/lit/ - Literature

How do I reconcile stoicism with all of the urgent life-saving things in my life at all times that will not be there if I do not throw everything I have at them?

>you have everything you need
Only if I take extraordinary measures to the degree of not being in the moment and stressing myself out or deluding myself in manic exertions to no end, and this is because of how unnatural of a person I am and my hyper-awareness of it, which is what my soul is colored with, but I do not want this to be my nature, so how can I just allow myself to go with this?
I wish I could trust myself to go along with whatever happens, but what is this supposed to look like when this process also inevitably entails one needing to take direct intervention and get their hands dirty to unclog their own internal shitter?

>you are over-staying the value of these temporary things you are framing as urgent
Sure, and also could be argued that I am creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where my anxiety is creating the impasse I cannot get past. But nonetheless, the alternative leaves me in the invalid state I described above. I simply do not know how to get past this.

Other people’s lives live rent free in my head at all times Andy entire life I’ve known no other way of interfacing with the world around me without comparing myself to others, both in terms of egocentrism, but also in the most basic egoless things. Which begets the fact, I have no idea who I am or what my values are. I’ve either followed some kind of deductive reverse engineered process to the constantly-changing apples of my eyes spread across the years, or to the whims of what my upbringing has had me think I should be, and I didn’t realize the error in this until a point where I do not know what faculties I utilize to get myself out of this hole.

>you have everything you need
But do I? How do I not have a panic attack every single day and cripple myself with uncertainty and fear of failure? Even knowing the self-fulfilling misery this brings, I don’t know what to look to otherwise. I have a terrible time with people and opening my attention to them, how do I look to the good things?


This post got out of hand but tl;dr the first question at the top

After carelessly going through it and discarding it many years ago I'm planning to do a reading of Meditations. Back then it just didn't do anything for me. I just put it down at some point and never picked up again. For some reason or another I really feel the urge to give it another go. I understand that it was meant to be a personal journal so it makes sense to do some reading on him and stoicism in general before diving to get something more out of it. After some light chatgtp'ing and googling I came up with this simple list:

>Marcus Aurelius: A Life - Frank McLynn
A biography to give me some context on his life as he was writing those entries. According to google the best biography available right now.

>The Discourses - Epictetus
An introduction to the philosophy meant for students.

Just those two. I kept coming across other recommendations but everything else feels redundant as a previous step to meditations. Hopefully I won't end up like Ryan Holiday and become a huge faggot.
Thank you for reading and have a nice day.

>>17197497

>>16126804
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>>16127750
I have such a hard time with figuring out which community I could possibly fit in with. Is the concept of a community dead? I am not talking about the omg lets set up play dates for our kids, school shit, and any other shit that revolves around having kids or some other soulless form of a community.

Where on earth would someone who browsers /lit/, /g/, doesn't care about both "normal" men and women, etc fit in? I JUST CAN'T THINK OF ANYTHING. Which is why I am going to start traveling full time to other countries and just eat food and see what sticks... :(

>>16124931
How the fuck is part 4 comfy nigga? The only comfy part was part 2 and I mean this in a everyone isn't a fucking degenerate gangster. I like part 1 even more, but I would not say it's comfy because they did my nigga Johnathan dirty and that doggy :^(

I've been recommended this. Should I read it even though I'm a pleb who doesn't know much philosophy? Should I read anything before it?
I'm mostly just interested in becoming more "chill" in real life, and not as stressed or easily moved emotionally.

unironically this