so no verse today. instead, prose.
as im writing this im thinking about what makes stoicism appeal so much to bitcoiners. one reason, as i will mention, is that i think there's an aspect to bitcoin culture that wants to understand the individual human action as small piece in the economic machine.
Nothing is more pathetic than people who run around in circles, “delving into the things that lie beneath” and conducting investigations into the souls of the people around them, never realizing that all you have to do is to be attentive to the power inside you and worship it sincerely...
i feel this applies to a lot of the bickering you see on other platforms/protocols. i admit, i am guilt of it. not all are cut from the cloth of stoicism, nor are they capable of this type of introspection, are they? keep it simple, focus on what you do best, and try to tune out what you dont need. that's how i interpret this
To worship it is to keep it from being muddied with turmoil and becoming aimless and dissatisfied with nature—divine and human. What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us. And our pity too, sometimes, for its inability to tell good from bad—as terrible a blindness as the kind that can’t tell white from black.
whether you appreciate or worship a divine, All Powerful, Omniscience, Self, Univserse, or what have you, what i think he is saying is to keep a reverence for the incomprehensible. though i don't claim to always do this, i believe there is usually something to be said for revering that which is beyond human comprehension, in whatever form that may be
the following section i understand as a reflection on our relative smallness, death, the universality of human life ... and i dont believe this is to undercut the multi-facetedness of human life and experience, but rather to be a reminder of the fact that we are the same in our smallness
besides this revelation about having reverence for the eternal smallness of the Self, nothing unites an entire planet of individuals like Bitcoin, where everyone (node runners, governments, billionaires) is equally 'small' when compared to the immutability of the bitcoin network, but where smallness doesn't diminish ones agency or potential to make an impact
Even if you’re going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have?
Remember two things:
i. that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period;
ii. that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.