Hypomnemata and the Humorist
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THE STOIC PHILOSOPHER
A quarterly eJournal published by the
Marcus Aurelius School
of the College of Stoic Philosophers
JAN/FEB/MAR 2018: Issue #25
Founding Editor: Erik Wiegardt
“Hypomnemata and the Humorist”
Steen Nielsen is a stand-up comedian, the kamikaze of the theater, who also writes cartoon
captions and just about anything that requires an exceptional sense of humor and pays
money. Recently, he was out of work, lost his apartment, and separated from his wife and
children. So, no money, no home, and a family lost - all at the same time. Steen was also a
student in his final term in the Marcus Aurelius School program, the term when original
hypomnemata is required. Here's what he wrote about this extraordinary time in his life.
Note: The assignment for the MA student is to relate some event in one's life that prompts
one to reflect on the Stoic principle or concept involved. This is what Marcus Aurelius did in
his Meditations. The passage can be a single sentence or several paragraphs, which is what
Marcus did. Steen choose to include not only a brief hypomnemata but also the story that
prompted the passage. It may surprise the reader to discover that Steen is Danish, and
English is his second language. First the hypomnemata passage in bold italics, then the story
that inspired it.
*
Ambitions and Children
Do not let your children become an excuse for your own ambitions. It is natural to want
the very best for our children, but we should heed the words of Epictetus when he said
that it is better to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich; for the hopes of the
instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant.
Go forth each day and do your very best to provide for your family. Share with them
the fruit of your hard work and let them enjoy it, but
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above all provide them with an
example to emulate by showing them a man doing what he was meant to do.
[Greeting]
My sincerest apologies for not writing yesterday. They are doing some sort of renovations on
the building where I'm currently staying, and apparently they accidentally dug up some cables
cutting off internet access for the entire block. Ironically, my hypomnemata for this week was
about not worrying too much about hard-to-meet deadlines. :D
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My hypomnemata was inspired by two separate events, but they both concerned a forced
sense of urgency that I consider a permeating trait of modern society. The first happened,
when I was faced with a deadline for writing 20 cartoon strips. I did, but I was only really
happy with 15 of them. I really hate missing deadlines, but the truth is that I simply couldn't do
the job to my own satisfaction in the time allotted.
The second was when I was having dinner with a friend. There was this big award show for
YouTubers in Denmark a few weeks ago, and my friend asked me if I would be interested in
having my own YouTube-channel. It seemed like easy money; this one teenager made about
$200,000 last year filming himself playing computer games while still living with his parents,
and one girl dropped out of high school when she earned $100,000 in her second year of
giving make-up tips online, but even more than the money these young people seemed driven
by a desire to be seen. A natural extension, I suppose, of the celebrity culture championed by
reality television.
Anyway, my daughter and I are on a mini-vacation in Copenhagen, which has messed up my
morning meditations a little bit....I’ve spent a lot of time with my kids this past week, so
naturally I have spent a lot of time contemplating my duties as a father, too. I firmly believe
that the greatest inheritance any parent can leave for his children consists not of material
possessions but in the means to live a happy life regardless of the circumstances they may
find themselves in.
My daughter got me this little book for my birthday last year called “My Dad, My Hero.” It’s
about 20 pages long, each with a cute little drawing and a single line of text like “Thanks for
believing in me”, “Thanks for teaching me new things”,
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and stuff like that. It’s really just a cute
little gift, but I find myself reading it more or less every day to remind me what it means to be
a good father.
I think one of the hardest things about being a Stoic is applying the Dichotomy of Control not
to your own life but to that of your children. My daughter auditioned for and was accepted into
The Royal Theater’s School of Ballet last week, which is absolutely fantastic, but in the days
leading up to it I found myself far more nervous than before any exam I’ve ever taken myself.
She loves ballet, and she loves the idea of going to a school that lets her dance every day of
the week, and I had no idea what to tell her if she wasn’t accepted.
Constant worry often seems to be just part of being a parent, but then I witnessed a mother at
the bakery section of the local supermarket burst into tears because they mixed up the order
for her son’s birthday cake. Meanwhile her son, this perfectly stoic 5-year-old, tried to calm
her down, saying “It’s OK, Mom. How about we just buy that one with the strawberries
instead? That looks good, too.” Sometimes our kids teach us as much as we do them.
Now, we can’t expect children to take a Stoic stance every time, but can we honestly claim to
do so ourselves? Kids can be remarkably brave, yet sometimes their entire world will implode
because they picked up a twig and forgot it at a bus stop 5 minutes later. In those cases, it is
our duty to comfort them, but we must also give them credit by not worrying needlessly.
Best Regards,
Steen
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Offense
Do not accept the attempts of other people to restrict your free speech. Claiming the
right not to be offended is deeply irrational, and accommodating people claiming such
a right is impossible. Just be sure that what you say is worth saying.
[Greeting]
Once again I must apologize for being late; it seems this being homeless thing doesn't come
with a reliable internet connection. The good news is that being without access to the internet
has given me loads more time to read and meditate. Once you get through the withdrawal
symptoms I find the disconnected world quite enjoyable! Anyway, I have found a room for rent
starting next month, so I should be able to maintain a schedule that is a bit more stable than
borrowing a different couch every night.
This week I have spent a lot of time wondering about people being offended. I don't know if
people are more easily offended these days or if the Internet just provides a platform for them
to easily vent their frustrations, but it seems that every week there is some sort of outcry
about often quite trivial matters. As a comedian I'm often asked questions like "is there
anything you wouldn't joke about?" or "where do you draw the line?" and I've always been of
the opinion that there is no such thing as off-limits as long as the joke is funny enough to
justify itself.
A rather spectacular murder investigation is currently unfolding in Denmark. This eccentric
inventor type (who was actually working on the world’s first privately built spacecraft) took a
Swedish reporter for a trip in his home-made submarine (I swear I’m not making this up!) after
which she went missing, until her torso washed ashore a few weeks later followed by her
arms and legs about a month after that.
Anyway, a chain of supermarkets found themselves
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in a bit of hot water when they started
selling severed plastic limbs as Halloween decorations recently. People were complaining
how insensitive it was to sell such a thing in light of such a gruesome murder. It wasn’t a lot of
people complaining, but social media allows even very small groups of people to make a
remarkable amount of noise.
I always wonder where such outrage comes from. Note that the victim was Swedish, so there
was little chance that any close friends or relatives would find themselves in that particular
supermarket. Last year the same chain faced a similar outcry for the exact same product
when people thought the decorations reminded them of ISIS decapitation videos. I would say
it was even less likely for the families of those victims to find themselves in a Danish
supermarket.
The interesting thing is that the people complaining are very rarely the people that might
actually be directly affected. If the victim’s family had asked the stores in her home town to
skip the dead bodies this year out of respect and stick with ghosts and jack-o-lanterns, that
would be somewhat more understandable, but the complaint was made by complete
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strangers taking offense in the entirely hypothetical scenario that someone else MIGHT be
distressed IF they were confronted with the display in question.
It’s a curious thing, taking offense on behalf of others, and I’m not sure it’s something they
would even want. I used to date a girl who was brutally raped at knife-point when she was
younger. She was remarkably open about the ordeal, and said (as stoically as anyone I’ve
ever heard) that there was really nothing she could do about it neither then nor now, and that
she was determined not to let it ruin her life. She claimed that she would never feel defeated
by her attacker unless I stopped doing rape jokes out of a failed sense of respect.
As Stoics we are taught not to let outside things affect our happiness, nor should we attempt
to control such things, and we certainly shouldn’t let people complaining on Facebook affect
us, but as a comedian I find the whole phenomenon of taking offense interesting.
I have always enjoyed the challenge of finding the comedy within the tragedy, and as a result
I have stepped on a lot of toes over the years. This has never been an end in itself, and I
really don’t like comedians who deliberately go for the purely shock-induced laughs, but the
truth is that it’s impossible to avoid every sore spot in a room. If I were to really play it safe I
could never do jokes about public transportation just in case somebody’s dad once jumped in
front of a train, and even if I did an entire set about cute little puppies someone would
inevitably have just lost their beloved dog.
Two years ago someone posted a list on Facebook about things that one should never joke
about. There were 11 points on his list, and what struck me was how incredibly arbitrary that
list was. Why would cancer be worse
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than any other deadly disease? I actually ended up
doing an entire one-hour show based on that list because I needed to show that of course you
can make jokes about cancer, suicide and people’s sexuality. (Ironically, I guess you could
say that I was a bit offended by people being offended.)
Claiming the right not to be offended is deeply irrational, and accommodating people claiming
such a right is impossible. I do not revel in the pain of others, and I make sure that I don’t (in
my mind) needlessly offend, but if I believe I have a truly great joke about incest, rape or the
Holocaust I refuse to pull my punches out of fear that someone in the audience might be
personally affected by it.
It escapes me why some people seemingly WANT to feel offended, and it seems to me that
the world would be a brighter place if we accepted the fact that there just might be something
a little bit funny in even the most tragic of circumstances instead of snuffing out the only spark
of light in the darkness.
Best Regards,
Steen
* *
Practice
The aim of the Stoic should be not just to study the concepts of Stoicism, but to
practice them to the point where he can apply them effortlessly in any given situation.
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[Greeting]
I did a gig last week in another city. When the show was over they didn’t have the money I
was promised, and on my way home I just missed the last train to Copenhagen and had to
wait for 2.5 hours for the late night train. It was 5:30 before I finally got home, and when I
woke up, I got an e-mail telling me that the club I performed at had to do just a little bit of
bookkeeping before I can get my money, so God knows when or if I’ll ever get it.
Now, not getting paid is obviously a problem, but whether or not they actually do pay me is
really out of my control. I could of course threaten legal action, but the gig wasn’t that well
paid to begin with, so I don’t really think the time and effort would be worth it. What I did was
send an e-mail telling the guy who booked me that they really need to pay the acts they hire,
and that I will be expecting my payment this week. I then proceeded to warn my fellow
comedians about him - recommending that they ask for money up front if they ever decide to
go there.
Missing the train actually ended up being the best part of the evening. The train station was
really peaceful at night, so I decided to sit down and meditate for a while in the fresh, cool air.
Later a stranger showed up who had also missed his train. He had a few cans of beer in his
bag, I went to get us some snacks from a vending machine, and we ended up having a really
fun conversation. When I finally got home, I decided that I wouldn’t get any meaningful work
done anyway, so I took the next day off to just rest and relax in good conscience.
The most interesting part of it all was that I never really stopped to think in terms like “what
would Epictetus say?” or “what would Marcus Aurelius do?” I just intuitively applied the
Dichotomy of Control to the
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situation at hand and didn’t really think about it until the next day
when I sat down to write about it in my journal. I really feel like the Stoic mindset is becoming
second nature to me.
I believe that that night is a great example of how the true value of Stoicism lies not in
theoretical studies but in practical application; I could have saved my analysis for the next day
and concluded that in retrospect things might not be quite as awful as they seemed, but that
would still leave me feeling miserable at the time. Instead I managed to turn things around on
the spot and have a beer and a few laughs with a new friend.
Best Regards,
Steen
* *
Hardship
Listen well to others' tales of hardship. You may find that their struggles make your
own seem trivial by comparison.
[Greeting]
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I found a room for rent and moved in last week. My new room mate is a 40-year-old Afghan
refugee who is honestly one of the most hospitable men I have ever met. Every night he
brings home a bag of fruit and vegetables from his job at the local greengrocer and cooks a
big pot of soup or stew. He told me I was always welcome to eat with him or help myself to
anything in the fridge. The night I moved in we shared a pot of tea and had a good, long
conversation.
He didn’t go into details, but apparently he had to flee Afghanistan in 2008 when he “ran into
some trouble” after assisting coalition forces. He had to leave his wife and 5 kids behind, and
have been trying to get them up here ever since. For four years he didn’t have any contact at
all with his family, until a friend of his told him that his wife had died, and that his children had
fled to Pakistan with his mother. His Mother later died, leaving his eldest daughter, aged 17 at
the time, to take care of her 4 younger siblings. Even now he has warned them not to mention
that he lives in Denmark out of fear that they may be kidnapped and held for ransom by
people who mistakenly believe everyone in Europe to be rich.
The curious thing is that I detected no desperation in his voice, as he told these stories; he
just shrugged and sighed “So many problems...” as he took another sip of his tea.
Desperation would be perfectly understandable; personally, I find it hard to spend a week
away from my kids, and I can only imagine having to leave them behind in a war-torn country
and not hearing from them for years. Yet, this guy fully accepts that getting his children up
here isn’t really up to him. He just filed the proper paperwork and patiently awaits a decision.
When Immigration Services told him that he needed to have a
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place of a certain size for his
family to live in, before his application could be processed, he went out and got a 2-bedroom
apartment far too big for his actual needs, rented out one room and asked for extra hours at
his job to pay the rent.
This guy has faced adversity most of us can barely imagine, and yet he keeps getting up
every morning to go to work, he keeps his apartment nice and clean and finds the time to
socialize and cook for his roommate. I do not doubt that his children inhabit his thoughts every
day, but he fully accepts that he is already doing all he can for them, and prefers spending the
rest of his time socializing with friends rather than worry needlessly.
The whole conversation put a lot of my own problems into perspective. It was almost like a
cheat sheet for negative visualization: “OK, so you don’t see your kids every day? Well, at
least they’re not trapped in a war zone with no means of contacting you.” As Stoics I believe it
is important for us to listen to the accounts of people who have lived through hardship in order
to discover how much a man can truly endure.
Best regards,
Steen
* *
A Way of Life
Epictetus was right when he said that philosophy is a way of life. Do not simply read a
book or two and expect to be able to apply their principles. Stoicism must be practiced