2025-03-08 Ending Stoicism

What I Did

As of today, it is the 6-month anniversary since I lasted interacted with Victor, Tori, or Mia.

The consequences of the September event have slowly worked to ending my career as an insurance agent, and I desperately hope this is the last of the punishment I must endure.

Please excuse another long post. I have been progressing forward in self-discovery, and it has left me further and further broken. My intent is to explain my brokenness here, in the hopes that it may elucidate some truths for some people.

Since it didn’t take much effort, I have made a few new essays, for whatever that’s worth:

• The Machine Gods
• Christians and Intellectual Property

What I’ve Learned

What I need to talk about requires some context. Specifically, it requires understanding the Stoic philosophy.

Beyond its philosophy, Stoicism represents a cultural tradition, a way of life, and has a religion hidden inside it. If you want more detail, feel free to peruse Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca.

For reasons of brevity, I’ll try to avoid giving tons of details beyond the Stoic philosophy. I’ll be speaking broadly enough that I’m getting the gist, but would probably make a devout Stoic angry (even though they’d probably be unable to admit that, but we’ll get there).

So, to begin, we’ll use a simple question that philosophers make not-so-simple: “How should we live our life?”

1. A Stoic would say that the best way to live our life is to conform to what is real and true.
2. This would mean living by virtue and shunning vice. Vices are things that aren’t natural, while virtues are generally good things.
3. Our feelings are often not conforming to real or true things since they are, in effect, low-resolution beliefs we hold about the world.
4. The rational feelings we have about the world are fine in their place (i.e., when they’re correct).
5. However, we must manage feelings when they’re clearly irrational.
6. However, clearly irrational feelings must be put in alignment with virtue, and Stoicism prescribes methods for doing this.

The Stoic Emotional Management system is relatively easy to understand, but very difficult to do.

The dominant way to deal with irrational feelings is to add new information that essentially renders those feelings inapplicable.

• If it’s crying over loss, then the perspective must be changed to interpreting the experience as a gain.
• If it’s anger over an injustice, the view should become peace in accepting the state of reality.

However, under Stoicism any emotional attachment to the world around us is risky because it may create irrational feelings. So, we can connect with the ideas of those things instead.

• While you may like ice cream, there might not be ice cream, or it may melt, and that would cause an irrational feeling relative to the many other things your feelings should be attached to.
• If you love your mother, she may be able to betray or hurt you, or may die, so attach yourself to the idea of motherhood or the essence of nurture.
• If you like your dog, attach yourself to the qualities you like that your dog expresses.

Among these standards, crying isn’t outright forbidden in Stoicism, but must be subordinate to Stoic principles (i.e., you can only cry about the right things). The same goes for any other expression of feeling.

The implied consequence of this approach leads to a mythologically inhuman tolerance to all forms of pain and hardship:

• Epictetus was rumored to be expressionless when his master broke his leg.
• I remember an anecdote indicating a Roman head of state was entirely expressionless as his home was sacked, then telling his wife to compose herself when she shed a single tear.

At the same time, the myth doesn’t stand up to the more prevalent reality. But we’ll get to that.

Prologue: My Stoicism

I never asked to be a Stoic, and I had adopted the philosophy long before I had even read about it.

In the home I was raised in, I never learned or understood love. In that void, my only stable father figure was in how computers reliably behaved and responded.

In many ways, an anthropomorphized computer is a bit like a Stoic:

• Has no feelings, and only understands information.
• Lives by truth, and never lies, even when it fails.
• Persists towards its purpose until becomes physically incapable to do so.
• An alien perception for how most of humanity processes information, except for the few who seek to understand it.

My undiagnosed autism only magnified my limited social skills, and I can say that my “culture of origin” was more affiliated with computers than other people.

However, Stoicism wasn’t the only contender for my spongy value processing education. Another competitor to this framework of thought arose as well for me through regular Christian church attendance throughout my childhood.

Abstraction A: Christianity vs. Stoicism

It’s safe to say that while the small details can differ dramatically, certain decisions in life are better than other things:

• Financial planners disagree on how much risk you should take, but they all agree that saving money is better than living above your means.
• Every success guide advocates working hard, though they’ll argue on how much and where you should put your effort.
• Nutritionists will come to blows over fat intake, but they’ll all agree that the Twinkies-and-ramen-only diet is not well-rounded (or is, depending on how we use that word).

And, the same holds true for the not-entirely-differing values of Christianity and Stoicism:

The “what” is mostly the same, but underneath the surface, when we dive into the philosophies themselves, the motivations are vastly different between how Stoics and Christians behave. But we’ll get to that.

Implementation 1: My Stoic Synthesis

When I was nineteen years old, in 2006, I fell off a skateboard. My right foot dislocated, breaking the tibia in the process and left the foot dangling off the bone.

Beyond the initial scream of pain, I was expressionless through the entire ambulance ride, and I only grunted loudly when they had to pull my foot out, rotate it back, then shove it to where it should approximately go.

People were stunned and amazed at my resolve, but shutting down my feelings suppressed any naturally-occurring feelings as well that would have elicited what could be called “human connection”. Suffering is one of the greatest experiences to draw us together, but I had been programmed to have nothing to do with it.

I saw I had nearly ascended to the mountaintop of Stoicism through that experience, and I realized within a few months there was nothing left for me at the top.

Within 6 months, I was walking again, and I had a near-complete recovery. Inside, though, I saw I needed to make a change to my value system.

After plenty of thinking and research, I had a highly intellectual encounter with Jesus, where I realized the God of the Bible was the correct path. I conceded that His prescribed life was the right way to live.

Unfortunately, even though I had become a Christian, my old Stoic mindset was still in force. It was all I had known up to that point, after all.

Implementation 2: Shadow Stoicism

For all my life, I’ve always felt a sense of urgency, with a motivation to endlessly work, driven by the opposing beliefs that I was worthless and that my talents were severely important. Even my recreational activities like video games or reading stories were emotionally interpreted as “work”.

I was endlessly living in the future, with no consideration for present troubles or capitalizing on positive experiences from the past. I was unknowingly maintaining Stoic approaches and disciplines while never labeling it as such.

Eventually, starting around 2009, My outward successes eventually created a feedback loop of perpetual mania interspersed with comparatively small lapses of burnout when the depression and self-hatred became too severe to withstand.

If I had encountered a therapist that wasn’t a Big Pharma drug dealer, I had essentially found a way to use cPTSD and adjustment disorder to become addicted to work, and most of my AdequateLife essays (and maybe most of my essays in general) came while in this self-imposed dissociative fugue.

If we mix this with deficient conflict management skills inherited from my mother and the generally controlling and impatient disposition of my father, this was guaranteed to go…somewhere.

This state of “inhumanity” was further empowered and puffed up by a significant dose of education in many domains. More education is the conduit for more power, which fed the continued mania.

Implementation 3: My Stoic Dialectic

With this philosophy established, my career went all over the place. I literally could feel no empathy with anyone, but was a dependable worker with an unshakeable moral compass. Looking back, my storied work experience history would probably have been half its size if I had been more attuned to my feelings.

With a tenuous work situation, there wasn’t much hope of developing a safe social life. While I developed friend-making skills, it was always in service of the above-stated “higher order”, and I never permitted to simply have a simple human connection.

I was determined to accomplish what I thought was God’s will, but was clueless on how to go about it or what that will even was. At this point, Christianity says “wait and ask God”, but Stoics say “do what you can”, and I chose the latter thinking it was the former. While I unveiled a few significant mysteries, I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with my entire existence.

And, until recently, my relationship with God has been utterly pathetic. I lived by the axiom of “God helps those who help themselves”, and drove forward in a fit of obsession, with the belief that my misery could be offset by devotion to following God’s precepts. I know now that that’s a short-term solution, fully remedied by devotion to following God.

Even in my asocial disposition and obsession, God had grace on me, and He brought Tori and me together in 2014.

I didn’t consider it a miracle at the time, but there’s simply no way a volatile non-careered almost broke organic farmhand in New York would be able to reconnect with a failed art school student working a dead-end job at at tchotchke shop after a failed first encounter without His intervention, let alone hold us together through bouts of homelessness and extreme poverty for over a decade in a secularized society that advocates divorce over trivial matters. The only inductive conclusion is that He picked her and put us together.

Of course, that’s not what I thought at the time, and I had attributed it to my conformity to the “Logos”. My “Stoic-Christian inland empire“, I thought, had doubled in size, and had quadrupled by 2020.

Abstraction B: Problems with Dialecticizing Stoicism and Christianity

The call to Christian living is fundamentally difficult:

• Show legitimate love to the needy, irrespective of how they got there.
• Make no enemies, but live peaceably and graciously with everyone.
• Desire nothing but spiritual things, especially for others’ moral redemption and salvation.
• If someone injures you, turn the other cheek and let them harm you further.

The trouble is that this is in direct defiance of human nature’s baseline:

• Show legitimate love to the needy who deserve it, which is based on how they got there.
• Only make enemies you can subdue or control, and live peaceably and graciously with those you can’t.
• Desire whatever you feel like, especially if it serves your self-interest.
• If someone injures you, mitigate losses and find ways to get even.

It is entirely possible to live virtuously for Christ and without Christ, for a small duration. Eventually, however, our habit-wired minds require some sort of feedback that tells us we’re doing things correctly.

• How do you know you’re actually helping others if they never tell you?
• Where do you find comfort when your enemies outnumber and overpower you?
• Why would abstinence from any vice be advantageous?
• What benefit is all the self-sacrifice?

This ends up sidling into the Men Without Chests imagery portrayed by Lewis. There is something the soul can’t seem to articulate that it hates, and the journey of self-sacrifice becomes a horrifying death march, with those who partake in it finding some solace in their own self-abasement.

To push into becoming a better person without God’s direct involvement requires a tremendous amount of willpower, and it will end up yielding several potential outcomes:

1. Bitterness – in finding little value for the sacrifices we make, we become angry at everything that doesn’t conform to what we expected.
2. Religiousness – in finding little inward value for the sacrifices we make, we direct our energies outward to gain others’ approval.
3. Failure – the most likely (and eventual) possibility, where we regress and behave selfishly, instantly undoing long streaks of good behavior and thought.

All of these are hideous abominations:

• I can attest that I have lived in #1 for far too long, with hatred of everything and everyone that didn’t conform to my own dialectical understanding of the world.
• The Nietzschean Übermensch is an evolution of #2, but somehow implies that being publicly miserable is a noble thing. In truth, it’s smart people who are repackaging and marketing #1.
• If self-hatred isn’t within #2, narcissistic behaviors will likely emerge (like I had mentioned previously), and can become narcissism if we identify too heavily with any successes that develop as a consequence of feeding our ego.
• #3 is the best option, since it forces someone to reconsider their philosophy, and is where everyone will stop, irrespective of whether they wish to admit it. Sadly, I’m certain some people go to the grave never admitting their failures.

Implementation 4: My Stoic Fall

I have a running theory that God’s modus operandi is to topple all kingdoms, and often in clever ways that couldn’t be anticipated.

Pathetically, my empire was the kingdom of a “self-made man”, as the product of finding identity in an upbringing that never provided one. I was afraid that affiliation to anyone could give power to someone who could misuse it, or that I’d swear allegiance to the wrong group and waste my time.

Unfortunately, our egos are made of more powerful stuff than anything under the sun, so we can easily frame ourselves to be gods over the physical domains we encounter, and then one small step for man to make a giant leap into assuming the same for the spiritual.

Starting in 2017, but most articulately in 2021, God worked my circumstances to break my Stoic philosophy by systematically pushing on its limits.

• It was traumatic to leave my infant son when he was 2 months old, then come back when he was 4 months, then leave again in a week. And yet, the utilitarian mindset said that it was noble because it paid the bills.
• The entire experience of COVID-19, especially my tendencies to obsess about what I had catastrophized, left me scarred. And yet, I dredged the secrets of the universe in GainedInSite, so I should have had some comfort that things would work out.
• Around 2020, I read the book about Linus Torvalds’ beginnings (the nerd who made Linux, and that’s GNU/Linux to the nerdier nerds), and was deeply struck by how he basically made the whole thing because it was fun! What is this “fun” and where can I have some?
• Sometime around 2019, but especially as 2021 passed through, my relationship with Tori became stagnant. We maintained a transactional, effective marriage relationship, but our relationship has represented something more like coworkers than lovers or even friends.
• In 2021, I had been living according to the duty set before me: to rightly discipline my children according to what was correct. I believed the universe would indemnify me in my noble actions, especially if I fully reported it to the police. Natural Law would protect me, of course! It was farthest from my or Tori’s mind that I’d receive a felony conviction.

The consequences of what happened in 2006, as well as 2021, have been well-orchestrated by God. Because of how American reputation management works, I have been given a tremendous and unfair social mark that makes me an inherent risk to any HR tranching system. That Scarlet F has been a hot branding of shame ever since that has tested how far I was capable of persisting on ego alone.

And, even then, God shone through. I wasn’t emotionally ready to adopt a blue collar career, so He placed me in an insurance role working with the absolute worst drivers in Iowa. All I had to do was to be patient in that role, and natural law would indemnify me.

Yet, that wasn’t the case. The latest event of September 2024 showed how utterly weak I have become in what I envisioned was strength. Looking back, I can see the devolution was borne of multiple factors, as if I were watching a murder scene:

1. The particular job I held in insurance, as a product of getting any role that would hire me, delivered a routine parade of dysfunctional customers.
2. I believed I could segment work and home life, even though Tori had become utterly exhausted through the daily regimen of homemaking two children with almost no support network.
3. I leaned into absolutely nothing for the support or rebuilding of my soul, and believed myself to be capable of indefinitely using my willpower and attitude to press through the difficulties.

The prolonged state of self-sufficiency, mixed with zero resupplying through others’ good faith, delivered me to a state of frustration, desperation, and impulsivity. In that state, I struck the woman I promised to love and cherish for the rest of my life. I destroyed the institution that I had devoted my life to building, and know that I’ve deeply harmed the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known.

Underneath it all, I needed God’s healing, but that required me to accept the Holy Spirit’s work, which meant I had to accept inadequacy. As virtuous as its mask, I have lived a selfish life. To quote Dostoevsky, my worst sin is that I have destroyed and betrayed myself for nothing.

Abstraction C: The Current Synthesis

I am now separated from Tori, Victor, and Mia. God lent them to me, and in my mismanagement He took them from me. Being freshly unemployed pales in comparison, though I no longer have the escaping salve of a routine workday to console the emptiness I have created for myself.

And, on a spiritual level, I have betrayed God Himself. My ambition was to somehow merge the realm of what I had known with what I was called to do. 1 Peter 2 alludes to God choosing His people and sactifying them, and I never paid attention to the fact that the wisdom of the world only runs parallel to the wisdom of God on its surface.

You may not agree, but I’ll provide an example with Proverbs 3:29 (“Do not plan evil against your neighbor, who dwells trustingly beside you.”)

• The world’s view – This is not good because they may harm you back when you’re not paying attention.
• God’s view – This is not good because it is not treating them the way you wish to be treated.

I have trasngressed the wisdom of the Most High and trivialized it as having relevance alongside other truths, similar to Mars Hill. It was common information, set parallel to everyone else’s, as if it could compare and hold up.

Like the Philistines in 1 Samuel 5, I have been paying the price for not paying attention. Tori called me a “Christian atheist”, said that I “never listen to others and only self-lead”, and told me to be a “spiritual leader”, and I now see what she meant, though the damage has clearly been done now.

The worst of the brokenness is likely complete, unless God wishes to bring more suffering on me or Tori refuses to forgive me. My pathetic little kingdom is shattered, and all I wish to do at this point is swear fealty to the God of Love who destroyed it.

Abstraction D: The Final Renouncement

We are not our thoughts. Our thoughts are a discomposed mess of our perceptions, others’ statements, things we think others said, feelings about all of the previous-stated, and further commentary we make on all of that. This means that any meaning derived in thought management must simply exist as as tool, and never as an end until itself. Stoicism’s techniques, therefore, can’t have inherent value worth following.

But, even as a reliable framework for living well, the Stoic philosophy breaks apart on purely logical grounds:

1. All self-defined thought depends on environmental experience to make them happen. That environment is not us directly, so we can only accurately say our thoughts are remixes of that world around us.
2. Further, all thoughts have an inherent volatility. If we define each thought as a connection of neurons, no two thoughts are ever truly the same in the same way that a river is never truly the same each time you look at it.
3. While Stoicism fights against the Hedonists, it uses the same tools, and is literally doing the same abstracted thing as the Hedonists or any other philosophy: it defines values in our mind, then finds peace through those values.
4. In essence, Stoic thinking is trying to find peace in the midst of a storm by calling the storm irrelevant, then finding meaning in carrying onward despite of the legitimate things that God originally designed us to feel within the mind.
5. All of this is especially bad because we can derive some amount of meaning through the efforts we invest into the self-discipline, which makes it nearly impossible to tear down unless the person consents that they’re inadequate for the task.

The effort to develop indifference to outside events is absolutely against the things that make us human, and the effort to persist in it beyond the signals we receive is as inhumane as swapping organic body parts for synthetic. In some ways, our worship of our ego as we subjugate it to our wills predate our brave new world of machine gods.

While hardship in life will arise, our feelings about that hardship are a perfectly healthy thing to have. I’ve learned very recently that feelings are like thoughts: they pass through, and we are responsible to simply untether our wills from them while acknowledging they exist. Even when they are severe, they truly can’t hurt us and only have control over us to the degree we ignore them.

Making bad responses to our hardship can utterly destroy us. However, we far too easily lump our feelings in with the unpleasant pain of our hardships. The end of it is an incessant hypersensitivity to all adverse feelings if we don’t keep the aperture as open as it can go.

In many ways, everything a Stoic philosophy provides that is of any value can be summed up in the Serenity Prayer. To imply that Virtue is the highest good is to miss that the virtue is subordinate to a being of Virtue. How is it advantageous to live by Kindness if you have no connection with anyone else? What good is it to work to Justice, without knowing the God who made Justice? Indifference is the least human a person can be, and robots and computers perform that indifference better than we could ever hope to achieve.

All of this serves to destroy a few truly horrific tenets of Stoicism:

1. Stoics assert that the truth is entirely knowable if someone works hard enough to find it (i.e., Kataleptic impressions). This is simply not true, and it is the nature of humanity to be perpetually and incessantly incorrect.
2. Indifference to what we experience is not only bad for our soul, but also devastating for any connection with others as well. This will be difficult for me to abandon, since my culture of origin involved so much computer use, but I trust God is faithful to heal.
3. Stoics teach that the only evil is ignorance, and that virtue is the greatest thing to aspire for.
4. However, our first sin came through desiring to know morality! The pursuit of truth with no buffer is a raw generator of evil, such as the Harvard University Hope Experiment.
5. Even virtue has dangers. Virtue of its own accord is not virtue. It must be subordinate to loving someone. To love virtue itself is to love a thing, which has no value to expanding the human experience, and on par with loving a 1966 Ford Thunderbird.

Loving God, then loving the path of virtue He establishes, is a rewarding journey. Loving virtue of itself is a lonely journey. Jesus promises a contrasted framework of existence empowered by the Holy Spirit:

• The peace in Stoicism is self-defined and self-created. The peace in Christianity is through the work of the Holy Spirit.
• Everything that could be found in Stoic thinking is abundantly available inside Christian doctrine, including spiritual exercises and the value of virtue.
• The hope in Stoicism is nonexistent. The hope in Christ is of a legitimate friendship with Jesus, deep familial connections with the Body of Christ, and an eternal home.

Implementation 5: The Aftermath

I am now at peace as a child of God, bought and paid for twice over. I can legitimately empathize with the Apostle Paul, and all my wealth of information and understanding is irrelevant within the scope of the spiritual inheritance I am being directed to assume.

One of the greatest comforts I’ve seen is in fully grasping Paul’s life: he devoted himself to the Talmud while persecuting the God he thought he followed, and God was gracious enough to give him a ministry that not only prevented him falling into old habits (since Gentiles really don’t give a flying Dutchman about the Talmud), but has been memorialized by being the vessel for just shy of half the New Testament.

Tori followed in that small empire I was building, and if He hadn’t smashed it the way He has, my children would have followed an ancient, worthless heresy.

My deepest hope, at this point, is that she will escape the trap of ego that Stoicism ensnares us toward. She is responsible to steer herself away from what I had taught. While my personal growth means I may be qualified to lead her again, that also requires that she devote her faithfulness to God foremost.

And, irrespective of what happens with our family of four, God has taken worse and made better of it, which is what I hold onto for the rest of this season. He has struck me, and this family and criminal history may be my mark for life.

But, He has the full authority to make me whole again, and I submit to whatever He wants.

What I’m Feeling

The above gives me tremendous joy. I have always submitted to “whatever may happen” instead of “whatever He wants”, and there is a tremendous solace that comes in renouncing control to a loving, patient God instead of an uncaring and unfeeling universe.

To make any clarity of what I’m feeling requires context to the subject we’re talking about:

• I feel uneasy about where my career goes next, but hopeful that I’ll find a decent fit that feeds my natural talent for technical skills.
• I’m absolutely disgusted at myself over what has happened, and regret that it has, but also hopeful that I can reconcile with Tori and the kids soon.
• With respect to my church community, I’m elated that they’ve been available and supportive. It’s all the troubles of my past, but I’d rather have it this way because I can feel that people are actually here for me and want to be around me.

And, for those who are curious, any anger I could hold against her originates in her decisions driven by how I trained her.

• I gave her a model for complete self-sufficiency and autonomy, as foolish as it has led both of us. I fear she hasn’t sought any help more than she’s needed, which means she may be a thread away from a catastrophe at this point with nobody to help her.
• I’ve empowered her to have a paranoia of the aptitude of the State, such as the surveillance culture of America. I never gave the assurance that we as individuals don’t fundamentally matter to the State, and my fear is that she may be living in hiding out of a terror that a bank card payment could lead to a DHS caseworker coming in to wherever she’s at to take away her children. She and I don’t really matter when there are worse people out there.
• My harshness has been the reason why she has felt it has been fitting to leave me completely in the dark this entire time, irrespective of what I may feel. I regret what I have lived under, and wish earnestly to rectify it, but don’t currently have any way to do so.

Of course, this responsibility makes me feel tremendous grief, knowing that the leadership I was granted has been badly managed.

I’m sure I have many other feelings if I more closely consider my situation presently, but it is too emotionally exhausting for me to explore, let alone articulate, when I have no knowledge of what benefit it may even yield.

In short, I am less miserable, and slowly improving. I have grieved the loss, and have continuous hope that He will heal everything about this circumstance. I don’t have much anxiety about the state of my children because He serves as a “father to the fatherless” with them in this season.

What I’m Doing Now

I’m still waiting for most beautiful woman I’ve known to reappear with the two amazing children we share.

• If she does, she’ll have to summon the courage to directly reach out to the Polk County Clerk of Court, either by calling or walking in, to have the NCO removed.
• She would need to reach out to Des Moines Fellowship if she needed any support.

I’m presently unemployed right now, but currently looking to pursue a mechanic role.

For the first time in my life, I’m actually trusting God, which means my most significant task right now is to learn patience and peace in my ever-changing uncertainties. I’m not doing nothing these days, but the to-do list gets rather small when you’re not sure what tomorrow brings.