Today, I’m excited to share a guest post from one of my new favorite writers on Substack, Sam Alaimo of What then? He is a former Navy SEAL, Columbia University graduate, entrepreneur, and writer whose work centers on the human condition.
Sam’s experiences in war, combined with his study of philosophy and human nature, have given him a unique perspective on resilience, hardship, and meaning. His writing challenges readers to look beyond comfort and convenience and consider what our ancestors, warriors, and ancient philosophers can teach us about being human.
“τί οὖν” or “What then?” was a question Epictetus repeatedly used to examine the ideas he wrestled with. Sam’s respect for his favorite philosopher runs so deep that he paid a graduate student to teach him Greek so he could read Epictetus in his original tongue.
After reading this outstanding essay, I encourage you to subscribe to What then? for more writing from Sam that will challenge how you view adversity in the pursuit of a meaningful life.
Here is Sam Alaimo of What then?:
Civilization is strange. We removed the burden of nature only to find a far greater burden—the burden of freedom from nature.
We can see this truth in a civilizational malady everywhere we look. But most of all, when we turn our gaze within, we see it in ourselves. It comes in two parts. First, a chronic desire for the next moment: the next vacation, promotion, phone, or blissful image in our skull of a perfect future, and all we need to do to earn it is be miserable just a little while longer… or so we tell ourselves. And second, to keep this desire active, the malady demands a willful blindness to a cosmic truth—what we are seeking over there already exists right here.
Let us look at this from a boots on the ground perspective.
Eating is fascinating because it can be viewed in a number of ways: the mere ingestion of calories, a mindless animalistic impulse, or as the art of seeing the entirety of the universe concealed within the granularity of a bit of taste.
I see this human malady operative within myself, so as an antidote to it, I ask a question while eating: What is my experience while eating this? We keep a Household Diary in the kitchen, a daily log of field observations, in which we write down one or two sentences about something small—yet epic—from our day in and around the house. The act of stopping and putting ink to paper cuts everything else away but the singular object of our focus for the briefest of moments. It might be the antics of a mourning dove or a fox, the various acts of mutiny our mutt likes to experiment with, or the simple act of eating. I reread one from a few days ago in which I compared the taste of two different types of grapes. It struck me that once I took the concept a step further, my mind turned to one of my favorite quotes from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. With it, our civilizational malady can be seen from a more Stoic angle.
Cotton Candy grapes taste light and bright. They remind me of the total inner release of control of skydiving through cumulonimbus clouds which temporarily blind us to the Earth hurtling towards us at one hundred twenty miles an hour. They turn my mind to the question of release. What is it, exactly? If we can release control in one life-and-death domain, why can we not release control in each of the smaller domains make up daily life? I am suddenly able to see civilization from outside the limitations of its boundaries.
Moon Drop grapes, on the other hand, are aggressive. I see a pre-state hunter lathered in a mixture of charcoal and pig’s blood stalking through cobalt blue waterfalls, feet silently heel-to-toing through lime green ferns. Biting a Moon Drop grape in half reveals that roughly one millimeter in from its wine-black exoderm are vibrant purple veins that gently fade into a translucent center. It is the most violently subtle assertion of beauty I have seen. I feel as though eating this grape is a privilege.
And yet… the astronomical difference between these two types of grapes is as nothing compared to the difference between the grapes and everything else we could be thinking about as we eat them.
Epictetus hit on this theme nearly two thousand years ago. In standard Epictetus fashion, he asks himself a rhetorical question a luckless new student might ask. He then answers it with his characteristic—and yet compassionate—brutality:
“When, then, shall I see Athens once more and the Acropolis?” Poor man, are you not satisfied with what you are seeing every day? Have you anything finer or greater to look at than the sun, the moon, the stars, the whole earth, the sea? And if you really understand Him that governs the universe, and bear Him about within you, do you yet yearn for bits of stone and a pretty rock?”
What is Epictetus telling us? That our desire to be somewhere else is in fact a confession we are not content to be ourselves. That we possess millions of sensory nerves designed to attune us to every subtle shift in the wind, micro inflection in a child’s speech, and nuance of the taste of a fig, and yet we consistently use this same extraordinary capacity to invent the most ingenious and self-destructive grievances imaginable.
What, then, follows?
It seems we are born with a simple choice: we may make of ourselves slaves to relative comparisons, or we can choose to be free men and women in obedience to the creed of absolute awe.
Take relative comparisons: We are physically in this immediate sensory world, but mentally we are far, far away in some abstract world that does not exist. We want to travel and lay eyes on “bits of stone and a pretty rock,” which is how Epictetus described Athens, and yet we care nothing that we are standing below the moon and stars and can hold in our palms a bundle of figs or grapes off a vine. We crave to bring our vision of the future to reality, and yet once we get it, suddenly it is worthless, and it becomes a mere stepping stone to a better vision of the future. It is a bitter irony that it is a vision we may never even live to see.
Is this a life in accordance with nature? Or are those who are obsessed with seeing Athens the same as those who are most terrified of sitting alone in a quiet room? Is this a love of beauty? Or is this merely a flight from the self?
Take absolute awe. We see the universe contained within the borders of the skin of a grape. Wherever we stand, we see Athens. Everywhere we turn our heads are bits of stone and pretty rocks, but they simply bear a different name. Thus a five cent piece of fruit is an encounter with God.
This is not a call to abandon the future and live a life of low standards. Far from it. Rather, it is to learn to love a paradox: the only way to be satisfied with an extraordinary future, which will itself become the everyday, is to be extraordinarily satisfied with the everyday.
And so it is striking that a civilizational malady can be cured by a grape.
What then is left but to view a single grape not as a mere amusement, but as sunlight with a flavor wrapped in iridescent flesh we consciously choose to assign absolute value to? What is left but to compare civilizational restlessness to the sovereign gaze Epictetus is ungently reminding us we are capable of: seeing the sun, moon, stars, and earth in every immediate and singular bite we are fortunate to take in our time here?
If this essay resonated with you, I strongly encourage you to subscribe to What then?. Sam is doing thoughtful and original work on philosophy, adversity, human nature, and what it means to live well.
I’m grateful to Sam for sharing his work with Stoic Wisdoms, and I hope this is not the last time you see his name here.
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The Ability To Think and Reflect
I have written a great deal in this newsletter about critical thinking, thinking for yourself, and protecting your attention from the systems built to capture it. All of that still matters. But none of it matters much if you never give yourself the time to actually think.
I agree, and I think a great precursor to this form of thinking is curiosity. Curiosity is perhaps the best and healthiest way to gain perspective, which in turn helps us form our own opinions.
Not because we’re following the herd, and not because it’s the easy way out, but because we’ve genuinely considered and carefully weighed the counterviews before arriving at our own conclusions.
For years I posted pictures I took while walking my dog on Instagram and tagged them #beautyeverywhere. I didn’t live somewhere anymore beautiful than the next but I noticed little details: sunlight through a petal, dew drops on a leaf, colors. I posted them to keep them organized someplace and inspire others to notice the beauty everywhere. We get to choose what we notice, or learn to. I think being wired that way makes my life pretty great.
Side note: I was doing this while getting divorced, having gotten laid off and being stressed about money, and trying to survive my sister’s terminal battle with cancer. I learned to hold both simultaneously. Life is awful. Life is great. And everything changes.