A man who reads old books and does hard things becomes very difficult to control.
He has prophets, God, generals, poets, sailors, fighters, kings, fugitives, and saints moving around inside him.
The feed offers him a trend.
He hears the dead laughing.
@jean__marie_ In summary delusional prior beliefs that forces a man to try several rounds leads to collapse of dignity with probability of 1 meaning guaranteed
Tolstoy believed most men die without ever truly living.
He explains in his novella, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich."
Protagonist Ivan spends his entire life doing what society told him was "proper":
Get a good career, model wife, follow aristocratic social practices.
To an outsider, he looks successful, but a closer look reveals that Ivan's soul is rotting from the inside out. He grows ill, and on his deathbed, becomes haunted by a horrifying realization:
"What if my entire life was a lie?"
Ivan's life of vanity and decadence led to emptiness and loneliness. Even his friends and family don't care for the dying man.
Tolstoy's insight is that the greatest human tragedy is not death itself, but reaching death only to discover that you never truly lived at all.
Modern people tend to think of death as a distant abstraction that applies to humanity in general, but somehow not to themselves personally. Tolstoy shatters this illusion:
He shows that most know intellectually they will die, yet they live as though they are immortal. They distract themselves with status, entertainment, careerism, and social approval, such that they never have to confront what mortality actually means. But the terrifying power of death is that it destroys one's illusions.
And in that moment, all the things society told you mattered suddenly reveal themselves to be hollow.
However, Tolstoy does not present this realization as nihilistic... in fact, quite the opposite.
He suggests that only by fully confronting death can man begin to live authentically. Only when you realize your time is finite do cowardice and conformity lose their grip over you.
The fear of death, then, is not something to suppress, but something capable of awakening the soul.
A man who learns how to *die* is finally capable of learning how to live.
The soul is not upgraded by books or by thinking or by wanting to be better, the soul is upgraded by pressure that kills everything fake in you. the way fire does. gold is not purified by being admired, it is thrown into heat until everything that is not gold burns away. and what is left is not beautiful because someone made it beautiful, it is beautiful because there is nothing left to lie. war produces poets, peace produces advertisers. collapse produces saints, comfort produces consumers. this is not an opinion, this is history. read it, and the pattern is so blatant it is stupid how anyone misses it. the best human beings you have ever met were made in the worst times, and the emptiest human beings you have ever met were made in the times that should have been the best
there's fuck you money, but then there is fuck you skills. you can be so skilled that you don't actually have to care about what people think. you'll be fine no matter what
The only advice i would give a son is the world hates you until you become useful. then it pretends it never hated you, and you must remember that it did, or you will start believing the love is real. and that is how they tame you