Yenta of Virtue
Hey beautiful people.
I was hoping to get some help from the Stoans. We are creating a modest database of life practices for the Beyond Self-Discipline (BSD) experience that is starting on Saturday. The BSD experience is about designing an “ecology of practices” and I thought it would be cool to source a bunch of practice ideas from the collective wisdom at The Stoa. If you’d like to include some practices, please do so on the link below. The question prompt is this …
What are the three highest leverage life practices you would recommend to a friend of virtue?
Here is the link.
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Truth, Trust, and Culture War w/ Zubin Damania, Ben Burgis, Christopher Kavanagh, and David Fuller. April 25th @ 4:00 PM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Zubin Damania (ZDogg), Ben Burgis, Christopher Kavanagh, and David Fuller visit The Stoa to discuss how truth and trust have showed up in the culture war during the pandemic. A dialogos followed by Q&A.
Check out what is happening in our wisdom gym:
Collective Journaling. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing. Every Tuesday @ 3:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Embodiment Hour. Every Thursday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Collective Presencing. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Stoic Breath. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
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April 24th, 2022
Last night Camille said there might not be enough coffee beans for an espresso for the morning. Of course, I Stoically responded like I was zero fucks about this news but my internal voice was like: Noooooooooooo! Are you saying my lips will be denied an encounter with my morning espresso, aka my daemon summoner?!
So when I was at our espresso machine this morning - grinding whatever beans were left - I was not expecting enough for an espresso to be made. To my surprise, there was enough. The joy this brought me. Now I am here, listening to pretentious indie music with a joy-inducing espresso by my side, journalling with my fellow journalling gangsters at Collective Journalling, while Socrates chases squirrels outside. Life is good.
I am surprised I am not groggy this morning. Last night was the first time in a very long time I found myself in Toronto bars drinking with my friends of virtue. It was a nourishing time. One thing that was salient for me was the fact that all my friends knew each other through me. Whether it was through The Club, previous meetup groups I hosted, or The Stoa, I have a tendency to create experiences that allow “the others” to find each other.
Before getting drinks I had a coffee yesterday with a Stoan, and she told me about the cool projects she is going to do in Europe this summer, all with people who discovered one another through The Stoa. This is a common thing I hear from others. The origins of many new friends, collaborations, and experiments can be traced back to this “hill on the noosphere” that I steward.
In a recent conversation with John Vervaeke, Jordan Hall said I should change The Stoa’s name to “The Yenta.” I looked the word up: a person, especially a woman, who is considered to be meddlesome or gossipy. Not what I expected. Then I saw the word is associated with someone who is a matchmaker. Now that makes sense.
I never would have thought myself a matchmaker, as that is no explicit intention I ever held, but it does seem like I often help cool people meet each other. And wow, so many fucking cool people find their way to The Stoa. I am endlessly surprised and tremendously grateful for this. Last week for example, I talked to three new conversational partners in my philosophical coaching practice, and these people were fucking awesome. Such high-quality people.
I remember at one point in my life I was so existentially lonely - basically friendless - with tons of epistemic violence being committed to me, not just by being not seen, but by being mis-seen. Being filtered through the limited frame of what my function was in the market economy was soul-sucking. Fuck that. It is like a philosophical community is needed to melt bullshit frames, so we can really be seen for the mysterious potential we are.
So yeah, my existential loneliness encouraged me to create places where I felt like I and others had a chance to be really seen, and these places allow for deep friendships to emerge. Makes total sense actually. People keep asking me to write more about “friendships of virtue,” as this phrase seems to really ping for people. This is Aristotle’s term for the highest order of friendships, contrasted with friendships of utility (e.g. co-workers) and friendships of pleasure (e.g. drinking buddies). Friendships of virtue are those deep friendships, as I defined before…
This is when one expresses goodwill, and wants the best for another, for its own sake. In these friendships you desire your friend to be virtuous, and you desire to be virtuous in their presence.
My philosophical disposition is to be virtuously oriented toward everyone, which opens up a taxonomy that includes other virtuous relationships: “Acquaintances of virtue” are virtuous relationships that are oriented towards becoming mutually virtuous but do not have the level of commitment that friendships of virtue have. I’d say my relationship with a lot of Stoans I personally know are in this category. And then there are “strangers of virtue,” where strangers wish to be virtuous towards one another.
I really like this latter category, because there are tons of strangers of virtue out there, longing for a friend. They are feeling all existentially lonely as well, because they sense they might be the only one out there who feels the way they feel and thinks the way they think, alienated by the fake-ass bullshit of the 9-to-5 world and all the weaponized shaming of the culture war.
Perhaps all these strangers just need a yenta to create a place where acquaintances of virtue can first emerge, eventually blossoming into full-blown friendships. Hm. Perhaps I am a “yenta of virtue.” I can totally lean into that.
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