The Cringe Path
Tomorrow’s events:
The Stoic Hustle w/ Peter Limberg. Every Tuesday-Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon events. 4 hours.
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Wednesday @ 7:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Embodied Book Club: Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck. Every Second Wednesday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Shadowplay: Personality Types in Shadow w/ John Beebe. February 24th @ 2:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
The Pneuma of The Stoa: Why Breathwork Will Save the World w/ Steve Beattie, Jesse Coomer, and Chuck McGee. February 24th @ 7:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Newly posted event:
Ten Flavours of Meta-Crisis w/ Jonathan Rowson. March 16th @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
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February 23, 2021
Why do I have Instagram on my phone? I never go on that thing, but I did go on today. Like a dork I follow accounts such as “mindofstoic” and “stoicreflections,” which have Stoic and Stoic adjacent quotes. This one from Alain de Botton caught my eye:
Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
I had a podcast and in-person group before The Stoa, called Intellectual Explorers Club, which I viewed as a “performative agnostic” club. Oh man, how embarrassing. The name was so dorky. Did I actually think that was cool? Yeah. I did. I thought it was cool. Cringe overtook my body just now when I was writing that name out. More like Intellectual Dork Club. I want to rid the internet of every single mention of it.
Reading some of my earlier journals here invokes a sense of cringe as well, but I felt cool while writing them. I feel cool now, here at The Stoa. After a session, especially when it goes well, I close the Zoom room and jump around like a little boy, giving Camille high fives, then we discuss how cool The Stoa is. If de Botton is right, which I think he is, I’ll look back at this time and be embarrassed by how cool I currently think The Stoa is.
I wrote about the “beauty path” before, but perhaps I should write about the “cringe path”: the trail of cringe one must leave behind them. Like I wrote about before, one needs to risk being cringeworthy. It is not even a risk though, more like a guarantee. There is a part of me that wants to be preemptive here, and start playing in a way that will avoid cringe forever, but when I try that I do not want to try at all.
The cool thing about being truthful is that it has a strong redemptive aspect. It sets you free. Earnestly mapping your words to what you believe to be true is where the spirit of truth is found. I do not want to position myself in the spectacle as this truthful guy though, because then I will be forced to eventually admit things that will be embarrassing. I am realizing that there is so much shit I do not know, and it is embarrassing.
But fuck it, eh. I do think it is cool being this crazy Canadian who gives zero fucks, who is truthful in a way you may never have seen before. It is also a very Stoic thing to do some premeditation here, on how all of this here will be a part of my cringe path.
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