Yes, late again, I know. No, I don’t have an excuse this time, either. All I will say is, of late, I have been reading through Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and let’s just say, it has gotten me thinking, about quite a lot.
Bertrand Russell – an atheist, who got quite a lot of things wrong – once said something along the lines of how “most men would rather die than think – many do”. He was right about that, at least, because thinking is not something you want to do unless you are prepared for the consequences, some of which can be profoundly sobering – especially if, like me, you enjoy a good glass of wine on a Friday.
As men get older – particularly as we approach what was once known as “middle age” – we start wondering what our legacy and impact will be. The things we once valued and thought important as youngsters, become completely irrelevant over time. Fame, money, and women might be nice to have in theory – in reality, they are not. A high-flying career is almost entirely an exercise in onanism and pointlessness.
All of it is vanity, to paraphrase the words of King Solomon. The main question we all have to confront, as we approach the hour of our death, is whether we have left any impact upon the world.
If we are brutally honest with ourselves, the answer for most of us is a resounding NO.
And that is a terrible thing to confront. When you realise how little you have actually accomplished, that actually matters, you then realise just how much time you have wasted on pointless, stupid, useless things. And that is a very depressing moment.
It is also a very clarifying one, because it makes you remember what you actually bring to the table, and how you add value to the lives of others around you.
And so, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, you learn to embrace fate.
We will all die. Most of us will do so without having done anything useful with our lives. Our legacies will not be our careers – literally NO MAN ever lay on his deathbed and thought, “I wish I spent more time in the office”. Nor will they be our bank accounts – we cannot take those with us, and in many countries, the government taxes us for having the audacity, the bare-faced CHEEK, to die and leave something for our children.
No – the greatest achievement we can do, is to leave our little patch of the world a little bit better than how we found it.
And the best way to do that, is to get married, have children, and raise them to be strong men and women, who will carry our values and our genes forward through time.
Everything else – literally EVERYTHING else – is irrelevant.
Having written that, I will note one thing:
This is why I studied maths, not philosophy.
I remember meeting a philosophy student in the halls at dinner when I was in college, and I joked with him about how philosophers create problems that mathematicians then have to solve. Seldom has that been more true, than what I wrote above.
And with that mind-expanding drug out of the way, let us get to the real reason of today’s poast.
This here is Anastasiya Nagornaya (Анастасия Нагорная), nee Evmenenko, age 21(-ish) from Yalta, Crimea – aka Mordor, aka Russia. She was a finalist in the 2022 Miss Russia pageant, and it is not at all difficult to see why. She also appears to be married, and very good for her.
Happy weekend, lads, enjoy a good rest.
2 Comments
Excellent thoughts, and excellent thot.
And she dares. to wear a crucifix, which is an act of outright heresy these days in too many places in the world. I hope she and her man do Mother Russia proud and have at least four lovely children.