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There’s Always Been a Darkness on the Edge of Town

Daily Stoic Emails

It feels a little bit like things suddenly got really bad. Like the political order is not working. Like government agencies are failing. The stock market is falling. The economy turned out to be not nearly as robust as we thought. 

And it’s true, these things are happening. It’s just important to remind ourselves that this is not new. It’s just that the darkness from the edge of town, the one Springsteen sang about—the bad luck, the poverty, the struggle, the pain—shifted a little bit. Now that it’s your problem, you’re suddenly taking it seriously. 

When 50 Cent was being interviewed about his and Robert Greene’s book, The 50th Law, in 2009, he made a pretty interesting observation. A reporter asked him about the then new and alarming financial crisis. He said something like, “You know, where I’m from, it’s always been a recession.” 

So before you throw yourself a pity party about this global pandemic and the recession it’s causing, remind yourself: This is not new. This is not some tragedy that’s only affecting you. This is a timeless fact of existence. This has been happening to people for years, it just wasn’t evenly distributed. 

When the Stoics talked about sympatheia, they wanted us to realize that we were all tied up with each other. That there was a real cost to letting the hive (or a fellow bee) be harmed. Did they fall short of their own ideals by tolerating slavery and imperialism? Yes, no question. But Marcus Aurelius strove to do everything he could for other people—he didn’t allow his privilege to blind him to the fact that other people had it much worse. 

We are being reminded today just how interconnected and interdependent we are. Those warehouse workers we refused to support a better minimum wage for, those people we thought didn’t deserve health insurance, those people we wrote off as “deplorables”—well, turns out that they are a lot more important than you thought. Turns out their health and security is more related to your own than you might have realized. Turns out they were the canary in the coal mine, in some cases almost literally so. 

Your suffering is real. It’s unfortunate. But it’s not new and it’s not special. And maybe one way to lessen it—and prevent it in the future—is to care a little bit more about your fellow members of the hive.

P.S. This was originally sent on August 6, 2020. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.