This premise has been consistent in your writing and has inspired much thought. Thank you for keeping virtual pen to paper.
I think it would be interesting to hear what you have to say if the audience was a group of us who accepted wholly the premise of safety-danger-aliveness and the positive outcomes of action to train for these disaster scenarios.
What does this training that look like? Not squats in the gym or cliff diving, but the setting up of conditions that trigger the healthful reactions in the brain box.
And if you have written on that extensively and I haven’t seen it the shortfall is on my side. I’m intrigued by the sign in the jungle idea and would love to engage in that with like minded people.
Paul, through both desire (the joy of trying to replicate a combat mode of mind) and need (autoimmune problems) I have built my life along this model. It is quite Spartan. I haven't written of this and I am honestly not sure how. I want to give your answer justice. I appreciate the feedback and I need some time to put together a coherent response.
Paul, I am still not quite sure the best way to answer this. It is the primary underlying mission of almost all of my essays. I am extremely skeptical of "how to" manuals or of giving concrete recommendations, as my hunch is this is an inner mission, but we can get close. One of the reasons I love Epictetus more than any other philosopher is his unwavering dedication to exploring worst case scenarios. I wrote in my essay last week that many of his quotes are never talked about, and there is a good reason for this—he accepts no boundaries on what the human mind is capable of in its pursuit of self-mastery. Let's bridge this to today. We have safety-danger-aliveness which you mentioned above and it is undoubtedly both a gift and a curse. To your point, squats and cliff diving may be fun, but they have zero correlation to cutting through safety-danger-aliveness and getting down to the core of the combat mode of mind I often explore. The only path of attaining this mind short of going to war is a mindset, what I call mode of mind. Combat is one. I study pre-state peoples and there is also a primal mode of mind I write about. The third is an Epictetian mode of mind. All three have a common thread, and it is this thread I love pulling one: an absolute, total, relentless pleasure in everything that can happen. All the good. All the bad. All the evil. Every possible outcome accepted with the most brutal bright-eyed acceptance. It is to live as if your back is against the wall and the last thing you have left is your choice to die well. This is what I mean when I say many Epictetus quotes are left in the lurch—they are so uncomfortable most people would not dream of leaning into them and structuring the mind around them every day. Hopefully this gives a decent answer to your question. I will probably start to circle more "practical" things in future essays. But I have been circling the problem more than solutions lately.
I have read your comment multiple times and have been thinking about this. Unsure myself if I have any cohesive insight. From my own experience aliveness seems to emerge from a mix of being exposed to danger while contributing to a group. Combat is a prime example. While exposed to danger you care for the existential health of others, regardless of rank. You fall asleep on post, you expose all to the danger. The intensity of that shared, existential contribution underlies the camaraderie that results.
Our current technical society abstracts out the existential, shared problem solving. We don't have access to the levers that control it (health outcomes, climate change, etc). All we can do is shout about it to a group that it so large it is just noise. Shouting into this technology created version of the void is the inverse of aliveness.
Cliff-diving provides the danger, but there is no real group problem there. Get your buddies together and agree not to cliff dive would be the most practical way to solve the existential element of that situation.
I wonder if we can address aliveness alone. Our marketing culture suggests we can. Perhaps the answer lies it creating a group that solves multiple decently complex problems together and by extension solves the larger existential problem of finding a group and not passing away alone.
Musings only. I very much appreciate your thoughts and writing and look forward to where you go next. Cheers
Decades ago as little boys we played with “toy guns” the attacks, ambushes and fire fights went on for hours. Unsupervised of course! “I got you Tommy!” “Nah you didn’t!” Endless Capture the Flag games in summer and in winter the grade school co-ed game played on the play ground snow banks of “smear the queer” (sorry if this offends, but in the day queer meant odd man out and had no reference to homosexuality.) of course this all played into a mind set, for this writer the logic and tactics taught at Marine Corps OCS/TBS/IOC would make perfect sense. The training started at age 7. Once indoctrinated and having led a rifle platoon whether in peace time or conflict your brain never shuts off. High ground, beaten zones, choke points never leave the mind. Standing at an intersection as the walk sign flashes “go” the brain says “ten hut” forrrwaaad march!” “You’re left foot first civilians your left foot first!”
It’s why Sam, when you got home and were living in NYC after the initial rush wore off you were antsy. There had to be more and there wasn’t for you. To the average civilian the big concern was what size Starbucks to buy, your brain was buzzing looking for the next bad guy around the next bad corner. It’s important to find solace but equally important to find the hurricanes in our brains and fight through them, the angst makes us stronger even in our dotage. Scared? damn right but that is the point. You’re alive, and learning to deal with fear is a mighty good skill to develope and use as needed and as confronted.
Charles, your messages are multi-layered and hit home. Your leap from childhood to training for war strikes me nothing but healthy—it reads like many of the pre-state peoples I write about. It sounds like my own childhood in the backwoods of PA until the dream came true down the road. I am grateful for the thoughts!
Having raised children in the 1990s/2000s and wanted to protect them from the 'street' problems I had growing up, I can say the outcome would have been better if they had learned to engage with dangerous situations and think them through. Maybe not every situation I confronted, but at least some of them. That brain is such a freakin' powerful weapon when you are forced to think! Your spidey senses are enhanced and you can evade, your skateboard becomes a weapon, your cunning, your ability to improvise and connect, or to frighten the other...your legs learn how fast they can really run, lol. And then you learn even more when you reflect on it all. The kids who had it all safe get little if any of that.
Anthony, you are nailing a powerful cycle—those who know danger seek to prevent others from suffering from it, which is a noble and beautiful impulse, yet it is this same suffering in danger (to a limited extent) that helps us grow. This is where the balance becomes tricky. When it comes to raising kids, how much risk/danger is too much? At what point are we doing harm and not good?
Anyway, this quote "your skateboard becomes a weapon" is simply epic.
And as for the skateboard story...I will share it with you over beers sometime.. Aluminum. That's all I'm saying now😇. But the life skills....maaaaaan. the literature on trauma and resilience supports the Alaimo doctrine 1000%. With a new 'frame'/story and a few other factors, our hardships give us strength.
You are an enjoyable interlocutor Sam! As parents (or friends, mentors, or trainers, i guess it's the calculated 'let em figure it out'/'let them experience this' calculus. After an elementary school brawl in which i was seriously outmatched, I saw an adult watching the fight from a bench. It was my dad. 😜
thank you! it would be nice if more "reasonally normal people" could understand that seeing danger and being in danger are two separate issues. forty years ago, a woman traveled across two states to find me at the kitchen table of the business I owned to ask me, "aren't you afraid?" and all I could say, was, "yes, most of the time, but I don't let it stop me."
"I believe in my bones the cure for the ills of safety—and for most of the ills of the modern world—is to train for worst case scenarios. Not merely for the worst case which will probably never come to pass, but for the training itself."
For me, Sam, the money shot is the words "but for the training itself". I may (or maybe not!) have some slight differences with you about how much real danger (un-safety) is optimal to provide in such a training program, but words like challenge and hardship and struggle and strain definitely factor in to the design.
Your writing on this topic has, I believe, wide application to education, parenting, citizenship development, organizational development and other key areas of living. Well done! 👏
Thank you very much, Baird. I honestly do not implement much "real danger" into my training. I leave that aspect up to the mental training side of the house. It is certainly users choice, as I have quite a few friends who throw themselves in BASE jumping and every sort of dangerous situation they can find to get their fill. But the balance, for my part, is key.
Good deal. A reasonable harm prevention element will make this more acceptable to the parents of young children who are an important population for some good resilience training.
I find your focus on the opportunities we will lose as a result of our species-zombification to be so compelling. I sometimes muse that it would be hard to invent a more efficient way of dumbing down humanity and dulling our hard-earned ability to adapt and overcome than the screen suck. Epictetus has my attention these days, thanks to you. I am swimming, sometimes drowning in his thoughts. "I chase his thoughts like birds." I love your comment below on the three strands. There is something so liberating in taking "absolute, total, relentless pleasure in everything that can happen. All the good. All the bad. All the evil. Every possible outcome accepted with the most brutal bright-eyed acceptance." In this sense, every day is a wild and beautiful day. Every obstacle an opportunity to think and be creative. Every reverse is a chance to be fully our best self. My gratitude to you, Sam.
Just to add to the excellent suggestions, I recommend familiarizing with the concept “left of boom” and roll it into your lifestyle. Teach your kids an age-appropriate version.
Be aware of your surroundings. Pay attention to anomalous behavior. Rely on the hackles on your neck and listen to the small voice in your head.
Residents in the developed West have a tough time with the truth that we are each of us responsible for our own safety, and our police are mainly to apprehend perpetrators after the fact. Educate yourself on hardening your home for security, and digest some of the readily available and excellent materials on personal safety.
You've got a great gift for weaving in such compelling stories from real-world examples, where the philosophical architecture you are creating has been demonstrated, put to the harshest of tests, and found worthy.
I also appreciate that the narratives move us towards actions--as Paul writes in the comments, we immediately start thinking about the training--but at the same time, I feel perhaps even more compelled to reflect on the type of person I am striving to be; challenging us not just to consider what we can do to "train for worst case scenarios" but to be a person who "embrace[s] the mindset of danger without the danger itself".
I appreciate it, Dan. You are hitting on the epic blend of action and ethics, not only doing but being. I love the ancient world because the two were intertwined: the act of training had built in solitude and reflection so we knew what we valued and acted upon it. It is what I am trying to show through these comparisons. This is no longer given us and it is now an art form—and for some a necessity—to relearn it.
It is interesting how you brought up the worst case scenario in combat training and concluded that actual combat was not necessary. I started with worst case scenario training in business using the S.W.O.T. Analysis but adapting it to everyday situations.
So the Seal becometh the Frog-Man (LOL).. who refuses to sink and become bemired as the Bog-Man. The Bog Man is now admired as the Frog Man's Boogie Man proving the point that every man needs a boogie man to get him off his ass from time to some time. "You never know" https://youtu.be/mRG0PdVzNro?si=4xQgRFw6tVyOEnku&t=15
So the Seal becometh the Frog-Man (LOL).. who refuses to sink and become bemired as the Bog-Man. The Bog Man is now admired as the Frog Man's Boogie Man proving the point that every man needs a boogie man to get him off his ass from time to some time. "You never know" https://youtu.be/mRG0PdVzNro?si=4xQgRFw6tVyOEnku&t=15
This premise has been consistent in your writing and has inspired much thought. Thank you for keeping virtual pen to paper.
I think it would be interesting to hear what you have to say if the audience was a group of us who accepted wholly the premise of safety-danger-aliveness and the positive outcomes of action to train for these disaster scenarios.
What does this training that look like? Not squats in the gym or cliff diving, but the setting up of conditions that trigger the healthful reactions in the brain box.
And if you have written on that extensively and I haven’t seen it the shortfall is on my side. I’m intrigued by the sign in the jungle idea and would love to engage in that with like minded people.
Cheers
Paul, through both desire (the joy of trying to replicate a combat mode of mind) and need (autoimmune problems) I have built my life along this model. It is quite Spartan. I haven't written of this and I am honestly not sure how. I want to give your answer justice. I appreciate the feedback and I need some time to put together a coherent response.
Paul, I am still not quite sure the best way to answer this. It is the primary underlying mission of almost all of my essays. I am extremely skeptical of "how to" manuals or of giving concrete recommendations, as my hunch is this is an inner mission, but we can get close. One of the reasons I love Epictetus more than any other philosopher is his unwavering dedication to exploring worst case scenarios. I wrote in my essay last week that many of his quotes are never talked about, and there is a good reason for this—he accepts no boundaries on what the human mind is capable of in its pursuit of self-mastery. Let's bridge this to today. We have safety-danger-aliveness which you mentioned above and it is undoubtedly both a gift and a curse. To your point, squats and cliff diving may be fun, but they have zero correlation to cutting through safety-danger-aliveness and getting down to the core of the combat mode of mind I often explore. The only path of attaining this mind short of going to war is a mindset, what I call mode of mind. Combat is one. I study pre-state peoples and there is also a primal mode of mind I write about. The third is an Epictetian mode of mind. All three have a common thread, and it is this thread I love pulling one: an absolute, total, relentless pleasure in everything that can happen. All the good. All the bad. All the evil. Every possible outcome accepted with the most brutal bright-eyed acceptance. It is to live as if your back is against the wall and the last thing you have left is your choice to die well. This is what I mean when I say many Epictetus quotes are left in the lurch—they are so uncomfortable most people would not dream of leaning into them and structuring the mind around them every day. Hopefully this gives a decent answer to your question. I will probably start to circle more "practical" things in future essays. But I have been circling the problem more than solutions lately.
I have read your comment multiple times and have been thinking about this. Unsure myself if I have any cohesive insight. From my own experience aliveness seems to emerge from a mix of being exposed to danger while contributing to a group. Combat is a prime example. While exposed to danger you care for the existential health of others, regardless of rank. You fall asleep on post, you expose all to the danger. The intensity of that shared, existential contribution underlies the camaraderie that results.
Our current technical society abstracts out the existential, shared problem solving. We don't have access to the levers that control it (health outcomes, climate change, etc). All we can do is shout about it to a group that it so large it is just noise. Shouting into this technology created version of the void is the inverse of aliveness.
Cliff-diving provides the danger, but there is no real group problem there. Get your buddies together and agree not to cliff dive would be the most practical way to solve the existential element of that situation.
I wonder if we can address aliveness alone. Our marketing culture suggests we can. Perhaps the answer lies it creating a group that solves multiple decently complex problems together and by extension solves the larger existential problem of finding a group and not passing away alone.
Musings only. I very much appreciate your thoughts and writing and look forward to where you go next. Cheers
Decades ago as little boys we played with “toy guns” the attacks, ambushes and fire fights went on for hours. Unsupervised of course! “I got you Tommy!” “Nah you didn’t!” Endless Capture the Flag games in summer and in winter the grade school co-ed game played on the play ground snow banks of “smear the queer” (sorry if this offends, but in the day queer meant odd man out and had no reference to homosexuality.) of course this all played into a mind set, for this writer the logic and tactics taught at Marine Corps OCS/TBS/IOC would make perfect sense. The training started at age 7. Once indoctrinated and having led a rifle platoon whether in peace time or conflict your brain never shuts off. High ground, beaten zones, choke points never leave the mind. Standing at an intersection as the walk sign flashes “go” the brain says “ten hut” forrrwaaad march!” “You’re left foot first civilians your left foot first!”
It’s why Sam, when you got home and were living in NYC after the initial rush wore off you were antsy. There had to be more and there wasn’t for you. To the average civilian the big concern was what size Starbucks to buy, your brain was buzzing looking for the next bad guy around the next bad corner. It’s important to find solace but equally important to find the hurricanes in our brains and fight through them, the angst makes us stronger even in our dotage. Scared? damn right but that is the point. You’re alive, and learning to deal with fear is a mighty good skill to develope and use as needed and as confronted.
Keep it coming Sam, you are on to something!!
Charles, your messages are multi-layered and hit home. Your leap from childhood to training for war strikes me nothing but healthy—it reads like many of the pre-state peoples I write about. It sounds like my own childhood in the backwoods of PA until the dream came true down the road. I am grateful for the thoughts!
Roger all that.
Having raised children in the 1990s/2000s and wanted to protect them from the 'street' problems I had growing up, I can say the outcome would have been better if they had learned to engage with dangerous situations and think them through. Maybe not every situation I confronted, but at least some of them. That brain is such a freakin' powerful weapon when you are forced to think! Your spidey senses are enhanced and you can evade, your skateboard becomes a weapon, your cunning, your ability to improvise and connect, or to frighten the other...your legs learn how fast they can really run, lol. And then you learn even more when you reflect on it all. The kids who had it all safe get little if any of that.
Anthony, you are nailing a powerful cycle—those who know danger seek to prevent others from suffering from it, which is a noble and beautiful impulse, yet it is this same suffering in danger (to a limited extent) that helps us grow. This is where the balance becomes tricky. When it comes to raising kids, how much risk/danger is too much? At what point are we doing harm and not good?
Anyway, this quote "your skateboard becomes a weapon" is simply epic.
Thank you for the thoughts.
And as for the skateboard story...I will share it with you over beers sometime.. Aluminum. That's all I'm saying now😇. But the life skills....maaaaaan. the literature on trauma and resilience supports the Alaimo doctrine 1000%. With a new 'frame'/story and a few other factors, our hardships give us strength.
Haha I am here for it, Anthony.
If you can easily see the path of your life, all the way to the end, you're not doing it right.
Seeing all the way to the end sounds like the utopian dream for totalitarians everywhere. Ironically, by putting up the good fight, we "do it right."
I prefer laboriously finding my own path than mindlessly following the totalitarian's path. And I've got Robert Frost to vouch for my point of view.
p.s. Coincidentally, I've just started reading Eric Hoffer's The True Believer
Let's go. I hope you enjoy it. He has one of the most incredible minds for abstract thinking and aphorisms I have ever seen.
You are an enjoyable interlocutor Sam! As parents (or friends, mentors, or trainers, i guess it's the calculated 'let em figure it out'/'let them experience this' calculus. After an elementary school brawl in which i was seriously outmatched, I saw an adult watching the fight from a bench. It was my dad. 😜
So this is epic... your dad must be a character. That certainly fits the "let em figure it out" category.
thank you! it would be nice if more "reasonally normal people" could understand that seeing danger and being in danger are two separate issues. forty years ago, a woman traveled across two states to find me at the kitchen table of the business I owned to ask me, "aren't you afraid?" and all I could say, was, "yes, most of the time, but I don't let it stop me."
It is a profound distinction between seeing and being. Thank you for your story here, Thelma.
"I believe in my bones the cure for the ills of safety—and for most of the ills of the modern world—is to train for worst case scenarios. Not merely for the worst case which will probably never come to pass, but for the training itself."
For me, Sam, the money shot is the words "but for the training itself". I may (or maybe not!) have some slight differences with you about how much real danger (un-safety) is optimal to provide in such a training program, but words like challenge and hardship and struggle and strain definitely factor in to the design.
Your writing on this topic has, I believe, wide application to education, parenting, citizenship development, organizational development and other key areas of living. Well done! 👏
Thank you very much, Baird. I honestly do not implement much "real danger" into my training. I leave that aspect up to the mental training side of the house. It is certainly users choice, as I have quite a few friends who throw themselves in BASE jumping and every sort of dangerous situation they can find to get their fill. But the balance, for my part, is key.
Good deal. A reasonable harm prevention element will make this more acceptable to the parents of young children who are an important population for some good resilience training.
Sitting in my office digesting this, Awesome work Sam.
I'm grateful, Enda.
I find your focus on the opportunities we will lose as a result of our species-zombification to be so compelling. I sometimes muse that it would be hard to invent a more efficient way of dumbing down humanity and dulling our hard-earned ability to adapt and overcome than the screen suck. Epictetus has my attention these days, thanks to you. I am swimming, sometimes drowning in his thoughts. "I chase his thoughts like birds." I love your comment below on the three strands. There is something so liberating in taking "absolute, total, relentless pleasure in everything that can happen. All the good. All the bad. All the evil. Every possible outcome accepted with the most brutal bright-eyed acceptance." In this sense, every day is a wild and beautiful day. Every obstacle an opportunity to think and be creative. Every reverse is a chance to be fully our best self. My gratitude to you, Sam.
Just to add to the excellent suggestions, I recommend familiarizing with the concept “left of boom” and roll it into your lifestyle. Teach your kids an age-appropriate version.
Be aware of your surroundings. Pay attention to anomalous behavior. Rely on the hackles on your neck and listen to the small voice in your head.
Thank you Eric. I am well versed in left of boom/bang, it is a good philosophy for life.
This "spidey-sense" you're talking about it truly enjoying to build out over time.
Thanks for jumping in.
My pleasure.
Residents in the developed West have a tough time with the truth that we are each of us responsible for our own safety, and our police are mainly to apprehend perpetrators after the fact. Educate yourself on hardening your home for security, and digest some of the readily available and excellent materials on personal safety.
Stay physically fit.
In this modern day world of comfort, we must make the decision to opt out of the trap of convenience. Great read!
Well said, Mac, I appreciate it!
Just love the engagement Sam.
I am blessed.
You've got a great gift for weaving in such compelling stories from real-world examples, where the philosophical architecture you are creating has been demonstrated, put to the harshest of tests, and found worthy.
I also appreciate that the narratives move us towards actions--as Paul writes in the comments, we immediately start thinking about the training--but at the same time, I feel perhaps even more compelled to reflect on the type of person I am striving to be; challenging us not just to consider what we can do to "train for worst case scenarios" but to be a person who "embrace[s] the mindset of danger without the danger itself".
I appreciate it, Dan. You are hitting on the epic blend of action and ethics, not only doing but being. I love the ancient world because the two were intertwined: the act of training had built in solitude and reflection so we knew what we valued and acted upon it. It is what I am trying to show through these comparisons. This is no longer given us and it is now an art form—and for some a necessity—to relearn it.
It is interesting how you brought up the worst case scenario in combat training and concluded that actual combat was not necessary. I started with worst case scenario training in business using the S.W.O.T. Analysis but adapting it to everyday situations.
It is a powerful tool, Barry, which you know well. The principles are powerful and applicable to every aspect of life. It is also simply enjoyable.
So the Seal becometh the Frog-Man (LOL).. who refuses to sink and become bemired as the Bog-Man. The Bog Man is now admired as the Frog Man's Boogie Man proving the point that every man needs a boogie man to get him off his ass from time to some time. "You never know" https://youtu.be/mRG0PdVzNro?si=4xQgRFw6tVyOEnku&t=15
So the Seal becometh the Frog-Man (LOL).. who refuses to sink and become bemired as the Bog-Man. The Bog Man is now admired as the Frog Man's Boogie Man proving the point that every man needs a boogie man to get him off his ass from time to some time. "You never know" https://youtu.be/mRG0PdVzNro?si=4xQgRFw6tVyOEnku&t=15