How to Rid Yourself of Life’s Bullshit
Lessons about self-constructed bullshit prisons from those who've escaped them.
Alexander the Great found Diogenes reclining in the sun.
The Cynic philosopher hadn’t run to greet the king of Macedonia when he arrived in Corinth like the other great men of the city. But Diogenes was famous throughout Greece and Alexander wanted to meet him, so the conquerer went to him.
Diogenes was dozing against a wall, and Alexander’s shadow fell across him as he approached. The philosopher’s old cloak looked shabby beside the king’s finely cut tunic, but he calmly opened his eyes and watched Alexander standing there.
“Is there anything Alexander can do for Diogenes?” The king asked after introducing himself.
This very question is what drew the great men of Corinth to Alexander’s side. He had wealth. He could distribute plum titles and lands. And if men didn’t please him, he had the power of life and death at his disposal.
“I want nothing,” Diogenes replied, making a shooing motion, “except for you to step out of my sun.”
Alexander’s companions laughed about the philosopher as the king went away, but Alexander didn’t join them. "If I were not Alexander,” he said. “I would wish to be Diogenes1.”
Diogenes had something even a king might envy — freedom from the bullshit that enshackles most humans and makes them march to the beat of someone else’s drum. Because Diogenes wanted nothing, Alexander had no hold over him.
That made him the freest man in Greece.
The Power of the Renunciant
True renunciants like Diogenes can’t tolerate bullshit — their own or the world’s.
This intolerance drives them to shed the inessential like water running off a duck’s back. To let bullshit take hold of them — to partake or give it lip service — is an insult to everything good.
Whether they call it eudaimonia, nirvana, or something else, the renunciant seeks higher states stemming from unwavering devotion to what’s most important. And so they drop physical possessions, social roles, and relationships tinged with bullshit. When they come across bullshit, they point it out.
Most of us don’t aspire to be renunciants. We probably don’t share their entirely pessimistic take on civilization.
But true renunicants have a lot to teach us about the good life and attaining freedom from the bullshit we’re mired in.
Civilization’s Antagonist
You’ll find renunciants on the margins of society. They camp in alleys or live in mountain shanties. Why?
There’s never been a bullshit-free civilization. “Normal” civilized life requires us to partake in bullshit to varying degrees, which the renunciant will not do.
Renunciants often denounce those mainlining the bullshit Kool-Aid, which makes them unpopular neighbors.
There are fewer people and less civilization on the margins, and therefore a lesser density of bullshit to deal with.
Cynicism and other renunciant creeds aren’t for the everyman who just wants to get along. They require an unswerving devotion to a higher ideal that most of us will balk at.
But there’s an underlying logic to the renunciant that’s hard to refute.
The Eternal Recurrance of The Renunicant
The renunciant’s ascetic path has been sparked by similar logical chains and followed to the same destination across time and space. Realizing most of us waste our lives focusing on what’s not important — or what’s downright delusional and vice-ridden — is usually the first spark.
We can observe the endpoint of this chain popping up again and again:
Diogenes of Sinope, Cynic philosopher, 4th century B.C. Greece:
“Seeing a child drinking from his hands, Diogenes threw away his cup and remarked, ‘A child has beaten me in plainness of living2.”
Xu You, Taoist Hermit, 2nd Millenia B.C., China:
“Xu You owned nothing and even drank directly from his cupped hands. Seeing this, someone gave him a singing gourd' to use as a cup; he hung it in a tree, but when he heard it singing in the wind one day he threw it away, annoyed by the noise it made, and went back to drinking his water from his hands3.”
But Renunciants Aren’t Minimalists
Surface-level familiarity with Cynics, monks, and other renunciants leads people to lionize their lack of possessions and simple living. They assume it's the salient element of their philosophy and copy it.
But renunciant aren’t minimalists. Minimalism may be an aesthetically pleasing or freedom-enabling choice, but minimalists are often wrapped up in bullshit that a true renunciant will find intolerable. Simple living might be necessary, but it’s not sufficient.
There is perhaps no better example of this than Kamo no Chōmei, a Japanese Buddhist monk who retreated from imperial court life in 1212 A.D. He built a tiny 10-foot-square hut in the mountains and foraged wild food. Yet whenever he returned to the capital, he admitted, “I am ashamed of my lowly beggar status4,” something we can’t imagine Diogenes saying.
Saigyō recognized, “...this fondness for my hut I now see must be error, and my attachment to a life of seclusion and peace is an impediment…you fled the world to live among forest and mountain in order to discipline the mind and practice the Buddhist Way. But though you have all the trappings of a holy man, your heart is corrupt…Have you after all let the poverty ordained by past sins distract you?”
But if minimalism and simple living aren’t sufficient, what is?
Defining Bullshit
Socrates made a bold claim: virtue is the only good. It was also entirely sufficient for a good life. All else was bullshit.
He had dozens of students, and most gave lip service to the idea. But they also carved out exceptions and didn’t necessarily practice what Socrates preached.
Except one. Anthisthenes took his teacher’s conviction to heart and dedicated himself to wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation, which no circumstances could stop him from practicing. He reasoned he needed only a bit of healthy food, simple clothing, and basic shelter from the elements, and got rid of most of everything else. Instead, he pursued friendship and the pleasures that sprang, “from out of one's soul5.”
Anthisthenes’s student Diogenes systematized this philosophy and developed it into Cynicism. For him, life was simple. It was a matter of stripping away all bullshit and focusing on virtue. No area of his life was exempt.
If he gave up the desire for fame, riches, power, and luxury, he wouldn’t need to toe the line, kowtow to kings, or waste his life in the pursuit of unimportant thing. So that’s exactly what he did.
He looked around at society’s so-called wise men and noted:
“That orators were anxious to speak justly, but not at all about acting so.”
“That men contended with one another in punching and kicking, but that no one showed any emulation in the pursuit of virtue6.”
Diogenes and Plato — another of Socrates’s students — developed something of an antagonistic relationship. As far as Diogenes was concerned, Plato was an intellectual dilettante more concerned with theory than practice. He was also something Diogenes couldn’t stand — a sellout.
Plato was a rich aristocrat and enjoyed the finer things in life. But he also had a penchant for cozying up to powerful men.
At one point, Plato is supposed to have come across Diogenes washing vegetables for his dinner in a stream.
“If you had only paid court to Dionysius (the tyrant of Syracuse Plato was trying to turn into a philosopher king) you wouldn’t have to wash your vegetables,” Plato told him.
“If you would only have washed vegetables,” Diogenes replied, “you wouldn’t have to be subservient to Dionysius.”
The Moderate Path:
Luckily, we don’t need to give up everything to be happy and live the good life. The Stoic emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius noted, “It is possible to live well even in a palace.7”
Stoicism’s founder, Zeno, studied Cynicism before deciding there was a better, more moderate path.
Cynics think virtue is the only thing that’s not bullshit, and that bullshit must be avoided.
Stoics agree that virtue is the only thing that’s not bullshit, but think bullshit that doesn’t interfere with virtue is perfectly fine.
The Stoic Approach Makes Life Harder and Easier.
Stoic life is easier because Stoics can live in civilization. They don’t need to be outcasts and hermits. They can have jobs, take vacations, and watch TV.
Stoic life is harder because bullshit and those who control and distribute it easily corrupt us when we partake. Our comforts easily slide from “nice to have but not important,” to “I’m not willing to give this up, even if it costs me my virtue.”
If we’re not careful, we end up like puppets, dancing on the strings society has attached to us. We become willing to abandon our ideals and preferences for more money, a prestigious promotion, or the next step on the hedonic treadmill.
But Diogenes and other renunciants are a testament that there’s a different path. If you cut the bullshit chains society had attached to you, if you free yourself from the tyranny of your comfort, then a better life awaits.
How much can you do without? The more you can comfortably give up, the freer you’ll be.
This is an amalgamation of the accounts of Plutarch, Diogenes Laërtius, Arrian, Cicero, and Valerius Maximus, with some minor fictional liberties taken.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6
Kenko. Essays in Idleness. A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees.
Kamo no Chōmei. Ten-Foot Square Hut and Tales of the Heike.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.16.
Stoic life, I think, is likely harder the short term but easier in the long term.
It is the opposite of a bad habit, which can be defined as something that is easy in the short term but makes life harder in the long term.
A Stoic might save their money, making their lives less stressful in retirement. On the other hand, a bad habit would be to enjoy hedonic pleasures now, rack up the credit card debt, having to endure the stress of paying it off later on.
I accept frugality but not austerity.