It is up to us to choose what we bring up out of our own past
Published in Practical Rationality
Nov 20, 2023 (Medium.com)
Great thinkers set out many insights that can prove helpful for us in our own late modern life. From time to time, I produce short podcast episodes mining and refining those insights. Here’s one from the ancient philosopher and biographer that I’ve found useful!
Plutarch in On Contentment writes:
It is clear from the differences between people’s experiences that everyone has within himself the resources which may lead to contentment or discontent. The jars of good and bad do not sit on Zeus’s threshold but lie in our minds.
Foolish people overlook and ignore good things even when they are present, because their thoughts are always straining towards the future. Intelligent people, on the other hand, use their memories to keep them vivid for themselves, even when they are no longer present.
Anything present is accessible for the minutest fraction of time, and then escapes perception, and consequently foolish people think that it ceases to be relevant to us, or ceases to be ours. This oblivion prevents life being a unity of past events woven with present ones. It divides yesterday from today as if they were distinct, and likewise treats tomorrow as different from today. And it immediately consignes every occurrence to non-existence by never making use of memory.
The school of thought which eliminates growth, on the assumption that being is in constant flux, makes each person in theory different from himself, and then different again. Similarly those who don’t use memory to protect or recover what has gone before, but let it trickle away day by day make themselves in fact incomplete and empty, and in suspense for the day to follow, as if the events of last year, the recent past, and yesterday had no bearing on them, or in short didn’t happen to them.
So this is another thing that unsettles contentment, but not as much as the next factor we must consider. You know how when flies settle on mirrors, they skid off the smooth parts but cling on to places which are rough and scratched. This is an analogy for how people slide away from happy, congenial matters, and get caught up in their memories of unpleasant things.
An even better analogy might be based on the story that in Olenthus there is a place which beetles fall into and are unable to get out of. They go round and round in circles until they die there. Likewise without noticing it, people slip into recalling their bad times, and are unwilling to revive or resuscitate themselves.
What Plutarch is touching on here in this passage is the active role that we have in how we direct our minds to our memories. We can decide to focus on things that we consider to be good, pleasant memories, even memories that might include some pain, but also include some generation of meaning or success, or something else that we frame in a positive manner.
And many of us don’t really take stock of the fact that while we can’t absolutely control our minds and our memories, we do have a role in deciding which things we dwell upon. Whether we ruminate upon negative painful experiences — those of humiliation, those of loss, those of betrayal or so many other possibilities that might be bad for us. Or whether to the contrary we deliberately direct our attention to those things that we know are going to make us feel good.
This doesn’t have to be a pretending that everything is okay. This is instead a therapy for the soul that every one of us, according to Plutarch, is able to engage in at least to some degree. I would suggest that like any other technique of this sort, the more that one does it, the better one gets at it. It’s like building any other habit. It’s hard at first, and then through the force of inertia that comes with the habit generated, it becomes easier and easier.
And so to bring this to a close, Plutarch is saying we need to really think hard about what we’re going to bring out of the storehouse of memory. We have so many options before us. We should pick the ones that will actually conduce to a better life.
If you’d like to year more useful insights, you can check out the other Sadler’s Shorts podcast episodes here.
Sadler’s Shorts — The Podcast
bits of wisdom to help you build a better life
Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of highly popular YouTube videos on classic and contemporary philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. If you’d like to support his ongoing work, bringing philosophy to the broader public, he has a Patreon site where you can donate. You can also donate at Buy Me A Coffee.
Written by Gregory Sadler
·Editor for Practical Rationality
president ReasonIO | editor Stoicism Today | speaker philosophical counselor & consultant | YouTube philosophy guy | co-host Wisdom for Life | teaches at MIAD