Or to put it a different way:

“It is better to starve to death in a calm and confident state of mind, than to live anxiously amidst abundance.”

–Epictetus

If you were to take Stoicism seriously, you would take this Stoic proverb seriously too: You would live and believe as if it were literally true.

But in the meantime I offer this, as an alternative .

The Liberating Truths of Anarchism, Atheism, and Nihilism (ASMR)

Truthfully … I could only get through the first half hour of it before the digressive clauses and rambling knifed my patience. But that was enough. It’s a good insight.

No god.

No master.

No nothin’.

I could write for quite a while on what each of the pieces really means, and how they fit almost seamlessly together, and in fact I have been doing so, just … inside my own head, rather than here.

Maybe I’ll put it down. On the page. Down like a rabid skunk.

Or maybe I’ll glance off it like a marble in zero G.

Either way it’s okay, because there ain’t

No rules

neither.

***

The distance to the Moon is about 240,000 miles, which is a little hard to imagine, but you can do it. Forty or fifty round trips from New York to LA, right?

To the Sun, it’s 93 million. Eight minutes at the speed of light.

Don’t know about you, but I cannot relate.

How many miles to the next closest star?

Proxima Centauri is about 25 trillion miles from here.

It’s not a distance the brain of a mammal can easily apprehend.

And that’s just the closest one.