Tucker has this unique ability to reflect on things that haven’t happened yet. It’s pretty subtle normally, but when you start to look for it, it sort of feels like that TV show where the guy gets tomorrow’s newspaper today and Tucker has already seen the article about himself.
At first, I would get so sucked in that I’d just take for granted that they already happened and be right there alongside him in that hypothetical world. Then, I started to notice it more and got angry, like it was dishonest or maybe delusional. Now, I’ve realized that it’s almost identical to something that I do which is to get a taste of an experience, extrapolate it to its end and then move on to the next lesson. I think that’s why I’ve been able to cram so much inside the last two years. I’m not so upset or judgmental about it anymore because, well now I think I get why I reacted that way.
This is the main tenet of stoicism, ultimately. That if you’re going to spend any time thinking about people’s actions, maybe you should start with your own.
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Bravo
“Philosophy does not promise to secure anything external for man, otherwise it would be admitting something that lies beyond its proper subject-matter. For as the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of statuary bronze, so the subject-matter of the art of living is each person’s own life.” – Epictetus
This quote may assist in the understanding of the reference to Stoicism’s primary tenet. I actually am quite unfamiliar with most aspects of philosophy, hence my interest in the subject.
Was this post supposed to make sense? I can’t for the life of me figure out what you’re trying to say about Tucker, which means I can’t figure out what you’re saying about yourself, how it relates to stoicism, or how that’s important in the grander scheme of things.
It’s like the opposite of a LiveJournal post. Way fewer words than necessary.
Umm–Tucker does something that Ryan was critical about, then he thought about it, figured out that he has an analogous tendency and then decided that the only one he had the right to worry about was himself.
How is that confusing?
No, the post definitely could use some clarification. It’s sort of representative of a broader trend I’m noticing in your posts: casual name drop, brief, vague, disorienting riff on life experience, culminating in a truism. Still better than most other sites though.
Same truism, expressed less stalely:
“Read only your own life, and from this understand the hieroglyphs of universal life!”
-Nietzsche
I’m confused too. Could you elaborate on what prompted this a little more?
The way I see it, is it’s basically consulting an empathetic response to your future self in order to make current judgments and decisions. Well put. If that’s what you mean, then I do the same thing. I’m not sure it’s that rare of an activity, so much as it’s rare to actually heed what you learn from it.
I think Ryan is referring to posts like this:
http://ihopetheyservebeerinhell.com/archives/what_does_a_pro_1.html
Noticing Tucker’s ego is pretty easy. Noticing your own is harder.
The message Ryan is trying to establish in this post: we all lie to ourselves, yet we are not aware of it. When we realize this, we understand how much bullshit our thinking really is. Then he talks about how he can read so many books, which is that he identifies the underlying thesis of a book and applies it to his life. If you really want to know the main message of Ryan’s blog, it is this: there is no meaning in this world; therefore, create your own meaning and make yourself an art pieace.
I’ve been turning it over in my head, and Ryan’s description of Tucker reminds me of a TED talk I saw in which a neuroscientist claims that the basis of intelligence is the ability to predict. Apparently, our brains are constantly weighing one scenario over another, and the more intelligent we are, the likelier our predictions are to be accurate. Assuming this characterization is accurate, I would conclude that Tucker is merely making his own high-level prediction abilities accessible to others, without making it explicitly known that he’s just predicting, rather than describing the past. It sounds like Tucker might get lost from time to time in this process, sifting through the different scenarios his brain comes up with. I wouldn’t call it so much an ability as a unique method of communicating.
I think you guys are reading way too much into this. I’m still working on learning how express what I’m thinking, I’m just not good enough as a writer to do it.
It breaks down like the very simple saying, that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Unfortunately, not TED talk material and not much on creating your own meaning.
It kind of seems like maybe Tucker’s unique ability to reflect on things that haven’t happened yet has been on the fritz for the last year, because he seems to have gotten one or two minor things wrong with his predictions for the success of his movie.
Granted I wrote this a long time ago and you’re just being a troll, but I don’t remember this being particularly complimentary towards Tucker. In fact, I wrote about the subject again a few weeks ago to the same effect.