So it’s pretty much over now. What a fun little project this has been.
You know, when I originally planned to do my UROP, I assumed that I would only need to work around twenty hours a week at my normal job and then devote the rest of my time to the project. However, this was not the case. My girlfriend/ roommate opted to take summer courses this year, shifting much of the burden of keeping us fed and housed onto myself.
Although this seems unfortunate at the outset, it really gave me a different perspective on the project as a whole. As Marcus Aurelius said, “nothing happens to a man which he is not meant by nature to bear.” So I guess I was meant to do this project under pressure, and indeed, if I am to accept the Stoic proposition that everything is divinely ordained by nature to happen the way it happens then I must accept that this project was supposed to be done in a less than comfortable living situation. I feel like the Stoic would look at that happenstance and smile, seeing the intricate and subtle ways that we are led along by nature and the gods.
One of the key stoic messages is that life is, in general, a daily struggle to find happiness, shaped by our outlook on the world and how we react to external events and stimuli.
I can’t help but chuckle at the notion of a scholastic project on stoicism having to compete with the dreary drudgery that is working for Walmart Stores inc.; both are time consuming activities vying for the time of a young man in the fleeting months of summer. Here I see the dichotomy of intellectual pursuits to find happiness and contemplate life’s finer points hindered by the difficulty of living in a modernized society where the forty hour work week comes standard and the bills flow in endlessly, mechanized and mobilized against us, eternally wearing down the walls of cash we are forced to build and rebuild around ourselves to stay afloat.
However, I see this as a powerful backdrop to the Stoic’s project. Indeed, as it is often said, death and taxes are unavoidable, and while the ancient sages of the past took to the task of accepting death, something they personally encountered much more frequently than we of the modern era, I think the task of the 21st century Stoic is to find peace in both death and debt.
So we must strive forth, until our bodies will no longer carry us, and never let the invisible and ever shifting numbers that make up our combined and individual debt slow us down, even for a moment.
