On Stoicism and Climbing
Paid subscriptions to my substack automatically restarted this week, so I thought I’d start writing and podcasting again (a podcast is on the way soon). If you don’t want to be a paid supporter, then don’t forget to switch to being a non-paying supporter, and if you do, then thanks.
These days, whenever I hear someone talking about stoicism or its philosophy, I get the same feeling I get when someone talks about Herbal Life, Juice Plus or OneCoin; they’re not trying to tell me something that’s of benefit to me, but sell me something that’s of a benefit to them. In the case of stoicism, someone will appear on a podcast or YouTube video and expand on a two-thousand-year-old philosophy that could be defined on the back of a stamp (use self-control and fortitude to defeat destructive emotions in order to become a clear logical and reasoning actor), and then tell you about their five books on the subject, online course or app (a stoicism app would flash up “don’t be weak” when you press the button).
This reaction is a result of the world we live in, where everything, good and bad, healthy and toxic, is recycled, bundled up, packaged, hybridised, and sold back to us (because we know it instinctively, as these things are handed down in our DNA). But in many cases, we fall for someone taking the simplest bit of eternal wisdom, like “eat what your grandparents ate”, and turn it into a business, brand, industry or cult. A lot of it comes from the types of lives we lead, which, to be frank, leaves a lot of people feeling empty that something is missing. It’s that God-shaped hole that God was invented to fill, or it’s an anxiety that comes from not having to fight for survival, that life’s too easy, but lots of people are looking for something, and people try and sell into that market.
This response to stoicism is unfortunate, as I think I was an early, pre-web 2.0 (when the internet of everything became the internet for selling anything) stoic, even if I didn’t know what that was. Much of what I wrote or thought about came from climbing mountains, and how that imprinted itself on my life were thing Zeno would recognise, although framed in a 20th-century.
For example, there’s Zeno’s shipwreck, and then there’s my story about returning from soloing an A5 on El Cap and listening to my neighbour railing about someone putting rubbish in their wheely bin (the moral of Zeno’s story is how we must embrace our fate; mine: we waste our lives on fool drama, as well as the importance of marking your bins).