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One of the great touchstones of philosophical greatness, in Greek thought at least, is the ability to respect your reactions to crises and opportunities, and to exercise power over those reactions. The secret to understanding how that works can be found in writing romance novels.

If there’s one absolutely consistent theme throughout my stories, it’s that the greatest mystery in human thought is simply this one: why do we make choices and decisions at all?

I’ve come to some satisfactory conclusions, the most important of which is that choice involves nothing supernatural. There’s no “soul” that “I” don’t have any access to, that makes decisions one way or another. That decision making is based not on reason, but on emotion, and that without emotions we would be eternally caught in an optimization loop, unable to break down and make a choice. Even as we weigh choices from the most trivial to the most essential, from what to have for lunch to whom to love and marry, in the end it is emotions that rise up and say, “It’s time to break the tie. You have other things to worry about, young hairless African plains ape, like that cheetah stalking you.”

I’m also a practicing Stoic of the old school, and one of the criticisms often hurled at Stoicism is that Stoics are unfeeling, unemotional creatures who think too much about death, and let that maudlin rumination leech them of feeling.

Obviously, if on the one hand I practice Stoicism, and on the other hand I believe that our emotions are the core and essence of what we are, and that we couldn’t be human without being fully emotional, then I believe that being Stoic and being emotional are fully compatible.

I’m a writer, and writers think about emotions a lot. To borrow a page from my character creation notes, a great character always has an internal tension between two different goals, one long-term and one short-term. Since I write romances, my two protagonists often start with a short-term need to get the hell away from each other for plot reasons, and a long-term desire for affirmation, love, and finding their place in the world. The trick of good writing is to show how those two desires conflict with each other, and then to show how deciding to go for the long-term solution slowly reveals the “real person” under the conflict such that they start to see how suitable the other person is as a partner.

I believe we all have these short- and long-term goals, and that they’re frequently at odds with one another. The desire to lock myself into my mancave and write for hours on end is clearly in conflict with long-term desire to have a happy marriage, and I’ve learned that I have to consistently push away from the desk and attend to my family. My long-term goal is more important to me than my short-term desires.

That’s the primal secret to having power over your reactions. You have to recognize that a reaction is an expression of a short-term desire, and that those expressions aren’t always suitable. By practicing how you’ll react to crises and opportunities, even in the quiet theater of your own skull, you’ll have more control over yourself when the time comes to put that rumination into practice.

I think that’s why romance writers tend to have such stupendous output. They’ve uncovered the secret to dealing with harsh emotions, by rehearsing them over and over on the pages they write. Readers get to experience that second-hand, but for the writer, exploring those details and analyzing them down to their bones gives them that insight. By understanding this conflict, they find the strength to sit down every morning, face the keyboard, and write.

You should practice this too. Every morning, ask yourself one question: “What one terrible thing could go wrong today? How would I deal with it?” Take a deep breath and ask yourself, if your long-term values were fully engaged, if you were seeking to be fully and emotionally satisfied, and not the hormonal, irrational, animal reactive person you are when you’re just “thinking fast,” how would you want to react? Who would need you more than you needed yourself in that moment? Do this regularly, and you’ll be a far stronger person than someone who doesn’t.
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One of the more notorious Stoic exercise is the Premeditation of Adversity. Shallow critics of the practice say it tends to make Stoics gloomy; all Stoics do all day is think about death and decay. It's an unfair criticism; the meditation is suppposed to be intermittent, not ongoing, and it's purpose is to hold you back on the hedonic treadmill by making you appreciate what you already have. Transience should make us aware of the existing gifts the universe has bestowed upon us before we think about seeking out new pleasures and recreations.

Once in a while, though, something happens that teaches you that your list of disasters is deficient. I've contemplated and even written up a sort of script to follow if my wife or one of my children is killed, or injured, or disabled in some way. I've contemplated what to do if the house burns down, or if I lose my sight, or any number of other disasters.

I was not prepared for Tumblr's shutdown. I hadn't realized just how many habits I had built around access to Tumblr. As I wrote earlier, Tumblr was the one social network where I enjoyed most of the interaction. My brain's end-of-phone signal was to rull through a bit of Tumblr and reblog a few things. Tumblr was where my recreations lived— the fandoms I participated in, the artists I admired, and yes the erotica and pin-ups I enjoyed. Tumblr was a happy place.

Tuesday, I found myself somewhat unable to function. I ended up sitting on the couch and staring at the ceiling, dysfunctional and missing that happy place. I've recovered, and yes, I did a few Stoic writing exercises to get over it, but "losing Tumblr" was not on my list of things. I didn't have a script.

And I don't want to try to cobble together an alternative out of various feeds, collections, services and the like. Tumblr, like Usenet, is simply no longer a friendly place for people like me— people who like sex and like consent and like pleasure— and I should accept that and move on.

But I also need to look at all the daily activities I have and recalibrate my meditations to include them as well. I know on the one hand I have a bit more free time, but whether I'm going to do anything useful with it on the other is still up for some debate.
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I'm a practicing Stoic of the Modern school, although my meditative style is much more heavily invested in Buddhist traditions and I have more than a little attraction to the Secular Buddhist movement. Recently I've been reading Robert Wright's Why Buddhism Is True, and one thing he wrote that I really liked is an anology between the Buddhist notion of Mara and natural selection.

There's a ridiculous strain of thought in the less-educated corners of Christianity that somehow scientists worship Darwin. Evangelist Lee Summrall, who's widely published and widely read in Christian bookstores, is a typical example of the breed, so it's not just random internet wackos. But Wright's got a point: if scientists were to think of evolution as a conscious and creative force, they would have to conclude that is a nasty, capricious, and fairly horrific conscious force. Everything from the bit about the whole red in tooth and claw to the more subtle horrors of fungi that eat brains from the inside out. If we were to attribute motives to natural selection, would we happily accept cancer, Alzheimer's, muscular dystrophy? Would we cheerfully embrace death itself at all?

And even more subtly, what we know about the human condition points to a pretty terrible outcome: our brains are constructed to deceive us, our emotions are hard-wired to be continually restless and unhappy, always in search of the safety and security of the tribe on the left, and the power and prestige of pulling ahead of the pack on the right.

Wright says that Buddhism is a toolkit for getting a grip on these impulses, for gaining insight into them and getting at least a little more control over them, for extending our free will just a little bit further than the few seconds every day where we actually exercise our will, and not just our habits and instincts. Because one way or another, the human condition is hard, and we need better tools for managing it.
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The older meaning of philosophy, "love of wisdom," was meant to encourage the followers of any one given school of wisdom to put that wisdom into daily use. Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Neoplatonism all started with premises, but ultimately pushed their students to express the consequences of those premises in their daily lives. The word "ethics" originally meant the study and development of excellence in one's character. Ultimately, all of these things come down to one idea: daily practice.

There is daily practice in most successful philosophies. Buddhism's includes daily meditation, mindfulness in each act, the the mantras of no ego and no permanence. Islam has the adhan. Christiantiy has daily prayer, as well as The Contemplation of the Christ in all its stations. Stoicism, the longest-surviving of all the non-theistic (or perhaps pantheistic) philosophies, has its own, and I'm most familiar with those: the morning contemplation of one's place in the world and its affirmation of fate willing, I will accomplish the work the world has brought me; the evening contemplation of one's work, three times and contra fate, and how closely it aligned with your morning affirmation, the regular assessments of impermanence, value, mindfulness, and self-discipline. Stoicism, especially, has a tradtion of psychological self-care that I find both demanding and valuable.

Christianity, Buddhism, and Stoicism might seem wildly different, but underneath, at the personal level, they have their similarities, especially the counter-tribal varieties that most people find admirable. All three have comprehensive daily regimes that assist you in maintaining your mental health in the full face of the truly despairing state of human existence.

I have yet to see a book at a Pagan bookstore or hear of daily practice at a Pagan gathering that imposes the same sorts of self-discipline and self-care on pagan practitioners. Do Pagans have these sorts of teachings? Or are they attached, willy-nilly, from other philosophical bases?

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Elf Sternberg

May 2025

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