Interestingly, this is precisely one of the reasons for my struggle with Stoicism (and Buddhism — you know I believe there to be a lot of overlap). I’m really sorry for the work you’ve lost and don’t want to come over as preachy, I hope you won’t mind I use this unfortunate event of yours to elaborate a bit on this topic that’s been in my mind for months.
There’s pretty much always two ways to go about in life.
You can do as the Stoics and Buddhists do, and expect and learn to live with what they would call ‘suffering’. To acknowledge that it’s all around us, and not be put off when inevitably it ‘falls down upon us’.
Or you just learn how to bloody avoid and mitigate it as much as possible— that tiny little bit of suffering that still remains in our modern Western society.
Concretely: why would you take the risk of (still) writing Word documents which aren’t backed up permanently? There’s things like Google Documents which synchronize in real-time, or there’s Dropbox which synchronizes upon every save. We’re pretty much connected all the time. And even in the infinitesimal chance that Dropbox would get hacked and all its data and backups destroyed, you’d still have local copies on at least one device, but probably multiple.
And this counts for so many things in our society, that I really wonder what this whole Stoic or Buddhist mentality could possibly still be useful for. Granted, 2000 or even 4000 years ago, surely one had much less control over what happened to him or her, and such a mentality definitely proved its worth. There were no internet backups. There was no ‘rain alert app’. There were no insurances. There were no Facebook events to schedule meetups with like-minded people. There were no cafés with 100 beer choices. There was no government instating laws, based on scientific research and big data analysis. There was no effective medicine.
There was war. There were diseases. There was pain. There was lots of drudgery. And there was very little choice — of ways to pass your time, of people you could meet, or things to do with your life.
How silly is it to compare our luxurious situation with theirs, thousands of years ago? I think people hardly understand what they’re comparing — how cruel, ruthless, unpredictable and dangerous the world was back then.
It’s populair in Buddhist circles to say how unpredictable life still is, and how suffering is everywhere. I find that very pretentious, coming from people with our life standards! It’s not! We live in a ridiculously safe, wonderful, predictable, controllable world, where it’s perfectly possible to avoid and mitigate enormous amounts of said ‘danger’, ‘disaster’ or ‘suffering’. The message that Steven Pinker conveys in his 2 bibles about this subject.
Sure — you’ll always have to deal with things like the death of loved ones (although modern science can solve so many illnesses already, and makes life’s end much less agonizing than it used to be), or there’s the odd chance of for instance being the victim of a traffic accident and be paralyzed or lose a limb — but also there, our Western progress, driven by science, by instating laws, regulations and safety checks, is doing a pretty damn good job at reducing the chance of such risks too. Isn’t that what our progress is all about and for? Why not gratefully embrace that? How can we be blind of that?
But even other, much less severe sides of ‘suffering’ are perfectly avoidable, if one chooses to. There’s pretty much always such option:
- Not a good sleeper? You can try hard to learn to sleep better under any circumstance — or you can make sure your bedroom is quiet and dark and you give up on that idea of backpacking with a tent.
- You don’t like losing time in traffic? You can learn to cope with it — or you could move close to your work, or go by train and find productive things to do during the commute.
- Picky about the things you like (hobbies, music style, food and drinks, amusement, standards when going out,…)? Learn (or pretend?) to be happy anywhere and with anything — or, using today’s tools and options, just search for and go to those things and places that you really like — geniuses in our connected and even globalized world have so much wonderful to offer for anyone’s taste.
- Afraid of not having enough financial security? Tough luck. Wait for universal basic income? Maybe marry a rich person in the mean time? Or find a job which will make you enough money yourself.
- Afraid of disasters? Pray. Or get more insurances.
- Etc, etc.
Try for yourself — you can apply this principle to pretty much any aspect of life. There’s pretty much always these two options available.
And I strongly believe that it’s much more sensible, in our culture and time, with the ridiculous amount of luck and opportunities that we have (and should be grateful for!), to just intelligently try to avoid risks and hedonistically indulge in the wonders that our time and culture has to offer — all while staying respectful to others and nature, of course.
(oh, and before posting this — I learned to press ctrl+a, ctrl+c; to avoid potentially losing all I typed — although today that’s probably silly because surely the geniuses at Medium just continuously store whatever you type even in these replies in the the browser’s localstorage, or even some server-side state… long live progress! ;))