Shad's Musings

Review of Letters from a Stoic by Peter Thiel

Book Review

Review

I had read several books and listened to several podcasts that recommended this book. I must say that this book was worth every penny. The book is a series of letters from Seneca to his student. He writes them at the end of his life and he packs a lot of wisdom in it. Seneca's words touch on different facets of life, from dealing with wealth to dealing with grief and everything in between.

One thing I found very interesting is the idea of stoicism. Basically, you should be aware that nature will take its course and we can only do so much to prevent this. Stoicism asks the following question: "once these events happen, what's the next course of action?". Stoicism will respond by saying, you take the event on the chin and look forward to tomorrow. You may lose all your wealth, friends, family but life keeps on going. To get the most out of life demands that you live your life as if there is no tomorrow and that every morning is blank canvas to write the best version of yourself.

I think the lessons from this book are especially useful today. We live in a world where the definition of a life well lived tends to equate to accumulation of material resources. However, this acquisition never stops and we can see some negative effects of this in our relationships and the environment. Seneca cautions us that our interests should be adaptive to the vagaries of life and we should not be married to other's ideas of us and our possesions. Instead aim to live a life that will live on 1000 times over as people talk about the quality of your character. Do good by others and by yourself, do no harm and develop a disposition for doing good.

I plan on buying many copies of this book and gifting it to as many people as I can.

Selected Quotes

I wasn't born for one particular corner; the whole world's my home country.

Be your own person. Don't just regurgitate someone's ideas.

To be really respected is to be loved.

Speak slowly, speak well, speak directly!

It is good to read the works fo others but don't aim to imitate. Instead be your own person. Build upon the works fo others or reject them altogether. It is more honorable to say "I said" while commanding respect instead of "saying so & so said..."

For having our friends present makes us spoilt; as a result of our talking and walking and sitting together every now and then, on being separated we haven't a thought for those we've just been seeing.

Harmful consequences of inactivity are dissipated by activity.

Rest is sometimes far from restful.

What is the good of having silence throughout the neighbourhood if one's emotions are in turmoil.

So it's with the love of money, the love of power and the other maladies that affect the minds of men. You may be sure that it is when they abate and give every appearance of being cured that they are their most dangerous.

So give up hoping that your prayers can bring some change in the decisions of the gods.

Have you anything that might induce you to wait? You have exhausted the very pleasures that make you hesitate and hold you back; not one of them has any novelty for you, not one of them now fails to to bore you out of sheer excess.

Making noble resolutions is not as important as keeping the resolutions you have made already.

Fortify your pertinacity until your will to do good becomes a disposition to do good.

If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor. If you shape your life according to other people's opinions you will never be rich.

Natural desires are limited, those which spring from false opinions have nowhere to stop for FALSITY has no termination.

How to know if your desire is natural/unseeing:

It is in times fo security that the spirit should prepare for dark/hard times (fast, few clothes etc). Start cultivating a relationship with poverty.

Anger is to be avoided not for the sake of moderation but for the sake of sanity.

Remaining DRY and SOBER takes a good deal more strength of will when everyone about one is puking drunk.

Whatever your destination, you will be followed by your failings. To proceed you need to rid yourself of your affliction.

So there is the comforting thing about the extremities of pain; if you feel it too much you are boudn to stop feeling it.

Ennui: the feeling that one is tired of being, of existing; usually the result of an idle and inactive leisure

Don't give in to adversitiy, never to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune's habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she was actually going to do everything it is in her power to do.

What really ruins our characters is the fact that none of us looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependent on the past.

We have actually come to such a pitch of choosiness that we object to walking on anything other than precious stones

Are you more concerned to find out where Ulysses' wondering took him than to find a waya of putting an end to our own perpetual wanderings.

How much does a man need in order to have enough?

The geometrician teaches me to calculate, putting my fingers in the service of avarice, instead of teaching me that there is no point whatsoever in that sor of computation & that a person is none the happier for having properties which tire accountants out or to put it in another way, how superflous a man's possessions are when he would be a picture of misery if you forced him to start counting up single-handedly how much he possessed.

Train yourself to lose the lot and keep smiling.

To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance. Apart from which, this kind of obsession with the liberal arts turns people into pedantic, irritatin, tactless, self satisfied bores not learning what they need simply because they spend the time learning things they will not need.

MEASURE YOUR LIFE; IT JUST DOES NOT HAVE ROOM FOR SO MUCH.

To govern is to serve, not to rule.

What's more impressive?

IT IS WE, AND NO ONE ELSE, WHO HAVE MADE THOSE THINGS COSTLY, SPECTACULAR AND OBTAINABLE ONLY BY MEANS OF A LARGE NUMBER OF FULL SCALE TECHNIQUES

Now our minds are slaves to our bodie's wants.

Our own homes count for a large part our feeling of insecurity.

We must experience the things nature throws at us such as ill, hunger and death. You don't need to believe the chatter of the people around you; nothing that nature throws at you is evil or insupportable or even hard. Those people are afraid of these things by a kind of GENERAL CONSENT.

What good is travelling from place to place seeking relaxation when you are carrying yourself?

By turning our backs on our causes of panic, we do not help ourselves. If anything, we are only exposing ourselves to more shocks because we have turned out backs to them.

If your heart/mind is in a discordant state, you won't be travelling but merely drifting as you seek to get waay from your troubles.

It's not because they're hard that we lose confidence; they're hard because we lack the confidence.

TO BE FEARED IS TO FEAR:

The fairness of a law does not consist in its effect being actually felt by all alike, but in its having been laid down for all alike.

Some people come to a lecture hall with NOTEBOOK, with a view of recording the words, not the contents of the lecture. These words will be passed on to hearers with no profit to them or 'recorder of words'.

As far as sour grapes, and critics of other people's lives, who set themselves up as moral tutors to society at large, you needn't give tuppence for them; you needn't ever have any hesitation when it comes to putting good living before a good reputation.