This evening I unexpectedly hit a milestone on a personal project I've been putting a lot of effort into for some time now. And I got energetically happy. Couldn't help it. Felt great.
Then I remembered that good Stoics contain their emotions. And that annoyed me, because feeling joyful is nice, so why would Stoics not want that?
The thing about Stoics is they achieve happiness by being virtuous in the moment. Every moment. There's no space to dwell on past virtuousness. Gotta be virtuous again. The time to be happy about my achievement was when I was doing the virtuous things that would eventually lead me there. The virtue was in the doing, not the outcome. When I felt joy this evening, what I wasn't doing, at that moment, was anything virtuous. I was basking, which is inherently self centred, and not virtuous. A good Stoic finds no happiness there.
Simon
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