March 10
It is not uninterrupted pleasure that brings tranquillity, but sober reasoning, which searches out the causes of every choice and drives away false opinions.
Letter to Menoeceus (freely rendered)
Listening mode
It is not uninterrupted pleasure that brings tranquillity, but sober reasoning, which searches out the causes of every choice and drives away false opinions.
A joy needs no reason. You can take pleasure in a smell in the stairwell without knowing what it reminds you of, and it would be strange to want to settle that first.
A decision is different. When you choose something, you usually choose an expectation as well: that afterwards you will be calmer, more recognised, or finally done with something. Expectations like these can be examined, and many of them hold up poorly. A new job may then be meant less to be interesting than to end the doubt about whether you have achieved enough. No job can do that.
What is unpleasant here is less the renunciation than the disenchantment. A wish whose reasons you have seen through loses some of its lustre, even if you hold on to it. Sometimes you end up choosing the same thing as before, only without the tacit agreement that it is supposed to redeem you.
Then the choice is smaller than it seemed to you. If something about it later goes wrong, it is only something going wrong.
