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April 3rd
DECEIVED AND DIVIDED“Circumstances are what deceive us—you must be discerning in
them. We embrace evil before good. We desire the opposite of
what we once desired. Our prayers are at war with our prayers, our
plans with our plans.”
—SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 45.6woman says she wants to meet a nice guy and get married—yet she
spends all her time around jerks. A man says that he wishes he could find a
great job, but he hasn’t actually bothered to do the looking. Business
executives try to pursue two different strategies at the same time—
straddling it’s called—and they are shocked when they succeed at neither.
All of these people, just as is often true for us too, are deceived and
divided. One hand is working against the other. As Martin Luther King Jr.
once put it, “There is something of a civil war going on within all of our
lives,” a war inside each individual between the good parts of their soul and
the bad.
The Stoics say that that war is usually a result of our conflicting desires,
our screwed-up judgments or biased thoughts. We don’t stop and ask: OK,
what do I really want? What am I actually after here? If we did, we’d
notice the contradictory and inconsistent wishes that we have. And then
we’d stop working against ourselves.