, and he is asking me to direct the hustle away from hell, and towards heaven. He is asking me to hustle towards beauty, and he wants me to invite you to join me.
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