Well, surprisingly good. Assuming I have no job, stuck alone in an asocial country, miss my home, and had a much worse mental state before entering pandemics.
TL;DR: stoicism rocks. the best thing I've adopted ever.
Secret? First of all, stoicism. When COVID started, I got into and quickly merged into my philosophy. I still have a lot to learn, read and internalize (finish the big 3 stoics, yudkovsky, taleb, kahneman), but even now it works pretty well. It successfully moves away from the orthodox version, so I'd recommend you to meditate a lot about the statements it gives instead of just accepting them. For example, I think I started to understand how all this "you can shape reality with your mind" stuff works. Nothing magical, just a proper mindset which is surprisingly similar to the stoic one.
Second - of course, I have savings. I anticipated a crisis long before so I started to stash money. In the best case, I have a couple of years of runaway (and even more if I return home).
Third - I have some ideas to build. So I plan to enrich my github / cv and in the meantime apply to interesting jobs (yes, I'm still picky). I planned to build the stuff anyway, so why not do it in a comfortable manner (and not tired after day job in the evenings). Plus, I can rehearse the proper escape to full-time tinkering which I hope the future will allow me to do.
Fourth - the upside of being a small asocial country is that it has already removed the quarantine. So I've already started going to coworking and got an awesome boost to productivity.
This. Being prepared and thinking clearly is the cornerstone of being able to practice indifference to fate.
I'm also in a good shape thanks to that philosophy, and moreover - thanks to a life I've managed to generate for myself. One can't work without the other.
And I'm not a kind of lucky and happy-face hipster taking success in life for granted. Life has been throwing enormous problems at me. I have no idea what I would do without a proper philosophical backbone in order to deal with that.
I almost spit out my coffee when you mentioned TALEB as a stoic, much less a member of the “big three”
He’s as far from stoic as I can possibly imagine. His hairtrigger easily offended argumentative twitter presence is maybe even more sensitive and reactive and thin skinned than trump.
Taleb is not a stoic, but his works provide a great framework for dealing with uncertainty: for example, the whole concept of antifragility... benefiting from misfortunes... seems like core stoic concept, isn't it?
Regarding his behavior. I think he just enjoys being human. After all, if he was ruled by emotions he'd not survive the trader job.
The most basic definition of stoicism is "indifference to fate". In that scope Taleb definitely is a stoic. His approach toward stoicism, though, is less philosophy focused and more (that's kind of unique) targeted toward statistics. Ancient stoics don't write about their philosophy in such a way, but the logic remains similar. The whole concept of antifragility Taleb has promoted is pure "opportunistic" stoicism. Taleb is like a Seneca the Younger, minus some charm ;)
Regarding his online presence, anyone knowing his works also knows that he's using Twitter purely to mess with people. He stated that many times in his Incerto series.
Sometimes it's easy to forget what is the actual core of a given philosophy / enterprise / etc. Hence my whole comment. It's worthwhile to know, I think, that stoicism has a very important component comprised of pure logic, which Taleb seems to be hyped about (not without a reason).
I wouldn't call Taleb a member of the top-3 stoics though. He's balancing on the verge of being an outcast rather than hanging out with mainstream stoic crowds.
He reminds me of Ayn Rand hating on government handouts while taking them. He promotes stoicism while practicing the opposite.
You can say he’s promoting “logical stoicism” just like Ayn Rand fans can say that “it’s okay to be ideologically against handouts while taking them,” but we both know deep down that these people aren’t practicing what they preach.
I like Taleb a lot but it took me a little while to understand that he was writing an idealized version of himself and his philosophy that is frankly fictional but still has great value.
TL;DR: stoicism rocks. the best thing I've adopted ever.
Secret? First of all, stoicism. When COVID started, I got into and quickly merged into my philosophy. I still have a lot to learn, read and internalize (finish the big 3 stoics, yudkovsky, taleb, kahneman), but even now it works pretty well. It successfully moves away from the orthodox version, so I'd recommend you to meditate a lot about the statements it gives instead of just accepting them. For example, I think I started to understand how all this "you can shape reality with your mind" stuff works. Nothing magical, just a proper mindset which is surprisingly similar to the stoic one.
Second - of course, I have savings. I anticipated a crisis long before so I started to stash money. In the best case, I have a couple of years of runaway (and even more if I return home).
Third - I have some ideas to build. So I plan to enrich my github / cv and in the meantime apply to interesting jobs (yes, I'm still picky). I planned to build the stuff anyway, so why not do it in a comfortable manner (and not tired after day job in the evenings). Plus, I can rehearse the proper escape to full-time tinkering which I hope the future will allow me to do.
Fourth - the upside of being a small asocial country is that it has already removed the quarantine. So I've already started going to coworking and got an awesome boost to productivity.