Last month we explored the theme of adaptability.

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Introduction to Monthly Theme

We can only prepare for so long, eventually, life requires we dive in.

We can work to restrain ourselves, or work with our emotions, or even adapt to changing situations.

But there’s a gap we often forget to close: our understanding of how we should live, and how we actually do.

We can know right from wrong and still not do the correct thing.

We can hold high standards and lower them when convenient.

We can work real hard—so long as someone is watching.

Integrity doesn’t live in the big moments but in the tiny decisions made every day.

Every time we act against the standard we’ve set, we chip away at who we could become.

This month, we’re exploring how we close that gap between thought and action. It is only through living in alignment, can we truly be able to build a sustainable character.

There’s good reason Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations are read 2,000 years after being written.

It’s not because he is prophesying, or has everything figured out. The work was not even meant for broad consumption.

The book is a record of a man struggling to to correct himself. Not once or twice, but as a daily practice.

It’s a personal journal—a mental gym of sorts—of a man trying to align himself.

In other words, Marcus was trying to truly live the philosophy he had been trained in. Not to learn what is right, but to live it.

“If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.”

One of the first things Marcus does in the Meditations is thank his grandfather, Marcus Annius Verus, for teaching him integrity. Not as theory but as practice.

Verus was himself not a teacher but practitioner. He was consul three times, one of the highest elected positions in Rome, as well as City Prefect, the highest civil administrator. Marcus observed, studied, and understood what it meant to hold power while also remaining disciplined, and staying true to oneself.

Integrity is not a belief but something we must prove, not just today but every day, through our actions. It is not glorious. No one comes to us and tells us good job. It is a solitary pursuit, done without fanfare or recognition.

But what it returns is character, someone who stands true to their word.

We like to think we have integrity. That what we say we do, that we stay true to our principles in all scenarios. That we are aligned between thought and action.

But most of us don’t examine ourselves enough to truly see the truth.

We say we’ll do something and then we don’t. We avoid the conversation we know we should have. Given two options we choose the easier path, not for any reason other than we simply are tired and don’t want to put in the extra effort.

And nothing happens.

No one calls us out, holds us accountable, or asks us to atone. These are little things we do, things we know in our heart to be wrong.

And so we do them again.

And again.

The problem is now that we’ve done them once, or twice, they’ve become habit. And with that, our integrity whittles away.

Not all at once. There often isn’t some big event that does it. Just little chips over time until suddenly, we’re just not the person we thought we were.

What we miss, or perhaps forget, in all of this is that every action we take is a vote towards or away from the person we want to be. Repeat the wrong decision enough times and before you know it our mind no longer feels the friction it once did—that voice inside saying maybe this isn’t the best decision to follow through on.

In the end, it is a recalibration of our mind and its expectation of who we are.

The real cost is not getting caught, it’s that we lose faith in ourselves. We allow habit to dictate our future path rather than the expectant version of ourselves we once believed in.

Marcus reminded himself in the Meditations, “To stand up straight—not be straightened.”

Only we can truly enforce the standards of our lives. Only we can ensure we hold our integrity to the highest standards.

It’s not about being perfect—none of us are. But it is about refusing to give in, to negotiate, to allow that voice to tell you to take the easy route.

It’s worth remembering, our actions are a vote for who we will become.

Thought to Carry this Week

You know what right from wrong is.

But do you recognize when you’re cheating yourself?

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The Last Good Emperor

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy—ideas meant to be lived. Each month, we explore a new theme and examine what it demands of our lives…

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3 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · D.A. DiGerolamo

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This month we’re exploring adaptability.

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We live with the assumption that if we hold more control over our lives, we’ll be able to better handle what gets thrown at us.

More information means more ability to predict what will happen we say to ourselves.

But regardless of how much we know, life will always hold “black swan” events, those moments that cannot be predicted, that seem to come out of nowhere—something that hits us due to being outside the realm of expected outcomes.

Rather than trying to predict the unpredictable, we must learn to embrace the lack of understanding of the world.

We all know certain things break when under pressure making them fragile. Likewise those that resist stress are strong and robust.

But what about when things are made greater by stress?

This is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls antifragility, and it is the lifeblood of adaptability.

Much of life is built to be robust, to weather storms, to be resilient. But even they cannot avoid black swan events.

The reason being, it is hard to build systems that allow for the downside to be limited but the upside to be unlimited.

Put another way, most people look to the middle for safety. Antifragility is about leaning into the extremes, being conservative in some areas while allowing for high-upside risk in others.

The world is unpredictable, yet we live as though we were Laplace’s Demon. Pierre-Simon Laplace famously argued that if a mind were able to know of every particle in the universe, their positions, their momentum, it could know the entire past and future.

Nothing hidden, nothing surprising, everything known.

We may not see this literally, but we often treat it practically.

We’re always collecting more information, always trying to track more data to plan, to prepare. We collect information like it is wisdom, yet refuse to acknowledge the flaw in our logic: it is all a way to control what happens next.

The demon matters because it strikes at the heart of the problem, namely, we hold a belief that more information is enough.

Antifragility begins when we realize it isn’t.

Reality is always moving, never standing still. It shifts as we’re planning. We resist what we cannot predict, making us ever more fragile in the process. Even our perceptions of reality are hindered, allowing us to see not objective reality but what we expect.

We are not Laplace’s Demon, though we act like we are.

The answer is not to know more, it’s to become less dependent on needing to know in the first place.

This is not simply adaptability. Adaptability is about surviving a change, antifragility is being strengthened by it. It’s the difference between chaos being something we manage through, or something a force we use.

Antifragility doesn’t seek to handle the disorder, it looks to be strengthened by it and reap the rewards in the process.

Small failures are okay so long as they help avoid the major ones.

We do this by building systems that are flexible to chaos and can be leveraged for it.

Consider a modern day individual who owns a home. They have a job, mortgage, little to no savings. On the surface they look financially fit, but one bad move—a layoff, a divorce, a medical emergency—and everything falls apart.

We need to design frameworks for our lives that work more like muscles: they thrive under stress. Stress forces small tears in the muscle fibers, but it regrows stronger, thicker than before. They excel under the weight of stress.

We can architect our lives similarly. Side hustle, transferable skills, living beneath one’s means, all ways to allow pivots when an unforeseen event strikes. The goal isn’t security, it’s leverage through asymmetry. The downside is limited but the upside is open. A single job as a point of failure crashes with a bang, but a side hustle that dies does so quietly.

When disorder arrives, the individual can pivot rather than crumble. They can lean into their skills, they can move to their side hustle, they can reach into reserves accumulated from living beneath their means.

It’s about assessing the landscape and determining the best approach to one’s individual life in order to be antifragile.

We crave certainty and build our lives around it. We try to insulate ourselves from chaos and tell ourselves we’re resilient.

But we cannot see the future. There are too many variables, too many areas where things can go wrong.

We need stronger foundations, systems that can thrive when stress is applied, not just weather the storm but be strengthened by it.

Antifragility is not about waiting for the storm to end, it’s about forming a life wherein it doesn’t matter if the storm ever stops.

Living an antifragile life means understanding the goal is not to avoid chaos but to thrive regardless of if chaos is there.

The shift doesn’t start in the mind, it did so in the systems we’ve installed for our life.

• Removing single points of failure.

• Allowing for small setbacks.

• Placing asymmetrical bets.

Once the architecture is there, the mindset follows.

And when we structure our lives this way, we realize our desire for control was nothing more than fragility cloaked in information.

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This month we’re exploring adaptability.

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Most of us react on a daily basis not to what is happening, but to what we’ve decided is happening.

Someone doesn’t respond to a message? They’re ignoring me.

A meeting doesn’t go as planned? The project isn’t working.

A roadmap goes off the rails? Project management is failing.

These reactions are immediate and they feel justified.

Yet what we’re really reacting to isn’t the event itself, but rather, the meaning we’ve assigned to the event.

We think we cannot adapt to changing circumstances because we cannot keep up, because the world is shifting too quickly.

But the truth is, we struggle to see the world clearly.

• Event occurs.

• We interpret the event.

• Our emotions are triggered.

• We react.

But the foundation for our reactions are often shaky. And once our interpretation of events is wrong, then everything downstream is too.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus reminded his students that it wasn’t things that disturbed people but their opinions of those things.

We’re not experiencing life from a clean objective point of view, we’re all experiencing it through the glasses we each wear.

Our past experiences of fear, assumptions, habits drive our thoughts, and build the lens through which we view the world.

In turn, our opinions become our reactions, and our awareness goes out the door.

We experience a thought and tell ourselves this is reality. But really, it is nothing more than an event with our own interpretation layered over it.

This is the real problem with life, we often forget to check the opinions we’re applying to the events we experience.

And when this happens, opinions become truth, and our truth directs us automatically.

Epictetus reminded his students it was their own judgment that was provoking them, not the event itself:

“…whenever someone provokes you, be aware that the provocation really comes from your own judgment. Start, then, by trying not to get carried away by the impression. Once you pause and give yourself time, you will more easily control yourself.”

Without the pause to test our experience, we automatically respond. And we do so through whatever lens we have on at that time.

• If angry, everything can feel like an insult.

• If we recently fought with someone, every comment can feel like a provocation.

• If we missed an opportunity, every setback feels like proof we’ll never succeed.

Everything rests within the small moment between the event and what that event means to us.

If we miss this window, we’re easily carried away by our first impressions. But find a way to pause and reflect? We’ve taken control back, and now have a choice on how to react.

Most of us forget to pause. Life is chaotic, it’s pulling us in a million directions, who has time to reflect?

But it is in this reflection that we learn the true nature of an event, and ourselves.

When our perception of reality is off, so is our ability to properly adapt to it.

• We try to fix something that isn’t actually broken.

• We lean in when we should pull back.

• We dig in our heels when we should ease off.

Feeling like we’re adapting to the situation comes when action is taken. But it is only when proper action is executed that we adapt to the situation.

And it is in this distinction that we find true power.

“Keep in mind that what injures you is not people who are rude or aggressive but your opinion that they are injuring you,” Epictetus advised.

Adaptability doesn’t actually begin with action, it starts with reflection.

With hesitating.

With ensuring the next action is the right one for the situation, not just acting to act.

The pause doesn’t have to be long, just long enough to think.

To question our initial reaction.

To see where clarity is.

“In all circumstances keep in mind to turn in to yourself and ask what resources you have for dealing with these things... By developing these habits, you will not be carried away by your first impressions.”

You wouldn’t entrust your body to a random person on the street Epictetus advises, we instinctively protect it. Yet we allow first impressions to show up and dictate our lives.

If we seed control to our first impressions, we are forced to see the world through distortions.

And when we move based upon distortion rather than truth, we speed off in the wrong direction.

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This month we’re exploring adaptability.

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We all know that person who cannot be convinced out of their beliefs, regardless of how many facts are presented to them.

When presented with an opposing view or opinion, they often counter, deflect, or state something irrelevant to escape scrutiny.

But they’re not alone. We each suffer this same flaw.

We all hold opinions and beliefs that are central to who we are and help form our identity.

The problem is, when we refuse to update our beliefs, we cannot adapt to the changing landscape before us.

The psychologist Leon Fessinger called this tension cognitive dissonance.

When reality contradicts our deeply held beliefs, we experience discomfort.

Convictions are hard to shake. Fessinger came to realize that rather than updating one’s beliefs, people tended to protect them. We tend to:

• Ignore what doesn’t feel right, natural, or easily understood;

• Take what is presented before us and reinterpret it to our own liking;

• Double-down on the beliefs we’re already entrenched with.

Changing one’s convictions isn’t easy, and the discomfort one feels when there is that contradiction between reality and belief isn’t small.

When our understanding of the world no longer matches reality, we find ourselves in a position of being forced to decide:

Do I update my beliefs with this new evidence?

Or

Do I stick with what I know and believe?

The problem with holding onto beliefs in this manner is they do not ultimately aid us.

But these beliefs are subjective, they’re tied to our identity, a part of the fabric of who we are. Releasing a conviction, or updating a deeply held belief means we’re losing a part of ourselves.

And sometimes, that part has been with us for a long time.

Refusing to update our beliefs may protect our identity, sure, and it may feel good to think we’re right, even if we’re not. But ultimately, an inability to see truth, and instead choose egoism, is what prevents us from adapting to the situation at hand.

The problem is, the world is moving at a speed that far outpaces our ability to hold static beliefs, or at the minimum, refuse to question them.

We often will deflect because there is pride in ourselves. Having knowledge of something provides security, it brings comfort.

But the world is moving too fast for these types of comforts. Change is accelerating by the day and if we refuse to question our convictions, if we reject updating our knowledge base, then we disadvantage ourselves like never before.

When we admit something isn’t working, or our beliefs are not correct, we open ourselves up to changing what we know.

As the psychologist Adam Grant has written, “Our convictions can lock us in prisons of our own making. The solution is not to decelerate our thinking—it's to accelerate our rethinking”

The more we delay in updating our beliefs, the more reality moves away from us. When this happens, we have to work doubly hard just to catch up. It’s better to stay afoot while one can as it puts one in a position to update one’s beliefs.

We often think of ego as arrogance, but it’s more than that. Ego is our construction that we have built to resist correction.

It’s that internal monologue we have, the voice that tells us to stand strong in our convictions, to never admit when we’re wrong, to be true to what we know.

And in turn, we listen, and we refuse to change.

Instead of updating our beliefs, instead of questioning if we could possibly be wrong, we double-down, dig in our heals, and insert our mental confidence that we know best.

In turn, we may stay true to what we know, but reality keeps rolling past without us.

The longer we wait to correct, the more expensive that correction becomes. What starts as a small shift in thinking turns into something that has to be forced.

And this is what we miss about why it is so important to keep our mind adaptable. We can’t outrun reality, we can only delay its arrival.

But by delaying it, we seed control to when it will show up.

And it always does.

A quiet adjustment, what could have been a quick decision, now turns into a situation.

We think by avoiding we can buy ourselves time, but the truth is, we’re just giving up control, making it ever more unpredictable for when reality is going to strike.

And when it does, it does so without warning.

Then, we’re no longer adapting.

Instead, we’re just reacting.

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Introduction to Monthly Theme

We’re often too slow in our reactions to life’s events. We naturally hold expectations and when they’re not met, we’re thrown off, pushed back on our heals, forced into recalibration mode.

It’s not that we struggle with change but that we are always fighting against it. We like to think of change as an event or a one time thing, not something that is constantly occurring.

But in today’s world, we need the ability to be agile, to pivot, to quickly assess and take action.

We need adaptability.

Adaptability isn’t just about changing or pivoting when needed. It’s knowing how, and when, to update ourselves in response to the world we’re living in.

It’s disciplined.

It’s thought-through.

It’s focused.

It’s being in close contact with reality, seeing it for what it is and adjusting on the fly. It’s not that we lack dedication or effort, sometimes it’s as simple as realizing we are holding ourselves back through outdated versions of who we are and what we can become.

In order to keep up with a constantly changing world, we need to notice, and take appropriate action.

For the month of April, we’re exploring the theme of adaptability.

Most of us think we’re holding it together. But in reality, what we fail to see is things are decaying too slowly for us to notice.

Within each of us there is a desire for stability. We want things settled, safe, reliable, within our lives: our relationships, our job, our finances.

When we don’t feel safe, or we’re unsettled, we tell ourselves stories like, “If I can just hold on a little bit longer.” Or, “As long as nothing changes, I can do this.”

These aren’t solutions. They’re pep talks. They’re nice to haves. They’re last ditch efforts we tell ourselves in desperate times.

They’re rooted in our desire for control of a world that is constantly at odds with stability.

And it is for this reason we should see stability not as a goal, but as an illusion.

The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus captured this through the imagery of a river. No man can step into the same river twice he said.

At the heart of the river metaphor is not just that change is constant, but the notion that what you’re standing on, the ground itself, is whisked away downstream.

The river is not the same because you can’t return to the same river. And you yourself are not the same person.

In the Stoic tradition, there was the belief that everything was always in a state of flux. Things coming into existence while others were decaying and being reformed into something else.

The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius raises this theme time and time again within his Meditations. He reminds himself that nothing within life has a firm foothold, it is constantly shifting.

“Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity,” he writes to himself. “We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold?”

Marcus doesn’t resolve this tension, he raises it to himself as an awareness. He must learn to live within this constant state of change because that is the guarantee, and the illusion is that we expect otherwise.

“Like an attachment to a sparrow: we glimpse it and it’s gone,” he writes.

While we believe deep beneath the surface of our lives there must be some anchor that secures us, that provides some stability, the reality is much harsher:

The natural state of the world is chaos.

Left to its own devices, the world tears itself apart. Things decay. They consume one another. Everything moves toward disorder—unless order is applied, with force.

Order does not come natural, it is something we ourselves must build. If we’re not actively building or maintaining order, things actively unravel.

Nothing in our lives is exempt from this.

The work we do, the relationships we hold, the fitness routine we have—it all requires maintenance.

Time.

Energy.

Dedication.

Sometimes, when we think we’re maintaining, we are in fact coasting.

And coasting is the equivalent of standing still.

We just haven’t noticed its impact yet. Because ultimately, all our success, all our failure, all the highs and lows, they’re just downstream signals from how we’re living our lives.

And they often take the form of phrases such as “fine,” “good enough,” and “secure.”

It’s not until something breaks that we realize the disorder creeping in. This forces us back onto our heals. We’re no longer in maintenance mode but now repair, working twice as hard.

So if we want to be adaptable, if we want to be able to handle an ever changing world, a world that is naturally pushing toward disorder, we need to be maintaining.

This requires we prioritize our lives, we take an accounting of them, and we ensure we are applying energy where it needs to go. Not just when it fails, not when we try to coarse correct, or we feel urgency. But always.

Consistently.

If we’re in a position where we’re telling ourselves the stories of “If I can just hold on,” or, “As long as nothing changes,” then we need to ask ourselves:

What is this the downstream impact from?

And then:

How do I correct that so this pressure is alleviated and order is restored?

Stability is not something we achieve, it’s a byproduct of prioritized maintenance.

And it is fought for daily.

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There are decisions that we cannot be prepared to make yet are expected to anyways.

Not because we lack information or haven’t done research, but because the information we need to make the decision does not yet exist.

Today, we’re told that good decisions come from good preparation: Thorough research, weighing pros and cons, performing pre and post mortems.

And that works for a good chunk of the decisions we need to make. It works for business, or planning a trip, or changing habits.

But then there are some decisions that this doesn’t work for. Not because the decisions change the circumstances or life we know, but because they change us and who we are.

This is what the philosopher L.A. Paul calls a transformative experience—decisions that not only shape our future, but also us, the person who will be experiencing that future.

And this is the crux of the problem:

In order to understand our future selves, in order to gain the knowledge we need to make the decision today, we have to actually make the decision and come out the other side.

It is a decision that, once made, cannot be returned from.

In order to gain the knowledge we need to understand our future selves, we need to walk through the door. We have to get to the other side.

When we make a decision, there is an inherent assumption: we know how the decision will make us feel.

We base our judgment upon whether something will make us feel good or bad. Whether it will benefit or hinder.

Yet the decisions we’re making are based upon who we are today, at the time the decision is made.

For this reason, we actually do not have a clear understanding of how the experience will make us feel, how it will change our lives, or who we will be on the other side.

There is objective knowledge, the knowledge we can gather through fact finding or research such as talking to people who have made similar decisions, reading books, finding data to support what we choose.

But then there is subjective knowledge, what it feels like from the inside. How we will process and interpret the decision and its results.

We can gather all the objective information we want in advance to make a decision, but it is not until the decision has been made, until we have gone through the experience itself, that we can comprehend our decision.

What it feels like to lose a parent, or have a child, or get married completely shifts how we interpret the world, and in turn, who we are.

We can empathize with someone else, or hear their story and imagine ourselves in the same situation, but until we ourselves experience it, we’re always on the outside looking in.

This is why books hit us differently as we age. The first time we read them, we understand the words. But when we read the same words years later, they’re deeper, they resonate more.

The words themselves haven’t changed, only we have.

The depth of our lives have grown. Our experiences have widened. The “you” who read the book for the first time is not the same “you” who reads it again.

We bring our experiences to the page with us. New emotions we previously didn’t know or have proper depth in. Or perspectives we couldn’t truly imagine.

One of the clearest examples of a transformative experience is one of having a child.

You can ask other parents what it is like. You can spend time with newborns or toddlers. You can read books and try to imagine what it would be like.

But you’re doing that as the person you are today, not the person you will be if you have the child.

That person, the one who will see the world in a completely new light, with a love you’ve never experienced, doesn’t exist yet.

This is what life does, it asks us to make decisions with information we do not have—cannot have—until we walk through that door.

Clarity only exists on the other side.

What we’re waiting for in the decision-making process is a guarantee. And it’s one we can never get.

These decisions don’t ask for certainty, they ask for willingness.

They ask for action.

They ask for us to become someone we’re not yet.

Not because we cannot envision who we will become, but because we are transformed through the decision itself.

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In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a group of prisoners are chained inside a cave since birth. They have never seen the outside world and what they have seen, the only thing they’ve seen, are shadows on the cave wall, cast about by firelight.

One day, one of the prisoners escapes. He is blinded by the light, and when his eyes adjust after a long, painful exposure, he meets reality for the first time: the sun, the sky, the vast world around him.

Freed from the chains of the cave, he returns to free the others and tell them of what he’s seen. But they do not thank him. They do not follow. Instead, they reject him and are willing to kill him before they allow themselves to be unchained.

Plato’s point is that it is the philosopher’s duty to try and free others by educating them of a perspective outside their own, to think differently. To think freely.

But that interpretation leaves another unsettling question unexamined:

Why would the prisoners reject the ability to see truth? And why were they so willing to give up freedom in order to keep things as they were?

It’s not stupidity, but rather, a choice. A conscious choice to reject freedom and their own individual agency. And it’s a choice humans have made time and time again over the centuries.

Which raises the question, why is it that we desire freedom, only to so willingly give it up once we’ve attained it?

Freedom’s Paradox

In the long arc of civilization, the story of the modern era is one of liberation. We have continuously fought for our freedom—freedom from kings, from feudalism, dogma. The Western individual of today is more free from external restrictions than any other time in human history.

And yet, at the same time, we are also willing to surrender our individual thought and agency to others out of fear of responsibility for one’s own life.

The philosopher Erich Fromm, writing in 1941 during World War II, asked what about freedom made it alluring while simultaneously terrifying.

The answer he came up with is that freedom is not a single thing. Rather, it is a two-fold distinction.

Freedom From, or Negative Freedom, is liberation from traditional external constraints such as kings, the Church, feudalism. This is the freedom that was fought for over centuries. To be free from the control of others.

Freedom To, or Positive Freedom, on the other hand, is harder to achieve as it requires the free individual to create it. It is the ability to do creative work, the ability to live spontaneously, to love. In other words, it is the ability to be one’s authentic self.

Modern day societies have, for the most part, accomplished Negative Freedom. The problem, however, is there is often a gap between this and Positive Freedom. This gap is a defining psychological crisis for individuals. We not only face an existential crisis, but become vulnerable to the will of others.

The Weight of Freedom

With the ability to achieve Negative Freedom we enter a paradox of emotions: when we are no longer oppressed, when we no longer have someone to dictate our lives, we are left with a sense of aloneness, isolation, and a sense of insecurity as we are now responsible for what our lives are.

Prior to modernity, we lacked individual freedom, but we had purpose—one had a job to do, your identity wasn’t something you were responsible for creating—it was assigned, and you had a role within a hierarchy.

When we strip this all away, when we achieve Negative Freedom, our conditions are improved, but in exchange, we are now alone and without anything to direct or guide us.

Fromm states we feel three forms of distress when we’ve achieved Negative Freedom, but have not yet achieved Positive Freedom.

The first is radical aloneness. You have the freedom to create your authentic self, the meaning for your life, the identity you want. But you lose a sense of belonging that came from the old structures. Whereas before you were part of groups that preceded you, and would outlast you such as the Church, you have now become individualized and responsible for your life’s purpose and direction.

The second is existential insignificance. While we are individualized and can be what we want, we get the sense we are insignificant. The old order provided us, even in the worst of ways, a place in a hierarchy: a job, a title, a role and function. But when we have the freedom to be anything, we have the fear that we will be nothing.

The third is unbearable responsibility. With freedom comes responsibility. There is no fallback and no one to blame. Each wrong decision, each bit of wasted time, it all is laid at our feet. If there is no king, god, or tradition directing life, then we are entirely responsible for it. And that means accepting it—all of it. Our fates, in other words, are our own.

While we wish for freedom, once we achieve it, we quickly come to see how daunting true freedom can be. And when there is no safety net to catch us, we increasingly become distressed and search for some semblance of certainty in a world devoid of it. This is not because we are weak, but rather, because no one teaches us how to bear the pressures of such a life.

Our Vulnerability and Susceptibility

While we sought freedom, we have a hard time surviving that gap between Negative and Positive Freedom. It is due to the pressure within this gap that Fromm says many reach for a relief, or what he called “escape mechanism.”

Within these escape mechanisms, he identified three patterns.

Due to the terrifying nature of one’s own freedom and the weight that comes with it, many freely hand over their agency to an authoritarian leader so as to relinquish the pressure while simultaneously aligning themselves with strength. While they may submit to a strongman-type leader, they see the move as relief, not defeat.

Destructiveness is the second overarching pattern. If it is the world that is pushing so much pain onto us, then if we destroy the world, or the world we know, we can rebuild it to our own liking. Destruction does not require anything special as it is always available.

The final element is automation conformity or when one assimilates themselves into the environment they inhabit. This is when the individual self is slowly, and quietly, dissolved and replaced by the culture that the individual adopts—opinions, tastes, desires.

Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman and author of The True Believer, saw the same wounds but from a slightly different angle.

Writing a decade after Fromm in 1951, Hoffer saw how mass movements form of those who have felt these pressures and were frustrated. Movements don’t start with those who are content, he wrote, but with those who are frustrated such as those who were promised a story—purpose, meaning, a place in the world—only to never see that story materialize.

“It is a truism that many who join a rising revolutionary movement are attracted by the prospect of sudden and spectacular change in their conditions of life,” he wrote.

People spent their entire lives being told freedom was the ultimate achievement only to discover it comes with incredible pressure and requires diligent determination. That disparity between story and actuality can make the decision to turn to a leader, movement, or cause feel like salvation rather than surrender.

The True Cost

The true believer gives up their freedom because in so doing, they feel reborn.

Gone is the need to think independently, or feel lonely, or figure out the meaning of one’s existence. The promise of a return to the golden or mythical past, drives meaning into the suffering of the moment.

But giving up one’s individuality and freedom comes at a massive cost: one is willing to do horrific things in the name of the movement.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt called this the banality of evil, how those who commit atrocities are often not monsters, but rather, regular people.

She was covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann a decade after Hoffer’s True Believer, in 1961.

Eichmann was the individual who oversaw the operations and intricacies of the Holocaust. But what the trial showed Arendt was that he was nothing more than a bureaucrat who allowed the movement to guide his morality. He was not filled with malice, but rather, was a man performing administrative tasks.

“The trouble with Eichmann,” she wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

The true cost, then, to giving up our individuality is that we become a pawn in someone else’s game. Evil does not require us to have ill intentions, it just demands we follow instructions.

When we give up our independence, when we surrender our individual agency, we become the prisoners in Plato’s cave.

And when we have a society of willing prisoners, freedom becomes obsolete.

Reclaiming Agency

When a society surrenders its individual agency, it leads to collective catastrophe where nearly anything is possible.

The answer to the problem is not more agency. It is precisely because of the pressure of freedom that many collapse under the pressure between Negative and Positive Freedom.

Rather, if we wish to reclaim agency, we must do so through several methods.

Fromm suggested that spontaneous activity—that which is derived from the individual’s authentic self—is free choice and helps to reaffirm one’s path toward Positive Freedom. We must learn to investigate our actions and truly dissect if they are ours, or if they are someone else’s we are just absorbing.

Fromm also believed that creative work, any type, would help the individual as it forced them to truly express themselves and not another.

The third solution Fromm saw was connection. By connection, he meant the relations that will bring forth the individual, not the kind that is looking to silence and grow numbers. True, genuine connection that helps expand an individual’s agency.

For her part, Arendt believed the best way to overcome the banality of evil was to think. Not to take in information, or just accept things as told, but to rigorously think through ideas. To genuinely scrutinize an idea is not only a path to freedom, but allows for one to reclaim their agency, one thought at a time.

If we think back to Plato’s prisoners in the cave, they take on a more three-dimensional shape.

They’re not ignorant, but rather, isolated individuals, just as Fromm would write about 2,000 years later. They are Hoffer’s true believers, relishing in the stories they know from the shadows dancing before them on the wall. They are Arendt’s ordinary individuals who stopped thinking for themselves, who dropped their judgment long ago.

But perhaps most importantly, they are each of us.

Deep within each of us are the desires, frustrations, and disengagement—the soil—needed to want to relinquish our freedom, to release that pressure.

The cave is always there, it’s always available, always waiting for us to retreat to it, to give up our agency in exchange for a relief of the pressure.

That is the choice we each live with daily. It’s not whether or not freedom is possible, it’s whether or not we are willing to bear the weight that comes with the freedom.

The climb out of the cave is real. We just have to ask if we’re ready to bear it.

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Meaning penetrates our entire existence.

Most of us at one point or another will ask ourselves the same question:

“What should I do with my life?”

Once the question pops into our consciousness, it tends to return again and again.

But for many of us, this question does not free us, but rather, restricts our actions.

We seek clarity. We want answers. We hesitate to move in any direction in fear it could be the wrong one. We wait for inspiration, or a sign that will point us towards our purpose, that will tell us the meaning of our lives.

But without answers to these larger questions, we become stagnant.

The key to unlocking meaning, according to the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, may be to reverse the question. Instead of asking, “What is the meaning of my life?” perhaps we should be asking, “What is life asking of me right now?”

As he wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.”

Meaning, then, does not appear to us through abstraction, but rather, through acceptance of responsibility for the task at hand.

Frankl himself came to these conclusions under the harshest of circumstances. As a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II, he witnessed firsthand how his fellow prisoners responded to the suffering they were forced to endure. Some gave up while others carried on.

Frankl concluded the ones who pushed on through the suffering did so because of the meaning they inscribed to their life.

Those who continued on did so because they believed there was more to their life than what that exact moment held. They believed that there was something for them outside the camp—a loved one, a calling, a project.

For Frankl, it was two-fold.

He had been separated from his wife before arriving at camp. At night he would lie against hundreds of prisoners, crowded together in the freezing barracks, and think of her and what she may be doing, where she may be.

The other was his manuscript which had been taken from him when he was arrested. In his mind, he began reconstructing it, line-by-line, determined to once again write it when he reached freedom.

By holding onto these two things, the suffering he endured suddenly had context, it gave him purpose, and with that came the ability to push on.

“The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.”

Life is constantly placing questions before us, questions that will determine who we become, and what we stand for.

Each situation demands our attention and our agency. In these moments, life is not waiting for us to know the meaning of our existence, it is asking us to respond to the situation before us. It asks us to be present, to answer the task at hand.

Meaning, then, comes from the answer we give. It is in the responsibility of asking our lives and taking hold of the choices that sit before us.

Will we carry on through the suffering?

Will we answer the call even when we’re tired, hungry, or poor?

Will we rise again after being kicked down?

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

So then, we must be willing to pick up the cross, whatever one that may be, and carry it.

Delay or rejection of the task does not aid us in discovering meaning. In fact, it hinders our ability to grow, to find purpose, to push on through the suffering and learn what we can from it.

Meaning is rarely ever discovered by standing still, waiting for it to smack us in the face.

More often than not, it appears, even if dim at first, once we can take a small step.

Life is always asking something of us. Meaning is discovered the moment we answer.

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We are creatures shaped by experience.

Through trial and error, we learn what works and what doesn’t, and carry those lessons into the future.

This typically serves us well, it’s how we learn, grow, and perfect ourselves.

But sometimes the lessons can mislead.

Instead of looking into why something did or did not work, we begin to build a narrative about ourselves.

• Maybe we apply for a job and are rejected.

• Maybe we try to lose weight but don’t see the results we hoped for.

• Maybe we take a stand for ourselves and it backfires.

In these moments, a conclusion begins to form, and it is this story that we carry with us.

• Maybe I’m not meant for this.

• Maybe I’m not good enough.

• Maybe I shouldn’t try.

Rather than examine what actually went wrong, we personalize the experience and allow it to define what is possible for our future.

In the 1960s, the psychologist Martin Seligman was trying to learn about fear, conditioning, and control.

He and his colleague Steven Maier setup three groups of dogs:

• Group 1 could stop an electrical shock with a button.

• Group 2 had no button to stop the electrical shock.

• Group 3 received no electrical shock at all.

After the dogs went through the initial phase, they were each put into a box with a small barrier. When the shock was applied, they could easily jump over the barrier and escape it.

Surprisingly, only the dogs in Groups 1 and 3 jumped over the barrier when the shocks were applied. Group 2 dogs, the ones who from the previous test had no button to press to escape the shocks, succumbed to their fate and didn’t attempt to escape.

Seligman came to understand that it was the dog’s belief that they could do nothing about the shock that drove their lack of action.

They had learned that nothing they did mattered, that even when in a new scenario with an opportunity to escape, they didn’t try.

This is what Seligman coined as learned helplessness.

When living beings are subjected to repeated negative events, they can begin to see effort as useless, even when circumstances change.

We each will encounter similar situations within our own lives.

• A rejection becomes proof we should stop applying.

• A failed attempt at a goal is proof we never should have tried.

• A hard conversation becomes proof we not have spoken up.

We too often see our experiences as zero-sum contests—I either succeeded or I failed.

Rather, they should be seen for what they are, practice for strengthening underdeveloped muscles.

• A baby does not walk on their first attempt.

• A professional piano player does not perform at Carnegie Hall for their first concert.

• A NFL athlete does not catch a football the first time they step on the field.

Growth happens through repetition, regardless of success or failure.

Failure is not unusual. Life is filled with taking risks and strengthening our muscles—physical, mental, emotional—as we try to succeed. It is about repetition, adjustment, and learning.

Later in his career, Seligman proposed an antidote: learned optimism.

If helplessness could be learned, then perhaps optimism could be too.

Why are some people resilient while others aren’t? Why do some people bounce back from setbacks while others crumble under them?

Seligman discovered that the ones who bounced back, who didn’t let the event hold them down or prevent them from trying again, interpreted failure differently.

When we encounter a setback, we typically explain it in three ways:

• Permanence: how long it will last.

• Pervasiveness: how much of our life it will affect.

• Personalization: whose fault it is.

Pessimists tend to see the events as permanent, pervasive, and personal. They see them extending out, affecting their life, and blaming themselves.

Optimists, on the other hand, see these events as temporary, limited, and contextual.

This isn’t blind optimism, however. It is much more akin to how the Stoics advised careful reflection of the judgments we make. It is hardly ever an event that harms us, rather, the judgments we attach to them that lead us to create narratives about ourselves. Likewise, learned optimism asks us to question and challenge the explanations we’re telling ourselves.

If we hold a negative feeling or emotion, we must investigate it and see why, really challenge the explanations we are giving for ourselves.

Helplessness does not spring forth from nowhere. It builds over time, through the conclusions we make of the events we encounter.

The trap is, a few failures can easily feel like a pattern, and a pattern can turn into a belief.

And when this happens, we may not even see the open door sitting right before us.

Not because escape is impossible, but because we’ve quietly decided it is.

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Introduction to Monthly Theme

Many of us fall into the trap of believing our lives are dictated by circumstances outside of our control.

The economy.

When and where we were born.

Other’s actions.

And it’s true, we do not control these things.

But we also too easily surrender ourselves to thinking we have no power over these broader occurrences in the world.

We say things like, “I can’t do anything about that,” “I’m not ready,” or “Now isn’t the time.”

Each phrase we believe, each one an easy excuse for the situation at hand. What we’re really saying is, “I don’t want to choose differently,” or, “I’m comfortable with life as I know it.”

We all have some form of agency in life, maybe not always to the degree we want, but we all have power to influence and direct our lives even in the worst of times.

Agency doesn’t mean controlling outcome, it means owning our response to life, and asking our participation in it.

For the month of March, we’re exploring the theme of agency: where it erodes, how it disguises itself as helplessness, and what it means to reclaim authorship in small but decisive ways.

In one form or another, we all wish to have freedom within our lives. Freedom to do what we want, to say what we want, to be who we want to be.

And on the surface, this can look very enticing. We are in control of our lives, dictating how we will act, what we will pursue, how we will organize our days.

We move to a new city where no one knows our name, or we start a brand new job, school year, or relationship. For a brief moment, there’s optimism that the page is blank, that what sits before us is nothing but possibilities. We can be whoever we want.

But then comes a daunting realization: if we’re truly free and have true agency over our lives, do we want such a heavy responsibility? Or, instead, do we see this freedom as a condemnation?

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre believed that our existence precedes our essence. In other words, we are born and then must figure out our purpose.

A hammer, for example, is made with a specific purpose—to hit nails. Likewise, a car is made to move someone from point A to point B faster than a horse. A hanger was designed for the purpose of having clothes.

But our purpose, the reason for our being here, does not, according to Sartre, exist. There is no specific reason for our existence other than someone brought us into this world.

We are not preprogrammed with a specific purpose. Rather, it is entirely up to our own making on what our individual purpose is.

This creates a somewhat nerve-wracking scenario for us. If we are free to do whatever we want, that means the responsibility of our lives rests solely within our hands, only we can figure it out.

For some, this is a weight lifted. Rather than live up to expectations, we are free to craft our own narrative, not beholden to some story or expectation for ourselves.

But on the other hand, it means we are in control, we have no one or nothing to fall back on. In turn, many of us reject our own agency and instead opt for ways to avoid the burden of our freedom.

Sartre lays out several ways in which this impacts us.

Anguish: an anxiety around the freedom we actually possess. Sartre uses the example of one standing at a cliff. There’s a rail, so you are safe. But then you realize, you could just jump, the rail isn’t really stopping anything. That feeling, when you realize you are free to jump and the only thing holding you back from doing so is yourself, that is anguish, the acknowledgement of freedom.

Bad faith: we attempt to reject our freedom by skirting responsibility. We say we had no choice, we had to act a certain way, we were just doing our job. But these are lies to ourself. Most often, the excuses we make are but a reason to avoid saying, “I won’t.” We see this all the time. We’re in a job that isn’t satisfactory and say of ourselves we have no choice. Or we’re in a relationship that is over and we say we can’t be the one to end it.

Radical responsibility: we are constantly making decisions, decisions that influence our lives as well as represent who we are to the world. This also means that blame rests squarely on ourselves. Our parents, others, there is no blame to place because you are responsible for your life, regardless of circumstance. And there is real weight to this, there is a heaviness to knowing there is no one to fall back on or to blame. When we get stuck in traffic and are late to work, we’re responsible—we could’ve left earlier, we could have planned ahead.

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

This can all seem very daunting as it brings into focus a singular point of view, one that forces the individual to realize there is no fallback. No god with a plan, no book with instructions, nothing except for ourselves.

We are, then, what we do. We become who we construct through our actions. Our essence is built, not born, from the life we live, the decisions we make, and the reactions we take to life’s events.

Ultimately, if we want meaning, if we’re looking for who we are, what our purpose is, and what the grander point of it all is, Sartre says we should stop and look in the mirror.

To feel this type of agency, one where our lives are truly our own, is both a liberating and daunting experience. It gives us hope, it removes the weight of expectation, but it also forces us to account for life in a way we are seldom used to.

But that’s what it means to have agency. It’s our responsibility.

It’s all ours to write.

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This month we’re exploring emotional agility.

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Most of us think of emotions as passing storms.

We get irritated, then it dissipates. We feel anxious, then it settles down. We get angry, and then it fades.

But how often do we stop and wonder if the emotion is part of a larger pattern?

Writing over 135 years ago, the psychologist William James stated that the actions we repeatedly do create more than habits, they form who we will eventually become.

“We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.”

James understood that an action, repeated enough, becomes easier with time. Today, we call this synaptic strengthening, more often articulated as neurons that fire together, wire together.

Think of it like water passing over a rock or stone. A single pass leaves little to no semblance, but with enough time and repetition, a groove will form.

Our emotional responses to life’s events work the same way.

We will all get angry at one point or another. But anger repeated becomes irritability. And, if unchecked, eventually forms an angry temperament.

The problem isn’t that we become angry. It’s that the emotion becomes habitual.

When we allow the emotion to become habit, we allow it to define us, to become part of who we are. Each time we reinforce the emotion—letting it fester or lash out—we deepen that behavioral groove. That groove becomes the flywheel of our actions going forward.

As James pointed out, “The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”

Aristotle similarly had stated that we form our character based upon our repeated actions.

In both cases, then, our destinies are shaped not through a single situation, but by the repetitions we make within our lives.

Emotional agility does not start, then, with suppressing the feelings we have. It does not come about by ignoring what makes us human.

It starts with recognizing the patterns we play.

Once we see how we slip into an emotional state—anger, depression, anxiety—we can learn to interrupt it. Once we can do this, we can learn to redirect, to form new grooves, to establish new habits and patterns.

We become who we are, then, not through an emotional episode, but from what we repeatedly do.

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Emotions do not control us…

…unless we allow them to.

Between every emotion and the action we take is a space wherein our decision awaits.

• Will we say the nasty remark when we’re angry?

• Will we withdraw when fear grasps us?

• Will we cancel plans when deep in sadness?

When emotions strike, it is easy to sit in them and take our hands off the wheel, allowing our actions to seem as though they are controlled by the emotion itself.

But this isn’t how we operate.

The emotion may arise without our permission, but the actions that follow are directed by us.

There is space between the emotion and our actions. We may like to place blame on the emotion for the actions we take rather than accept our active participation in the matter, but the fact is:

When an emotion arises and we act from it, we are the ones responsible for those actions.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle broke human action into two categories based upon responsibility.

Voluntary action was defined as the individual knowing what they were doing. There is awareness and choice in what we do. We lie to avoid a hard conversation. We cross the street when the light is red. We send the message knowing it will escalate the feud.

We blame our emotions—I was angry, I was fearful, I was frustrated—but when we choose to act, the responsibility is ours. We take ownership of those actions.

In contrast, involuntary actions are those derived from compulsion, an external force, or ignorance.

If someone pushes us from behind and we fall into someone, the action is not ours, it was forced upon us.

Ignorance, however, is more nuanced in that the actions taken could be either voluntary or involuntary. Whether or not an action is voluntary is dependent upon the particulars of that scenario, and whether or not the individual knowingly takes action based upon the choices before them.

Aristotle believed that one formed good character through the repetition of the correct action in the correct scenario—becoming just by doing just acts, courageous by performing courageous acts.

Character, then, is not built from how we feel but the choices we make. Emotion, therefore, is not the moral event, the choice we make is.

• Anger may rise involuntarily but the choice to act cruel does not.

• Fear may provoke tightness in our chest, but to act cowardice is our decision.

• Sadness may hit us without provocation, but to withdraw or isolate is our own choice.

Emotions are there to inform, to guide, to instruct. But that doesn’t make them commands.

Emotional agility is not the restriction of these emotions, it is the discipline of where and when to act.

Each time the emotion arises, we have a moment—a brief moment—to reinforce the habit we want to form.

Will we choose to just react to the emotion’s presence? Or will we force ourselves into deliberation?

Our actions, what we choose to do, is what forms our character.

Our emotions will surface and we are not praised or blamed for this. No one sits there arguing that you should not feel one way or the other.

But we are praised and blamed for the choices we make. These choices dictate the actions we take. And it is up to us to ensure they are the correct ones.

Emotions may be involuntary, but our character formation is anything but.

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We think of emotions as direct reactions to what happens to us in life.

Someone ridicules us and we become angry. Things don’t work out as we anticipated and we feel anxious. Our project proposal is denied and we feel rejected.

When we experience events like this, it feels like we understand why we’re experiencing the emotion—we’re slighted, worried, or soured. An event happens, an emotion appears. Case closed.

But the famed psychologist Aaron T. Beck saw emotions differently.

In Beck’s view, it isn’t events that trigger the emotion, there is something else, something before the emotion even arises within us.

Meaning.

Beck believed that emotions arose not just from the events we encountered, but also from the meaning we transcribed onto the event.

The situation occurs, we map meaning onto the event—without realizing we’re doing so—and an emotion appears based upon the interpretation.

This idea was a departure from earlier theories on emotions. The conditioning model, for example, saw emotions as the direct result of stimuli. The psychoanalytical model, on the other hand, saw emotional causes sprouting from unconscious impulses. But Beck’s cognitive model saw emotions as the byproduct of the story we tell ourselves—consciously or not—about what just happened.

These stories bring with them biases, assumptions, and expectations, all of which change how we interpret the situation before us.

This is why no event is necessarily the same for two people—the meaning each inscribes to the event is derived from their own lives, beliefs, and past experiences. This is why some people may be weighed down by a comment but others can shrug it off without a second thought.

As Beck explained:

“A person who attaches an unrealistic or extravagant meaning to an event is likely to experience an inappropriate or excessive emotional response.”

Similarly, over 2,000 years ago, the Stoics stated it is our judgment of events that dictates whether or not we feel a specific emotion.

In his book, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, Beck shows how the emotions come into being.

Sadness, for example, surfaces within our lives due to some type of loss. The loss, however, does not need to be something tangible, it can also come from something we expected to have. A promotion that was promised but never delivered, for example, can feel much like a demotion because the loss is against the meaning we had assigned to the promotion, such as our worth, skills, and abilities.

Similarly, anxiety can be triggered by the anticipation of loss. When we feel our control, security, or connection to something hindered, we can quickly slip into an anxious state.

Anger, for its part, is often triggered when we interpret an event as threatening our sense of self. This can be when we feel someone disrespects us or we’re treated unfairly.

A single event, dependent upon circumstances, can trigger any one of the emotions of sadness, anxiety, or anger. It’s not necessarily in the event itself, but the meaning we invoke during the encounter that brings about the emotion.

The event may be constant, but our interpretation is what changes. The emotion that arises, then, is based upon the meaning we’ve applied to the scenario.

Forcing ourselves to just feel differently when an emotion arises doesn’t work because we’re not rewriting the underlying story of why the emotion appeared in the first place. If we’re not examining the underlying story, then we’re only ever treating the surface.

Having emotional agility, being able to quickly pivot once an emotion arises within us, therefore, can only begin when we can figure out the story that is triggering the emotion in the first place.

There is a space between the event and the emotion that arises. It’s small, often invisible at first, but with time and practice can be seen.

Our goal is to grow this space so there is a clear pause between stimulus and emotion.

We can start building this gap by reflecting upon ourselves, asking questions such as:

• What is the meaning of this situation?

• What is an assumption I am making?

• Why is this making me feel this way?

• Why do I care about this?

• What conclusion have I reached?

We are naturally prone to faulty thinking. Often times, the negative emotions in our lives are arising because of dysfunctional thoughts: catastrophizing, personalizing, generalizing.

After some practice observing the rise of the emotion and questioning its origin, however, we can begin to see not just our own logic and why we reacted the way we did, but patterns in our thinking that lead us into similar responses time and time again.

No longer do we need to live with an event and our knee-jerk reaction to it. Instead we can begin to understand the narratives playing beneath the surface.

The emotions we experience are not random, they appear because of the meaning we’ve assigned to the events we encounter.

Meaning may shape our emotions, but it is our awareness that reshapes the meaning.

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Last month we explored the theme of restraint.

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Introduction to Monthly Theme

“…emotional rigidity—getting hooked by thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that don't serve us—is associated with a range of psychological ills, including depression and anxiety. Meanwhile, emotional agility being flexible with your thoughts and feelings so that you can respond optimally to everyday situations is key to well-being and success.” - Susan David

Emotions run through us each and every day, dictating much of how we perceive the world. They color our vision, signal what matters, alert us to potential danger. Without emotions, we would have a hard time navigating life.

But emotions can also imprison us.

Once an emotion arises it can hang around, replaying over our mind, shifting how we interpret the world. The emotion of a moment can become the mood of an afternoon, a day, or a lifetime.

Anger, for example, was described by the Stoic philosopher Seneca as “the ugliest and most savage of all emotions” because of its ability to stick with us and rage on until it harms both others as well as ourselves.

“…no space is left for Reason once passion has been ushered in and given jurisdiction. From that point on it will do what it wants, not what you allow... once it has entered and made its way through your gates, it takes its prisoners and grants no terms.”

He wasn’t condemning emotions outright, rather, he understood how easily they can takeover our lives.

Emotions are necessary to live a flourishing life, but they cannot manage it.

Our emotional system evolved for survival, not the everyday situations we live with today. They’re meant for quick reactionary messaging to our body. See danger—feel fear—run! They are there before we understand them, which means our ability to be emotionally agile begins with understanding their function and finding ways to properly interact with one another.

For the month of February, we’re exploring the theme of emotional agility: how to pivot once an emotion strikes, how to take back control when it seizes us, and how to feel an emotion without being captured by it, and much more.

We are not our emotions, though it often feels like we are.

Anger ignites when we’ve been wronged. Fear surges when we have a close encounter. Grief envelops us when a loved one is gone.

When emotions strike like this they can feel like everything, blanketing the whole world in whatever we’re feeling. The emotions themselves feel personal, like the clothes we wear.

But they aren’t.

Emotions may rise and fall within us, but they are not us.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus had reminded his students that it’s not things themselves but our judgments of things that disturb us.

What Epictetus was teaching his students more than anything was that we will experience life, emotions will arise, but we don’t have to identify with the emotion itself.

This is where the teachings of the Stoics often get misunderstood.

It’s not about emotional suppression. Pushing down an emotion, compressing them and attempting to pretend they don’t exist doesn’t work. It’s like a shaken bottle, the pressure builds until it eventually bursts.

The Stoic response to an emotion is different. It’s not about ignoring but instead acknowledging. A Stoic notices the emotion arise within them. No fighting it back, no giving into it. There is an acknowledgement of its presence without attachment.

We can see the anger rising. We can feel the fear within us. We can experience the grief. But that doesn’t make us an angry person. It doesn’t make us a fearful person. It doesn’t turn us into grief.

There is a space—a small one, but present—between the self and the emotion. Our emotional agility begins when we can recognize this space.

“Your ability to control your thoughts - treat it with respect,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself. “It’s all that protects your mind from false perceptions - false to your nature and that of all rational beings.”

The problem is we often fuse our identity to the emotions, seeing them both as one and the same since it is arising from within us. We say things like “I am angry,” but we ourselves are not anger. Anger is just within us. And emotion that arises and then will eventually fade.

“Anger has arrived” is more appropriate. It rejects identity. It understands the distance between the self and the emotion. When we tie our identities to our emotions, we more easily succumb to being stuck within them with no way out. As Marcus reminded himself:

“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

The key to pivoting out of an emotion is to ask, “what is happening inside me right now? What thought, impression, or reaction is giving rise to this?”

Maybe it is an external force—something at work, a message from a loved one, stress around dinner. But it can also be from thoughts and our thought patterns.

Pivoting from the emotion, though, lives and dies on whether or not we can step back and see the emotion arise within us, detached from the process enough to just observe without tying ourselves, and our identity, to the emotion itself.

The emotion will hit, it will rise within us. We will become angry. We will experience grief. We naturally will encounter fear.

An emotion does not tell the entire story. It is a subjective experience meant to assist in survival. It is powerful, yes, but it is not what defines us.

Not unless we let it that is.

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This month we’re exploring restraint.

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Self-restraint is hard, but moral-restraint is even harder. In an age where polarization and outrage is baked into everything, we must learn to see our morality through the lens of discipline.

Restraint typically is viewed through the lens of the self—the habits were forming, the judgments we’re making, the discipline we’re instilling and things we’re resisting. But restraint is broader than the self. We live in a shared world, one that requires we use restraint when dealing with others.

Today we have opinions that immediately sort people out into groups, we have judgments of those groups, we grandstand our morality as a signal to our in-group, while castigating those in the out-group. We’re not so much concerned with being right so much as wanting to appear right.

And this is not a failure of our moral intuition but rather a byproduct of our current world, and a failure of our restraint.

It’s not that we lack values, or that our values are wrong, it is that we lack the discipline to pause, to slow our judgment down, to ask questions and understand rather than jump to conclusions.

Even before social media and 24/7 news, the Stoics recognized how easy it is to fall prey to this dark side of human nature. Our virtues, and especially the virtue of justice, is compromised whenever we reach certainty prematurely.

As the Emperor of Rome, Marcus Aurelius dealt with everyone from the slick politician to the conniving guard. He knew he’d encounter friends and foe, those who he wanted to detest as well as those he respected.

And yet, the very first entry of book two of his Meditations is a reminder of what it means to live in a shared world.

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.”

Marcus reminds himself, much the way Plato wrote of the ignorance of individuals, that the people who do him harm do so because they know no better. He doesn’t hate them, rather, he works to remind himself that they know not of their wrong-doing.

But then he pivots. He reminds himself that they are like him, that he recognizes his own nature within them.

“But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.”

He grounds himself and his relations with people in the fact that we all are elevated above common animals in that we use the power and privledge of reason, of rationality, that we do not have to rely solely on our emotions and impulses. We are one in that we each share in the collective wisdom of the world.

For this reason:

“And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him.”

And finally, he comes back to our shared humanity. He reminds himself that even though these people will annoy him, even though they may plot against him, want him dead, or wish ill upon him, we are all here, as one, to work together.

“We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”

Marcus is zeroing in on a moral error we all fall prey to: the belief that people act immorally because they are evil. The Stoics knew we were all fallible, that we were susceptible to our emotions, to the pull of appearances.

Marcus is not attempting to be morally indifferent, he’s ensuring he’s morally restrained, disciplined in his judgment of our shared world.

He understands something we all too often forget when we get wrapped up in the polarization game: it’s not our side versus the other that is at stake, it’s our own moral character.

Justice cannot survive injustice towards others. When we group, when we caricature, when we see only our side’s view, we lose our shared humanity, we abandon reason, and we allow our character to falter.

Moral-restraint does not mean no accountability. It doesn’t mean forgetting the rule of law. It doesn’t mean allowing others to walk all over us or allow malice, hatred, and ignorance.

It means suspending judgment long enough to think critically, to see someone as a person and not a label. It means having the courage to try to understand the other side and have a discussion. It means attempting to teach, if the opportunity arises.

Self-restraint may govern our habits but it is moral-restraint that hold together our humanity.

And today’s world, we need moral-restraint more than ever.

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This month we’re exploring restraint.

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“We must make the best of those things that are in our power, and take the rest as nature gives it.”- Epictetus

Many people who become interested in the philosophy of Stoicism assume that the Stoics placed a heavy focus on white-knuckled discipline and being emotionless, or as many have stated, walking around with stiff upper lip.

But Stoic philosophy is actually a much richer philosophy than simply rejecting desires outright.

If one wants to understand a Stoic’s path to discipline, they must understand the desires they have.

Alignment

Each of us has desires in life. We have biological desires, such as the need to sleep, eat, and procreate, but we also have more cultural desires, things such as a specific car or watch we’ve been wanting, the clothes we wear and how we look, the status we have in life.

Each of these desires is tied to a value-judgment or belief in that those desires fulfilled will make us happy—each desire a judgment of what we think will give us a good life.

The problem most of us face, however, is we place more emphasis on desires outside of our control. In essence, we leave of happiness up to things we cannot guarantee.

It is our pursuit of wisdom—practical wisdom—however, that helps us make the proper decisions and pursuits in life.

Epictetus examples this in his Discourses, stating:

“Instead of Socrates and Diogenes you admire the man who can corrupt and seduce the most women. You want to be handsome and you make yourself up to be, though you are not, and you want to show off in glittering clothes to turn the women’s eyes, and if you get hold of some perfume, you think yourself in heaven.”

The first step a Stoic must do is properly align their desires to what it means to live a good life.

Virtue, the Stoics argued, was the path to a good life. It was through virtue that we live in accordance with Nature, using our reasoning faculties to help us know what to want and how to act.

Most of our suffering comes not from wanting too much, but from wanting the wrong things.

Wisdom, therefore, is knowing what’s worth wanting.

Clarity

If we want discipline within our lives, we cannot just force it. Repression does not work as that is just a top-down force that is dependent upon willpower.

It unfortunately can only get us so far. When we’re tired, when our will has been decimated by decisions throughout the day, we fall back into old, engrained patterns.

Discipline that requires force collapses under this, and fatigue reveals your systems—or lack thereof—for handling your desires.

However, when we’ve set our sights on the proper desires, when we’ve aligned properly to what a good life looks like, we’re more prepared to tune out certain temptations.

Rather than being tempted, we’ve re-engineered our minds for the judgments of what to desire. There is no impulse to want the car or to purchase the clothes or to have the best status. We’ve reframed our judgments and focus on the ones in which we can control the outcome.

As the Stoic scholar A.A. Long has put it:

“How we experience the world, and how we experience ourselves, depends through and through on the judgements we form, judgements about the structure of the world, the necessary conditions of human life, goodness, badness, and, above all, what is psychologically ‘up to us’.”

Our judgments shape our experience of the world before a desire, and choice, ever enter the picture.

If we do not know why we want something, what that things value is to us, we can never truly have any discipline for it because we are simply swept away into wanting what the world tells us we should want.

But when we work to understand where our desires spring from, then we have clarity into the judgments we are placing on those wants. From there, we can adjust our thinking, we can re-align ourselves so as to put the focus on virtue.

If we don’t choose our desires, the world will for us.

OnlY the pursuit of virtue can help create the counter-weight needed for desire and in the process help us build discipline and restraint. As Epictetus pointed out:

“For every challenge, remember the resources you have within you to cope with it. Provoked by the sight of a handsome man or a beautiful woman, you will discover within you the contrary power of self-restraint. Faced with pain, you will discover the power of endurance. If you are insulted, you will discover patience. In time, you will grow to be confident that there is not a single impression that you will not have the moral means to tolerate.”

Temptation fades when judgment changes.

You don’t want what you no longer value. Self-restraint is discovered through our judgments, not self-imposed bondage.

Relief

Many of us believe, still, that relief comes from achieving our desires. But as anyone who has accomplished this can attest to, the novelty quickly wears off. When this happens, we pivot and begin looking to fulfill our next desire, whatever it may be.

Desire unchecked may promise relief, but it actually only delivers repetition.

A Stoic understands that relief cannot come from the desire itself, but rather, from having a proper frame of reference for the want in the first place.

The problem isn’t desire, it’s the lens in which we view our yearnings through. Relief, therefore, comes not from getting what we want, but from desiring wisely.

“Philosophizing is virtually this,” Epictetus taught his students, “enquiry into how it is possible to employ desire and aversion without hindrance.”

A Stoic understands that they already have all that is necessary to live a good life. Lack of something is not a condition but a misjudgment.

A Stoic’s discipline does not come from suppressing a desire or forcing one into obedience. It comes from aligning with what is within our control—virtue, character, action.

Restraint appears, then, not from being imposed but naturally through better judgments and alignment.

When we can educate our desires, discipline no longer feels like an effort and instead feels more like freedom.

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This month we’re exploring restraint.

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Many of us tell the same story: if only I were more disciplined, if only I had greater willpower, if only I was more motivated, I’d stop making decisions that weren’t in my best interests.

It’s easy to see why these stories would be our train of thought, we see others with discipline, with motivation and direction, and we can’t help but think we’re somehow missing that.

But Plato viewed our decision-making differently. He famously divided the soul into three parts, using the metaphor of a charioteer and his two horses:

The charioteer represented reason and our reasoning faculties. The first horse was the noble horse, representing our spirit and positive traits such as pride or courage. And the second horse was the unruly one, representing our appetite and desires.

Sometimes, our passions or desires are leading us and our rational brain takes a back seat, but other times it is our reasoning brain that is doing the guiding, steering the unruly horse to align with the noble horse.

Plato expands upon this line of thinking in his work Protagoras by diving into the decisions we make and why we are at times our own worst enemy:

“No one goes willingly toward what is bad, nor toward what he believes to be bad.”

In other words, no one knowingly chooses the worst option for themselves.

That seems perverse we may think, I know plenty of people who time-after-time mess up their lives by making clearly bad decisions.

But to Plato, he believed that when we act against what is best for us, when we willingly choose the worst option, it’s not because we are purposely self-sabotaging, it’s that the bad decision does not appear bad in that moment.

“The power of appearance often makes us wander from the correct judgment, so that we choose great evils instead of small goods, and small evils instead of great goods.”

In other words, our judgments are corrupted by the appearance of the choice before us. While we should be able to know the difference between better or worse in these situations, it is our ignorance, or lack of knowledge, that prevents us from truly making the correct decision.

When in that moment of a decision, we aren’t thinking clearly, we’re thinking through the lens of desire. In that moment, the bad decision is what feels good. We have short-term thinking, our lens is that of impulse, and we cannot help but indulge in the desire that sits before us.

So, rather than fighting the temptation of desire, we give into it, and in so doing, receive a jolt of relief. But in making that decision, we also doom ourselves to the consequences of the bad decision.

It’s not that our knowledge is weak, or the pleasure that sits before us is so great. It is that the inside we need to make the correct decision is absent.

This is why Plato believes that it is not that one is stupid who makes these bad decisions, it’s that they are ignorant to the right decision. Their desire for the bad decision is so overpowering of their reasoning abilities that they cannot, in that moment, make a proper decision because they cannot see clearly.

The unruly horse runs wild and in so doing, the charioteer cannot determine the proper path.

This is why restraint and discipline are so important. They are there to force us to pause. To not rush to a decision. To fight back against the urge of desire.

If pleasure is strong, Plato states, then knowledge must be stronger and guide our choices.

We are, after all, pleasure-seeking creatures. We’re going to make mistakes and choose pleasure over the right choice more often than most of us would like to admit.

• We often seek validation through the praise of others instead of finding it within ourselves.

• We choose the easy work rather than hard work that provides more gratification.

• We choose to eat food we know isn’t good for us just because it is cheaper or more readily available.

But restraint is a muscle we can strengthen. It can give pause to decisions, and by doing so, allows our reasoning abilities to catch up.

We need to know the difference between what is good versus what feels good because ultimately, each decision we make today is a point for, or against, our future self.

It’s not always about having better discipline or stronger willpower or more motivation. Sometimes it’s as simple as slowing down, questioning oneself, the situation at hand.

When desire strikes and we feel the urge to relieve the itch by giving into our impulse, wait, think, and give space.

Not forever, just long enough to see.

Clearly.

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Last month we explored the theme of the self.

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Introduction to Monthly Theme

“Greatness of spirit despises great wealth; it prefers moderate means to abundance. For moderation is useful and life-giving, while abundance harms a person through excess.” - Seneca

We live in a world of abundance but mistake it for freedom of choice.

Everything is available to us at the touch of a button. Food is on demand. Entertainment everywhere we turn. Products delivered to our doorstep. We can do, watch, and buy anything unlike any generation before us.

Yet we seldom stop to ask the question of whether we should want all of this “freedom.”

Freedom of choice, taken to excess, breaks our desire for specificity. It is just one of the many tradeoffs we now encounter.

Abundance without restraint does not liberate but instead overwhelms.

Restraint isn’t about removing so much as aligning with purpose. It’s the ability to choose with intention in a world built for impulse.

For the month of January, we’re exploring the theme of restraint—what it is, how we master it, and how its practice leads to a life of true fulfillment.

We didn’t lose our attention all at once, it was taken from us slowly through incremental changes framed as convenience.

Dopamine is a chemical messenger in the brain that is our “reward” system. Our wants and desires, the cravings, the expectation for rewards, it is all driven by dopamine. In a healthy system, it helps guide desire, reinforce learning, and push us towards what feels rewarding. In short, it is our compass.

The problem is, the compass has been hijacked.

Food is bioengineered to be super palatable. Our phones are designed to be checked compulsively. Entertainment is now frictionless.

We may live in a world of excess but we were optimized into it.

Once habituated, we rarely stop to ask what our behaviors are actually trying to fill such as discomfort, dissatisfaction, and boredom.

Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle saw how easily we could be corrupted into excess and vice. Virtue, he argued, had to be worked on daily, and was dependent upon the scenario one was in.

Everything in life is on a sliding scale wherein on one end you have too much and on the other too little. Known today as Aristotle’s “Golden Mean,” it is our ability to properly judge that helps guide the balance.

Courage is a very helpful virtue to have, but pushed too far and it easily becomes recklessness, putting oneself, and possibly others, in danger. Conversely, cowardice does not allow for appropriate action when needed.

“…in matters concerning action and questions of what is beneficial,” Aristotle wrote, “the agent must consider on each different occasion what the situation demands, just as in medicine and in navigation.”

In a world of excess, we need restraint. But we cannot apply a blanket statement of rigidity, it is fluid to the situation, to each of our circumstance, and therefore, needs thought.

Today, our dopamine systems are allowed to fire non-stop if we allow them. One’s knee-jerk reaction to this may be that we need a dopamine detox, or a retreat of sorts.

But what we really need is practical wisdom, the ability to hold proper judgment in times of tension. We need the ability to distinguish between what is useful and what is just easy.

“A man of practical wisdom [must] take cognizance of particulars,” Aristotle wrote.

We therefore build restraint not through monumental moments or drastic action but proper decision-making through practice in life.

“Men become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, we grow just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising our self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.”

We create restraint from dopamine hits not by trying to eliminate them, but by intelligently aligning our goals and our decisions. It’s about choosing what serves the goal at hand—more focus, greater health, deeper interactions with people.

That’s how we author our lives—not through blanketed removal but through deliberate decision-making.

If we want to succeed within our goals, we must do so through applying restraint with practical wisdom, knowing when and where to let off the gas or use it.

In a world of unlimited excess, restraint isn’t just a virtue, it is necessary for survival.

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This month we’re exploring the theme of the self.

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One our biggest misconceptions around the self is how we interact with time. We think of time as external to us, something we ourselves can measure, something we move through as though we are an object.

But it would appear the opposite is true.

We are not beings in time so much as temporal beings. We therefore shape the narrative around our individual selves through the unfolding of time.

Fixed identity, a stable personality, an independent commanding “me” sitting at the center of it all—this is what it feels like to be alive and human.

But what if the “self” was never meant to be a fixed identity in the first place?

The philosopher Martin Heidegger forced the world to not just rethink the notion of time, but also our place within it. Heidegger‘s Being and Time forces its reader not to think of humans as an object in time such as a rock is, but rather, that we are time.

A rock exists within time.

A mountain persists through time.

And a clock measures time.

But to Heidegger, it is conscious individuals who are themselves time.

Dasein, or being-there, is the ongoing presence of an individual, a life unfolding. It’s not so much that we’re present as we are beings thinking about what it means to be a Being.

Crucially, time passes through us in a temporal manner, described by Heidegger as occurring through three dimensions:

• The Future: What we aim towards, our future oriented self.

• The Past: What has already happened to us including things outside of our control such as the when and where of our birth, the body we inherit, and the early life experiences that shape us.

• The Present: The engagement with our past and our adjustment/alignment toward the future such as coping, struggling, adapting to the world.

To Heidegger, everything is shaped through our future projection of the self. We interpret the past through what we project for the future, and this leads to how we handle the present.

In other words, to look at the self through this lens, we are continually formed by how we anticipate, remember, and engage with the world around us.

When we readjust our lens of the self this way, we begin to stop the motion of the commander at the center of everything and instead see the self as time meeting activity—temporal actions working between three layers of time.

The problem is, many of us never come to see the world from this perspective, instead relegating ourselves to join the crowd, ro follow others, and to be a part of the world as a conformist.

But Heidegger states we become authentic individuals by viewing ourselves through our finite existence—time being our horizon—and taking authority and authorship of our lives.

We can therefore think of ourselves as projects more than individual selves. At the heart of Heidegger’s philosophy is the question of what it means to be, what an authentic individual is.

This means reimagining what it means to live in the world, what it means to have choice and control over our decisions. We attune our thoughts and actions to the finitude of life, and in the process, become an unfolding Being. Not all possibilities can be pursued—life’s finitude forces us to make decisions for ourselves, as distinct individuals, rather than following all those before us.

We may not have controlled where we were dropped into the world—the time or place, the parents we were born to, our inherited genetics—but because we’re always attuned to a future, we ourselves can take ownership of it all, and reinterpret the past how we wish in light of the future we project and attempt to attain.

This forces us to take responsibility for our actions but also gives us authorship over them, helping make us an authentic Being. This also means that rather than searching for “fixed selves”, we should think instead of ourselves as individuals evolving over time—in a story unfolding and it is our task to see, and write, it.

This all means that to flourish means that we are not really mastering life, but rather, are living life by attuning ourselves to our authentic Being. To truly flourish, then, is to find acceptance with one’s finitude, reject conformity, and instead live with integrity for oneself as it is yours to have.

To understand ourselves as beings in time, we must stop asking the question of “who am I?” and instead ask, “how am I living through time?”

Our true selves is something we must enact through deliberate decision-making. It is drawn up through understanding life is limited and decisions must be made to shape our lives, and therefore ourselves, into the individuals we are to become.

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This month we’re exploring the theme of the self.

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One of the biggest mistakes we make today is conflate the job we have with the value we provide.

Work consumes the majority of our lives. With time, our individual self and the job we work begin to fuse and we tie our worth, identity, and the meaning of our lives to the job. When work is good, we’re good, when work is bad, we’re bad.

Suddenly, our job is meant to carry meaning and purpose to our existence. But one bad move and it feels like our lives are falling apart.

The problem isn’t the job, it’s that we’ve outsourced the meaning of our lives to work, and it was never meant to carry it in the first place.

Over sixty years ago, the philosopher Hanna Arendt saw the speed of productivity and how it was already beginning to impact the everyday worker.

In The Human Condition, Arendt detailed how the modern day working culture was compressing the meaning of worker’s lives. As she explored in the book, there are three forms of human activity—labor, work, and activity.

Labor represents our biological needs such as finding food, shelter, and security. Labor is never finished, it must be done again and again as it is cyclical and the product is always consumed and in need of replenishment.

Work, in contrast, is about creating something that stands the test of time, or is durable. It is about not just existing within the world but reshaping it to help us continue to thrive. The purpose of work is linked to an end goal outside of pure consumption. Work is world building—tools, systems, and structure.

Finally, action is our expression of who we are—it is the self. It is driven by what we say, do, and choose. Meaning enters the world through our actions as presence, not output. It is who we are, not just what we produce.

Modern society, however, has become nothing but labor, a lifecycle of endless production and consumption. Over time, action has been eroded and the reflective nature for the self has been replaced with endless efficiency or busyness. The self recedes and busyness fills the void.

When we remove our self from the equation, we may have more production, but we lose revelation.

The compression of labor, work, and action into a single entity is clear in today. everything can now be summarized as productivity.

Virtue has become efficiency, identity output.

The self shrinks in this type of work culture. It wedges itself in to whatever role it has to play.

But the self is not defined by work. It does not stop with the job. Rather, the self continues and grows.

Life today is being defined more by the accomplishments we achieve rather than any other aspect of life. But work wasn’t designed for this, and the weight of meaning, purpose, and identity cannot be withstood.

We cannot place such an unbearable weight on work. One bad economy, one round of layoffs, one bad performance review and suddenly our entire world is altered.

we have to step back and ask ourselves, “What do I carry outside of work? What values?”

Virtues—courage, wisdom, justice—all things we carry outside the job that help build not only our moral compass but the intrinsic motivations we feel, that help drive our engagement with life.

These our ours, all ours, and no job can, or should have the right to take those away. Work can help us express ourselves, but it cannot hold it.

A meaningful life is not built by finding the perfect role, but by becoming the kind of person who can bring meaning into whatever role they inhabit.

Work may be the vehicle, but it can never do the driving. Only we can.

When we can reclaim that distinction, the self can learn to breath again.

Before you go…

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Thank you for reading Mind Candy. If you enjoyed this work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Or if now isn’t the right time, please share to someone who could benefit.

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D.A. DiGerolamo

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.