Affection for Neighbors, Feeling Necessary, & Kindness
Wednesday Wisdoms for September 18, 2024
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living with 3 quotes, 3 observations, and 3 questions.
This email forwarded to you? Are you reading the free version? Click below to adjust your subscription.
Affection for Neighbors
🤨 Quote
“Characteristics of the rational soul: Self-perception, self-examination, and the power to make of itself whatever it wants... Also characteristic of the rational soul: Affection for its neighbors. Truthfulness. Humility. Not to place anything above itself - which is charaaeristic of law as well. No difference here between the logos of rationality and that of justice.”
Marcus Aurelius
Source: Meditations 11.1
Observation 🧐
We’re first and foremost creatures for ourselves.
We experience everything through our own individual lens. To be us is the most unique experience we will ever have.
But when we pull back from this, we have to remember we are part of a larger whole—A single being in a sea of connected parts.
Known as cosmopolitanism, the Stoics viewed others not under different cities or nations but as a single entity. Everyone is worthy of our morality, regardless of where they live.
To the Stoics, this was the bedrock of justice.
So while we have to experience the world through our own individual perception, the world itself is filled with everyone else doing the same thing.
These are our fellow citizens. The ones we were made to work hand-in-hand with to paraphrase Marcus.
It is therefore our duty in life to find ways to help one another, to work with one another, and to build a better and more just world for one another.
🤔 Question
Take a single topic in today’s political landscape and look at it through the lens of cosmopolitanism. How would it differ than today? What positives and negatives would come about?
Feeling Necessary
🤨 Quote
“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
Sebastian Junger
Source: Tribe
Observation 🧐
We are incredibly social creatures, so much so in fact that a solitary life drastically impacts one’s health.
As William Patrick and John T. Cacioppo demonstrated in their book Loneliness, persistent feelings of loneliness and isolation lead to increases in stress hormones, as well as lower immune and cardiovascular function.
Nevertheless, we continue to build these ideas that we’re self-sufficient and need no one—That to be tough in the world means finding ultra independence.
Beneath these misconceptions, however, lies a simple truth: we all want to feel necessary to the world.
Maybe it is we want to feel necessary just for our loved ones, or our community, or in some instances, even our state or country. Regardless, within each of us is a deep desire—a need—to feel necessary to the world.
This stems from our innate need to feel secure bonds to the world, to our family, tribe, and loved ones.
Without it, we’re a ship in an endless sea with no sail or land in sight.
🤔 Question
Sometimes that feeling of necessary doesn’t appear in the form of a person, rather, it does so in the form of a job, vocation, or activity. If this is you, what brings this necessity out in you? Reflecting on it, what inside you drives this?
Beneath the paywall this week we explore the wisdom of Charles Darwin. Click below to support and get access.