New Normal Digest #8
Thank you! A brief guide to gratitude.
I’d originally planned something different for this edition of New Normal Digest, but as #8 got delayed by a week, I dropped that plan to concentrate on something perchance more positive.
There is plenty to keep most of us awake at night. I probably don’t have to enumerate, so I won’t. I don’t want to get off track here.
There’s also plenty to be grateful for. To give thanks for.
Thanksgiving is a day of just that: thanks giving. Giving thanks. Whether to God, or to others, for what we have and what they do for us.
I want to say Thank You to my readers. I’ve not been gifted with a large audience. But I am grateful for those of you who show up when I post something. That is whether you agree with me or whether you disagree (as a very small handful of my readers do).
Thanksgiving is not a day for politics. It’s not a day to talk business. It’s a day to avoid divisions. Sadly, that hasn’t been true for a lot of people this year. Family members disinvited other family members from Thanksgiving dinner because of who they voted for.
That’s taking politics too seriously. It’s definitely not something I would do.
This may be coming a day late, but only because these editions come on Fridays, not Thursdays.
Other writers have done something similar. Sasha Stone, for example, writes a lot of pretty dark stuff in here. But yesterday she posted this, which I’ve left unedited.
I feel grateful that we live in a free country with free speech because only that has led to the rise of alternative media, which has been my lifesaver.
It has been a transformative year for me, that’s for sure. I never thought it would go the way it did. When I got online 30 years ago, I mostly did it because it felt like a world I could control. That has been true until recently. There is so much I couldn’t control about how the last four years have played out.
I remember after I gave birth to my daughter, I was fretting that it hadn’t gone perfectly. It was 18 hours of labor, and I had an epidural. The nurse said to me, “Healthy mom, healthy baby, and that’s all that matters.” She was right. I think about that a lot, especially now. I always feel grateful when I wake up alive. And grateful that most everything on my body still works, at least for now. And finally, grateful for this country and our vote. Healthy people, healthy country. We got this.
This is a big thank you to so many of you who have been here for the past four years, some only just recently. At least we all know that we’re not alone, which has been the best thing about this Substack for me. In truth, it’s been my salvation.
Not entirely free of politics, but as the saying goes, close enough for government work.
Note what’s here, whether explicitly or by implication, that’s worth being grateful for, which hopefully all of us can relate to:
living in places where free speech is possible, even if not perfectly protected.
alternative media online, which is the only environment many of us have to publish and be seen.
family, be it just memories of deceased relatives, or the spouse we have now (I have to add gratitude that she puts up with me), or the children that have entered our lives.
health: many of us presently have major challenges, or lesser ones, but we’re endured and can be grateful both for the days past and the days to come. It’s worth remembering that we’re not entitled to these days. Treat them like gifts from God, whatever your circumstances.
challenges that have arisen over the past four years, or eight years, or twelve years, however you want to enumerate. Facing challenges courageously and honorably, with ethics in mind, makes us stronger and better.
transformations: the result of such thoughts as these, reminders to ourselves of what we’ve been given. So often we focus on what we lack instead of what we have.
Ryan Holiday is probably the leading entrepreneur of Stoicism. I just completed my second excursion through his Stoicism 101 course.
One of my ambitions, before I die—call me crazy, that’s your choice—is to undertake the kind of integration of Stoicism and Christianity that Aquinas attempted with Aristotelian philosophy and Roman Catholicism. Aquinas became a pivotal figure in the history of ideas, and his legacy includes natural law theory and very possibly the mindset that was needed for the scientific revolution. This was the firmly grounded belief that the universe we seek to understand is intelligible to us, to the human mind, in specific ways that enable us to predict the future, at least somewhat, based on the past, and to make use of our discoveries to improve our lives individually and collectively.
Holiday has done a great deal to point out the gratitude the ancient Stoics expressed despite having endured circumstances far worse than any of us will ever endure—hopefully!! (See his and Stephen Hanselman’s Lives of the Stoics.)
He penned this for Thanksgiving for the Daily Stoic.
Maybe it seems over the top to regard calamities that sometimes befall us as “gifts of the gods” (or, for Christians, God’s will). Let’s look at it.
Zeno of Citium, who’d spent life as a wealthy merchant, lost everything in a shipwreck off the coast near Athens. He made his way to the city with whatever he could carry, which probably wasn’t much. He could have given up, but turned to philosophy instead. He founded the Stoic school. That shipwreck had become the defining event of his life.
Epictetus, who lived right around the time of Christ, was born into slavery and spent the first thirty years of his life enslaved. He experienced cruelty, including an owner who purposefully broke one of his legs. Epictetus walked with a limp for the rest of his life. Then he discovered Stoic philosophy and best formulated what become what of its touchstone principles: focusing the bulk of your life energies on what you can control and letting go of the rest. In our time, that means letting go of all the noise that’s out there and controlling where we place our attention and efforts.
Marcus Aurelius came from the other end of the wealth spectrum, becoming Emperor of Rome—then the most powerful position in the world—and possibly the only true philosopher-king in history. Marcus Aurelius was more than aware of his own faults and failings which he struggled with daily, recording his efforts in a journal originally written for his eyes only but which was discovered, preserved, and comes down to us as the Meditations, by any standard a philosophical classic.
During his reign, Marcus Aurelius endured pandemics, wars, and internal rebellions. He had to bury several of his own children.
I’ve discussed these philosophers’ lives in more detail previously.
The point is, the Stoics knew hardship. Theirs was a cruel and violent world, filled with deprivation. But they cultivated gratitude.
Worth noting as an exemplar of modern-day Stoicism would be the late Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale, drawn to Epictetus as a student.
Stockdale was shot down by enemy fire over what was then North Vietnam, taking captive, and spent several years as a POW. He was isolated, humiliated, and brutally tortured by his captors.
The fact that he’d committed passages from Epictetus’s The Enchiridion (“Manuel”) enabled him to endure; focusing on what he could control enabled him to develop a secret communication system to use to reach out to his fellow POWs, to shore them up and encourage them not to lose all hope.
I’ve recently written in greater detail about the relationship and applicability of Stoicism to our present political moment here. (That link should get you past Medium’s paywall.)
But back to the case for gratitude.
It beats negativity and resentment. The latter get us nowhere. Gratitude, if cultivated, reminds us of what we have, not what we lack. Too often, we focus on the latter.
I’ve periodically kept a gratitude journal, writing down two or three things each morning that I’m grateful for, including the coming of morning itself. It might be a useful exercise if my readers tried this as well.
This is not just about Thanksgiving holidays, in other words. Cultivating gratitude is a useful mental and spiritual activity I recommend to readers, as part of my giving back. It has helped me.
[Author’s note: this will be the last New Normal Digest. I originally promised a minimum of ten, conditional on more subscribers, but in the absence of more subscribers—and due to the pressure of other commitments—I’ve decided this has served its purpose. Barring a flood of protests in the comments section, therefore, or in my email, New Normal Digest will be discontinued after today.]
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Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several universities in the Southeastern U.S. He authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academia itself.
In 2012 he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: the problems of the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere. The problems are problems of Western civilization as a whole.
As to whether he’ll stay in Chile … stay tuned!
He has a Patreon.com page. Donate and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.
Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.
His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.
His paranormal horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) can be gotten here.
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