Blogs

"The stupidity of the people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything."

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I came with a quote by Steven Pressfield from book "Tribe Of Mentors" written by Tim Ferriss (See here to check my readings from 2020) And it goes:

"The disease of our time is that we live on the surface. We are like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep."

This makes a lot of sense if we really think about our contemporary lives. Take an example of the internet. We don't really understand it, but we all use it.

Pressfield said, "If you want to become a billionaire, invent something that will allow people to indulge their own resistance." That's what Internet and Social media did.

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

― Epictetus

It might sound weird but not knowing is a great skills and nothing surpasses it. It is the inception of everything.

Milan Kundera in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being said:

"The stupidity of people comes from having the answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything."

It's is really important to ask question. One who ask questions on everything is the one who is destined to be evolving.

It is true that nobody knows all. Tragically, must of us don't even know ourselves. Marcus Aurelius wrote: "Learn to ask all sets of actions, why are they doing that? Starting with your own."

We write a letter to our past selves expressing our feelings towards the decision we made in past.

It's metaphorical. Its easy to blame our past decision for the result we get.

The question is: What would you say to your future self? And how would you feel when you read that letter in a few months or years?

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one

-Meditations, 10.16

Modern culture often associates masculinity with aggression, dominance, emotional hardness, or anger. But many philosophical and spiritual traditions viewed true strength differently. Real strength is not losing control of oneself, but governing oneself despite emotion.

Marcus Aurelius believed character is revealed through action rather than performance. It is easy to speak about virtue, discipline, or morality. It is harder to embody them consistently in difficult situations.

Anger can feel powerful because it creates intensity and reaction. But uncontrolled anger usually reflects inner instability rather than strength. Kindness, patience, restraint, and composure often require far greater discipline because they demand self-control under pressure.

This idea appears across traditions. Stoicism valued mastery over impulse. Buddhism emphasized compassion over hatred. Confucian thought viewed self-restraint and moral conduct as marks of character rather than weakness.

Being kind does not mean being passive. It means remaining governed by principle instead of emotion.

Sometimes the stronger person is not the one who reacts with anger, but the one who remains composed enough to choose otherwise.

Psychological resilience is the mental and emotional toughness required to recover from difficulty. It is the ability to withstand adversity and return from it with greater strength and clarity. Ancient philosopher from Epictetus to Seneca to Marcus Aurelius all understood that this quality is essential for a well-lived life.

Epictetus said,"You can bind up my leg, but not even the Zeus has the power to break my freedom of choice."

Epictetus, who was born into slavery, famously remarked that while his leg could be bound, not even a god had the power to break his freedom of choice. This internal sovereignty is the core of resilience. We cultivate this strength by focusing on what Epictetus called our chief task in life: identifying what is in our control and what is not.

What other people say is not up to us. How we respond is. This distinction is crucial, and it marks the definitive difference between a resilient person and one who is easily broken by external circumstances. By narrowing our focus to our own choices and reactions, we build a psychological foundation that remains steady regardless of the challenges we face. Resilience is not about avoiding the storm; it is about maintaining our agency within it.

Every condition reverses itself and it tries to become normal. That’s universal. This equanimity and balance holds true in almost every aspects of the life.

What increases will fall back and what downgrades will upgrade to become normal. Every losses has some kind of gains and every gains come with some losses.  As a saying goes, “For everything you lose, you gain something and for everything you gain you lose something.”

Well, it’s all about balance. That's how we humans and the nature, as a whole, is evolved.

Memento Mori

The ancient practice of meditating on mortality goes back to Socrates, who once said that the proper practice of philosophy is “about nothing else but dying and being dead.”

One day we all die, that's what we all have been told and that's what we believe. But we are, in fact, dying everyday. We die every night when we go to sleep and awaken a different person, although we often barely notice what has been lost in the process. The child dies to become the adolescent. The adolescent dies to become the man. The boy is father to the man but also predeceases him. As Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius put in this is not the body to which your mother gave birth.

This idea of practicing and meditating on death adds meaning in life. It encourages us to focus our attention on its true worth. Seneca told himself each night as he closed his eyes to sleep that he might not awaken to see the morning. In one of his Moral Letters, he wrote:

You were born a mortal, and you have given birth to mortals: yourself a weak and fragile body, liable to all diseases, can you have hoped to produce anything strong and lasting from such unstable material? — Seneca, Moral Letters

"Know thyself " and be mortal, said Seneca.

Those whom you love and those whom you despise will both be made equal in the same ashes. This is the meaning of that command, “Know thyself”, which is written on the shrine of the Pythian oracle. — Seneca, Moral Letters

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself: “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Marcus, therefore, advises contemplating death in each action:

During every one of your actions pause at each step and ask yourself: “Is death deemed catastrophic because of the loss of this?” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Epictetus would say his students, "It is not the things themselves that disturb men, but their judgements about these things. For example, death is nothing catastrophic, or else Socrates too would have thought so, but the judgement that death is catastrophic, this is the catastrophic thing."

“I begin to speak only when I’m certain what I’ll say isn’t better left unsaid.”

– Cato

"Cheat Day" is a term most familiar to people in fitness world. It's when they take an excuse in the name of cheat day to eat/do what they like.

But it's a trap...

That one day in a week has the high probability of dismantling the improvements of other six days.