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Parker Settecase on Journaling Like Marcus Aurelius (Episode 132)
872 Plays6 months ago
Do you want to learn how to Journal like Marcus Aurelius?
Parker Settecase explains different approaches to journaling, writing, and recording your thoughts. He and Michael take a deep dive into how and why to think about journaling.
Use these strategies to organize your thinking, and be the best version of yourself.
Michael and Parker on Parker's Pensées
(01:32) Journaling As A Philosophical Practice
(18:24) Transformative Journaling
(22:32) Self-Dialogue
(31:44) Why You Need A Catch All
(34:32) Journaling To Be Present
(38:09) Diary Vs Journal
(44:35) Marcus Aurelius Had A Journal Not A Diary
(45:45) Commonplace Book Vs Compendium
(57:17) Recommendations
(59:18) Michael Pushes Back
(01:02:08) Creation Over Consumption
(01:08:40) Nature Log
(01:12:02) Learn More
***
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Listen to more episodes and learn more here: https://stoameditation.com/blog/stoa-conversations/
Thanks to Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music in the conversations: https://ancientlyre.com/
Recommended
Transcript
Managing Anxiety Through Writing
00:00:00
Speaker
I would say everyone should probably keep a catch all, especially if you struggle with anxiety. It's really helpful. It's really, really helpful just to put down your ideas. It's a way to be responsible. It's a way to respect your mind. I do take my ideas seriously. I'm going to write them down.
Introduction to Stoa Conversations
00:00:17
Speaker
Welcome to Stoa Conversations. My name is Michael Trombley. Today I talk with Parker Settekes. He is a public philosopher and host of the Parker Ponce podcast, as well as the YouTube channel Parknotes.
Theology, Stoicism, and Personal Growth
00:00:32
Speaker
We talk about writing and journaling as a method of self-discovery and a way to improve your life. Hey Parker, how you doing?
00:00:41
Speaker
Good man, good to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, super excited to talk to you. We got the chance to talk before it was on your show. It was a great conversation. And I wanted to bring you on. I think because we have a lot in common. So, you know, for those listening, you're primarily a theologian specializing in Christianity.
00:01:02
Speaker
So there's this different perspective than people that are interested in stoicism. But I think what it has in common is this focus on the transformative nature of studying ethics, this goal of being a good person. And engaging with these questions very seriously as if these kinds of questions really matter because they really matter for how we live and how we should live. So I thought we would have a really great conversation just staying in that kind of space of philosophy of life, ethics, and how to live.
00:01:33
Speaker
In particular though, I wanted to focus on this question of kind of journaling or practical tools that you use in terms of writing and ordering your thoughts.
Parker's Journey with Journaling
00:01:44
Speaker
You could probably speak to this a bit better than I could. So could you provide a bit of an introduction into your thoughts on the value of maybe journaling, note-taking, writing, and what that's had for your life and how you think about things?
00:01:58
Speaker
Yeah, totally, man. So, yeah, I have two masters in theology, systematic theology, one in theological studies, and I have a master's in philosophy of religion. It's analytic philosophy. I was always a philosopher who was doing theology, and all my theology friends got so mad at me for being a philosopher in that space. But like you said, the philosophy side of things
00:02:20
Speaker
helped me think about a philosophy of life. Because if you know anything about modern philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, they're like, that's not philosophy any longer. We don't do philosophy of life type stuff. But the theologians, a lot of them are still messing with the old texts and they are like, hey, Paul was talking about stoicism, so let's learn about stoicism.
Analog vs Digital Note-Taking
00:02:41
Speaker
Or maybe John was reaching out to
00:02:44
Speaker
stoics and jews and so uh and uh, you know second temple judaism stuff like that at the same time so I started to appreciate stoicism Because of my theology, but I was always a philosopher and I couldn't find any of my other philosopher friends who were taking it seriously unless they specialized in it like you so It was because of the theology that I got into Some of the same journaling practices that a lot of the stoics would emphasize and I learned
00:03:14
Speaker
Man, this is a really beneficial way of life to be like a journal person, as goofy as it is now because the space is so dominated by ladies that your audience won't be able to see this, but I have a handlebar mustache, and I don't fit in the space very neatly. And yet, a lot of people like watching my stuff, and I think
00:03:39
Speaker
A big part of that is because I'm giving you a vision of a different kind of life, a life where your thoughts actually do matter and thinking is really important and specifically your thoughts do matter. They matter enough for you to spend money on a physical notebook and keep it with you at all times because you don't want to lose those thoughts.
00:03:59
Speaker
So yeah, I think that's why I've found some success is just that I'm, I'm kind of more of a bro. I am not afraid to use bro-y type language and then slip into analytic metaphysics or, you know, stoicism or whatever. But yeah, man, I, I, I've been doing this for about 10 years and it's really, I wouldn't have been able to get three masters if I hadn't been keeping all the different styles of notebooks that I keep. And maybe it's maybe I'm particular. I know there's other people like me, but.
00:04:26
Speaker
I don't remember stuff as well with digital methods as I do with the analog style.
Transformative Nature of Stoic Journaling
00:04:33
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, as, as you hit on there, there is this, there is this theme in stoicism of, of journaling, of kind of keeping a physical book on you. The handbook, Epictetus's handbook itself was meant to be, it was meant to be a pocket book, right? It was meant to be something to keep on you. Marcus Aurelius's meditations is something we study now, but was part of his own practice. It's something that I've always, it's something that I've personally struggled with. Like I don't journal and I always know that I should, and I could probably benefit from it, but I don't.
00:05:01
Speaker
And I think maybe that's part of it is like, I think, I think enough. Like I'm like, okay, I already, I'm already chewing on ideas. I've already kind of processing constantly. I'm wondering for you as someone who's also, also a thinker and has that philosophy background and probably someone who thinks quite a bit, what was the difference? So you've been doing this for about 10 years. Was there like a before and after when you took up that practice and then a bit of maybe what that practice looked like? Well, in practical terms, what does that look like in a day to day for you?
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah. So, um, beforehand I, dude, I always wanted to be a jock. I always wanted to be a wrestler. We've talked about wrestling and jujitsu and I didn't, I didn't want to live the intellectual life. I thought that was for nerds. And even though I wasn't, you know, I was a nerd myself.
00:05:44
Speaker
I didn't want to live that part of my life. So it wasn't until college where I started taking philosophy and theology more seriously, I started reading a lot more and I had to teach myself how to read. I would fall asleep on my books. I'd be drooling on them. I'd make it two pages and fall asleep because your mind, reading is a
00:06:07
Speaker
It's something you have to work at. You know, it's, it's like jujitsu. It's like lifting weights. Like you have to practice it and you have to continue to keep it up or it's going to
Reading as Mental Training
00:06:16
Speaker
slip. And I had let my, my mind slip a lot, especially when it came to reading. So I started reading more. Then I started having a lot more thoughts of my own. Hey, I have a unique take on this and turned out to not be that unique because I just needed to read more and see that a lot of people had thought about the things I was thinking about, but having like a unique insight. That's really cool. That's really.
00:06:38
Speaker
like important. That's the life of the mind is a really rich part of what it means to be human. It's not everything, but being, being creative, even in your intellectual work, like that's a really big deal. And a lot of people don't think about it like that. They think like the nerds are
00:06:54
Speaker
They're just logic choppers. They're just like, it's just mathematics in there. And then you like study the history of mathematics and you're like, Oh, there's so much creativity that goes on in this. And the creativity is such a deep part of thinking. Like it just is all blended up together. So I would have these like brainstorms, these mindstorms when I was laying in bed, because all these thoughts would come rushing back. And I didn't want to forget them. I don't know if that was intentional or if that was my mind, you know, fighting against
Pocket Notebook for Peaceful Sleep
00:07:20
Speaker
me.
00:07:20
Speaker
But I would lay in bed for two hours just thinking about all the ideas that I was chewing on throughout the day. And I would work through different ideas, different blog post ideas, stuff like that. And I'd wake up and they were gone. I was like, dude, what? I could get them back if I focused on them. But I'm like, I had these unique insights. And even if they weren't unique in human history, they were unique in my history. And I just lost them. And I can get them back if I really work at it.
00:07:46
Speaker
I came up with this really cool phrase or I came up with this really good argument. I don't know if I can say it the same way. So I just randomly started with a moleskin pocket notebook and I got a leather cover to it because I thought, hey, it looks cool. That was it. It was just like, I.
00:08:04
Speaker
It looks like it should be wrapped in a leather thing. Uh, some people don't like that, but that's like part of it. It feels like it's an ancient tradition, you know, having a leather notebook. So I started keeping a pocket notebook with me. And then when I was going to bed, I could actually, all those ideas that would come like rushing back to me, I'd just write them down and then I could actually fall asleep.
Writing as Mental Labor
00:08:25
Speaker
So for the first time in.
00:08:27
Speaker
I don't know, a year and a half, two years, I wasn't laying in bed for two hours, just like plagued by these ideas that I thought were so original. I can actually write them down and remember in the morning. So that was a huge, like, that was actually impactful for my life, you know? Yeah. There's a lot of great stuff there. I mean, I was thinking.
00:08:47
Speaker
There's one thing you said about, you know, the life of the mind isn't valued or whatever way you put it. And yeah, I think about something like, you know, if you work all day and you, you, you dig something or you build a wall, you walk away, that wall is still there. You know, and if that wall got knocked down, it would be incredibly frustrating. Or at least everybody recognized what a waste of time you built this wall and it got knocked down. There's nothing there. But I think that you speak as we sit and we think.
00:09:11
Speaker
And we ruminate on things, but then we don't capture that value. And maybe it's not the best wall. Maybe you're going to knock the wall down later and build another one because you're learning about how to make, you're learning how to build. You're getting better at your craft, but you still want to kind of preserve the output of that work. Um, and that's something that we don't do because we don't care about that as much. And I think about how many people have Instagram pages. I have Instagram and let's say it's a bad thing, but we.
00:09:33
Speaker
preserve our kind of visual representations of ourselves or kind of our status or our appearance, but we don't preserve those thoughts in the same way or show them off, at least not as commonly. So yeah, I think that does say something about how things are valued. I think there's that, which is just great. I think that's a really great point that speaks to it. I think myself too is like, it's something I probably should do is write more things
Journaling for Anxiety Reduction
00:09:56
Speaker
down. Another point you spoke to, which comes back to, I remember this from our last conversation, just the focus on humility.
00:10:02
Speaker
It's really easy to think what you have is a great idea if you keep it in your head. You commit it to paper. It's kind of a trial by fire because you've put it out into the world and other people, I mean, either if it's for yourself, you can return to it. But if you put it up somewhere publicly, other people can see it and you've committed to it, right? It's not this thing I'm chewing on. It's like, that's my thought. That's the sentence. That's my way of putting it. And now you've committed to it and the guy in the holes to it come out.
00:10:31
Speaker
Not really adding anything there to that. Just those are things that you said that really resonated with me and spoke to me. The third thing, sorry, just riffing on what you were saying. Cause I thought it was so interesting. No, that's good. This is one thing that I do too is like the only kind of journalism I do do is like notes on my phone. I should probably get a notebook.
00:10:47
Speaker
Because when I'm sitting in bed and I have trouble falling asleep, I find if I just like write what I'm thinking about down, it does really help. There is really something to that about, um, also freeing up, I guess your mental space by getting it out of that loop. Um, that's really important too. So I don't know if you wanted to respond to any of that, but also curious about how, okay, that's why the habit started. Um, what does that look like? How did that transform? Is that just something you've been doing consistently? Have you, uh, changed your practice in any way?
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah. So I'll get to the, the changing, but dude, you had some good insights there too. So, um, yeah, the humility part one way, if you have to write down what you think a lot of times it's different than what you think you think. Like you have a vague idea, right? You have this vague notion of X, Y, and Z. And then you have to write it down. You're like, maybe I just don't even know enough to say what I think I'm trying to say. And you end up changing your opinion. And that, that happens if you're writing an academic paper.
00:11:45
Speaker
I had one where I had to completely change because I realized what was actually going on and I was like, Oh no, you know what? I'm going to argue against this. And I changed, I completely changed the paper because of it. And it was so helpful for me to have to be forced to put my vague ideas into words and clarify what I mean. So sometimes it's just clarifying. Other times it's, it's, it's.
00:12:05
Speaker
not humiliating, but it's humbling to see, Oh, that's what I think, or that's the best I can do. Well, maybe I should work on this a little bit. You know, maybe, maybe it's time to work on it. This is genuinely my best shot. I don't think it's that good. That's okay.
Writing and Self-Transformation
00:12:18
Speaker
It's a start. And then, um, if I can take that up.
00:12:23
Speaker
When we bow to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, people listening, they really resonate with this jiu-jitsu stuff if they do it, maybe a bit less so if you don't. One of the main appeals to Brazilian jiu-jitsu has always been like, and resting is the same way, or any kind of fighting focused martial art, is that you get consistent feedback on your attitude from a resisting partner. So you're not able to exist in this land of, well, I think my technique works. It either does or doesn't, and you get feedback on it immediately, right?
00:12:52
Speaker
And that kind of iterative consistent feedback is really valuable. And so that's what I'm hearing you to say is, is there's this, it can be really tempting with ideas to keep it in this. It's like the person who's like, Oh, I've got like, you know, the best takedown, or I've got this submission or work on anybody, but I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to practice it. It's a really, it's a disservice to yourself as a martial artist to be like that. You've got to go to the room and you've got to try it. And.
00:13:17
Speaker
I think obviously there's like, there's, there's journaling and then there's like blogging, right? And I think maybe there's this analogy to blogging, which is actually putting your ideas out there into the world. But I think there's that, that there's that space where you can almost do it to yourself. Sorry, bear with me on this, but it's not like you're fighting against the opponent, but you're like fighting from against yourself a day ago. You know, you go back and you read it and you say, Oh, that wasn't that compelling or, or, Oh, that wasn't that good because now it's
Iterative Improvement in Writing
00:13:41
Speaker
written down. You can actually reflect on it and you can kind of have that relationship.
00:13:45
Speaker
That makes total sense. And not only can you just reflect on it, you can sharpen it. Just because you had the thought then doesn't mean it's complete. And I think we have a weird view about that too, because we don't understand authorship and how authors write books. We think that so often it's like a spark of ingenuity. It just hits you. And I have the inspiration, and the muse comes and drags me along. It's like, if you talk to authors, nonfiction authors, or fiction authors, it's not like that.
00:14:11
Speaker
They work at it. It's a lot of work and they got better at it because of it. So yeah, man, write down your ideas and then come back. And this was the analytic philosopher in me. Come back and shred them or just come back and build them up, you know, build them, retouch on that. I've done this so much. All of my YouTube videos have been in multiple journals, notebooks, and they, they spanned years. Some of them are just been chewing on this idea forever. And then when I go to actually make it.
00:14:38
Speaker
Maybe I put three or four different ideas together and I'm like, man, good thing I did this because if I hadn't been working on this for three years, I couldn't have done it. Like I wouldn't people, some, I have a lot of YouTube channels and a blog and stuff. And a lot of people will say, Hey, you know, you must be so busy. And I'm like, well, I'm a little busy, but I've also been working at this for 10 years. I've been collecting my thoughts for 10 years. Like they're not all good. They're definitely not, but I've been sharpening and chewing on them for a very long time.
00:15:06
Speaker
Because I think they matter. They matter to me. I don't think everyone wants to read through my journals, but they're tools for me. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think it's beautiful.
00:15:19
Speaker
We'll get into some more about the practice, but at the heart of a philosophy of way of life, I always think it's this idea that like how you live matters. And I always go back to this Socratic idea of like an unexamined life is not worth living. And when people say, well, nor are you a stoic or it's like, I honestly don't care what you do, which is like, you should take these questions seriously.
00:15:39
Speaker
And so what I'm hearing from you is that same thing. It's like what you think matters, the light, like that, that you, you have this well of creativity. You have these, this well of ideas that you're generating and don't, um, I dunno, don't underestimate yourself. Don't lose that. Don't, uh, take that as less important than other kinds of things you produce capture those. And then, and then not only will they be better, but you're also just like.
00:16:03
Speaker
We're kind of just generating those as we go. Anyway, we all have thoughts and reflections. Um, and I, I just think that's a beautiful sentiment and that's something that I'll reflect on. You know, we're 15 minutes in. I'm going to have that as a takeaway of like, yeah, it matters what you think. It doesn't just matter when you're having the debate or you're having the conversation. It matters what you think when you're going on a walk or you're sitting by yourself too. And there's something beautiful to that. Yeah. Well, and we all do this. A lot of people do this in the shower. I wish I would have said this instead of that.
00:16:31
Speaker
Well, actually writing stuff down does help you remember there's, there's some psychological literature on that. A lot of it has to do with taking notes in class versus
Psychological Benefits of Writing
00:16:39
Speaker
taking notes on your laptop. And partially that's because, or at least the interpretation is that you can take notes faster on a keyboard. And so you might be able to take down like verbatim word for word, what the professor is saying. But if you write with.
00:16:52
Speaker
in longhand, then you can't write as much. So you have to digest it as they're talking. You have to put in your own words. So that's part of it. But I think there's more to it. I think that the hand mind, hand brain connection, whatever, I think there's something really strong there, that when you're writing it down, you actually remember it. So Field Notes, one of their mottos is, I'm writing it down to remember it now. So it's not just I'm writing it down to remember it later. I'm writing it down to remember it now.
Active Reading Practices
00:17:22
Speaker
The act of writing that down helps you remember it. Same thing with my books. I make marginalia. I write in all my books. Some people hate that because they have this like a holy vision of books. I think books are tools, and so I want to make it my own. This is my copy of this book. Why? I want to go back to it. I want to reference it, man. If I'm going to have you back on, I don't want to go back to Seneca and be like, where did he say that? No, no, I marked it up, dude. I can read through this.
00:17:50
Speaker
Not so I can look smart. I did that work. That's my work. Why would I let that pass? Why would I just read it passively and not be able to use it later? So if you don't have a podcast, you don't have a blog, it's still the same thing. Don't you want to digest what you're reading and make it part of who you are?
00:18:10
Speaker
So yeah, we can get into different methods, commonplace books do that a little bit differently. But I keep different journals and different notebooks for different purposes, all having to do with the life of the mind, but they serve different roles.
Internalizing Philosophical Principles
00:18:24
Speaker
I want to get into those purposes, but I want to follow up on that thing they just said about, I'm going to remember it now. That's another great one. Because it makes me think about Marcus Aurelius' meditations, right? And he's writing this journal to himself, not intended for public audience. And one thing that we talk about in Stoicism, I mean, I wrote
00:18:44
Speaker
Paper on this is this concept of digestion and Epictetus So this idea of you know you you've taken in the principles But you need to digest them and Epictetus uses this this actual physical metaphor Which is that you know it needs to transform into muscle right like it needs to the work that you did eating needs to manifest different and to change kind of the base material you're working with and
00:19:07
Speaker
So Marcus Aurelius is not taking notes from a lecture. He's just re-articulating things he's already learned, he's already read, he's already thought about, but it's having a kind of a morally transformative function because I think...
00:19:21
Speaker
We're talking a bit about, and I don't think these things are mutually exclusive, but we're talking almost about productivity, right? Like you're doing that work, you had that good thought, don't lose it. So you can have that good blog post or you can kind of produce, or you can have an intelligent point to raise in conversation later. There's this kind of idea of like, don't lose work. You already did the work, record it so you can keep it.
00:19:44
Speaker
But then there's that second point of actually that transformative aspect of writing, which is not just, I want this to be, I don't want to lose something I had that was already good. I want to become better by doing this. And I guess I'm curious, I mean, when you're talking about different journals for different purposes, or different ways of writing for different purposes, is there one that kind of fulfills that function more than others? Or I guess maybe how do you think about it?
00:20:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, 100%. Sometimes, or a lot of people talk about imposter syndrome, especially in academia. I think, this is all speculation,
Imposter Syndrome in Academia
00:20:21
Speaker
man. I haven't done any research on it, but I think a lot of that has to do with the nature of academia being
00:20:27
Speaker
I'm going to pour everything into my head. I'm going to write this paper." And then it's on to the next different topic, maybe related topic, but I'm not looking at those things anymore. And so if someone asked you, hey, can you help me think through this paper? You may have to go read that paper again, or you may feel like an imposter. I don't really own those concepts that I wrote about. I think that's a big part of it.
00:20:54
Speaker
Look, it's still your work, for sure. You do the research. You don't have to feel bad about it. But if it's not part of who you are, then I understand why you're a little bit nervous to talk about that. And human memory is weird, and we forget weird stuff, and we remember weird stuff, and you'd be surprised what you do and do not remember. But when you make it part of who you are, you're becoming the expert in that field.
00:21:17
Speaker
having a little humility, being like, Hey, I forgot or whatever. I'm not sure. But also like, no, I know this stuff because I read it. And this is like part of who I am. This, I, I not only have read it, but I've tried to apply it to my life.
00:21:30
Speaker
and I've tried to help other people understand this. So I think actually practicing the good wisdom, the good lessons, the good concepts that you've learned, practicing those and
Practical Application of Philosophy
00:21:42
Speaker
making them part of who you are, reflecting on them, but also reflecting on them and then going out into the world trying to act on those, making you that type of person, I think that can help with that imposter syndrome. Like, you know, these are lessons that
00:21:57
Speaker
belong to me because I have earned them. I've done the hard work of reading about them. I've also just incorporated them into my life. I've become this type of person.
00:22:07
Speaker
I mean, as Epictetus would say, I'm a big Epictetus, guys. As Epictetus would say, show me your muscles, don't show me your weights, right? Which is like, show me your, show me, as you said, it's become a part of you, not the book that you have on the shelf that you read once. Show me that part of that, when you read that book, what part of that became a part of you and show me that and how that acts and how you manifest it. Yeah. So you asked about, do I have like a different journal for that?
00:22:36
Speaker
One of my journals, I call it a book of soliloquies, and I got this from St. Augustine. I know that soliloquy has come to mean something a little bit different in theater. It's just like someone speaking out loud or speaking to themselves.
Soliloquy for Self-Dialogue
00:22:50
Speaker
But a philosophical soliloquy, at least from St. Augustine, is when you personify your own thought process, so you're having a dialogue with yourself.
00:23:00
Speaker
So he does, St. Augustine does this in his book of, there's two soliloquies, one and two, I think. And I think he's talking with Lady Reason.
00:23:10
Speaker
And he's going back and forth. Hey, why do I believe this? Why do I believe that? It's still him. It's all him. But then Boethius does this in the constellation of philosophy. He's talking with lady philosophy. And it's his thoughts, but he's going back and forth. And both of those thinkers are writing for other people, but it's still their own thoughts. They're still getting clear on what they believe. Boethius was writing in prison. So I don't know that he's
00:23:35
Speaker
like well aware that this is going to be published and lots and lots and lots of people are going to read it. He had plenty of other works that he meant for that. And Augustine is like, look, I want to know about God and the soul and reasons like anything else. And he's like, nothing more, nothing whatsoever. And it's not clear whether or not that was like meant for publication or that was his own personal thing, but I've taken that and I reason with myself. Sometimes I personify my own thoughts.
00:24:05
Speaker
Sometimes it's just me kind of same, you know, me versus me. But I use this to try and get clear on reoccurring themes in my life. So a particular one is like, dude, I really like villains. And I'm like, why, why do I like villains so much? What's the deal? How come, how come villains are so much more compelling to me? I don't know that I want them to win.
00:24:26
Speaker
But growing up, dude, I wanted to be Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. And I'm like, no one hunts like Gaston. No one fights like him. Yeah, he's a jerk. He can work on himself a little bit. But that dude's the freaking man. From his perspective, this woman that he liked that snubbed him, so made him like her even more, got abducted by some beastie thing. And he's like, I'm going to go kill that.
00:24:52
Speaker
Um, maybe that I just totally lost someone, especially if it's a, uh, a young lady listening who was like, no, Bell is me. Like, yeah, maybe, but I understand that that's something that's odd about myself. So let me go think through that. Let me take some time to actually think through, is there something wrong with me or is it because maybe we're better at painting compelling pictures and guest on is not the best, but like emperor Palpatine or whoever, like pick, pick your, um, pick your poison there. Moriarty from.
00:25:22
Speaker
Sherlock Holmes, like, why do I like these people? Why do I, why am I, I don't even know if I like, cause I don't want to emulate them necessarily, except for Gaston, but, uh, they're just more compelling than some of the, some of the protagonists. So I think about this one a lot. I write, I often write in my soliloquies book, like here's, here's a villain that I'm attracted to.
Empathy Through Soliloquy
00:25:46
Speaker
What is it about them and what are some positive aspects? Like are these positive attributes that are just gone amok? Can I re-spin them the other way? Or yeah, maybe there's something just kind of twisted about me. That's something I'd rather work through in a notebook than with my spouse, you know? Yeah. So the idea is, is.
00:26:03
Speaker
The idea is it's a form of a, it's a form of a dialogue with yourself and you either personify the other side or it's, as you said, just you against you. And now you're using it. The moral aspect there was using it as like a form of explore, uh, self discovery, right? It was like, I have this part about myself that's either confusing. I mean, I don't know if this one's particularly shameful, but it's at least it's confusing. And this is going to help me kind of dig it out because I'm going to be able to put a name on it.
00:26:31
Speaker
You know, this is, is this how it works? Like this is villain loving Parker and he's going to provide the counter arguments to all the reasons why you shouldn't. Yeah, cool. I mean, I, so this is something that I do myself, but I don't, I don't write it down. One, one thing. I think there's a value to that. I find I do this process, the soliloquy process a lot when I'm having an argument with another person and I almost try to like epitomize them and put them as charitable as possible.
Writing for Reflection and Finality
00:26:58
Speaker
So when I think, oh, no, they're wrong. And then I think, well, their, their argument would be this. And then I go, okay. And then I kind of go back and forth and it helps me kind of become much more empathetic. It's like a dialogue without the other person there, which is a funny way of saying it, but I do find it really, really helpful internally. But you're saying you, you, you write this down and this, that process helps it even more. A hundred percent. And yeah, you may, you may write that down, uh, that exactly the way you just described it, where you're personifying the other person, but you're giving them, you're putting them in the best light possible. Yeah.
00:27:28
Speaker
I don't want to say steel manning because that's such a cliche thing now, but it is. That's what analytic philosophy is all about. It's like, I'm going to knock down your argument, but I'm going to make it way stronger if I can, and then I'm going to destroy the best version of it. But doing this for self-exploration, for examining your life, and just like you said earlier about writing down your ideas to get clear on them, writing down
00:27:52
Speaker
These are still your ideas. You're still your thoughts. I don't want to make a super huge like distinction between thoughts and emotions or anything like that, but writing these down. There's also something final about it. So if it's just going on in my head, I could have the same thought again and again and again and again. But there's something about, um, offloading those thoughts into a notebook that has some kind of finality where you're like, I've, I've worked through that. And if it comes back up, let me go back and read what I was thinking about then.
00:28:21
Speaker
Oh, you know what? Maybe I have changed a little bit. Let me do this again. Or maybe I'll move this into a journal and do it, do it a little bit differently. Or maybe I can go talk to my therapist about this. Cause I've done some work. Why, why is the work only in my actual therapy session? You know, like that's like you don't do your homework at home and you just show up to class expecting that's when you're going to learn. So I don't personally go to therapy, but I'm saying like, this could be a really helpful tool for those who do as well. The other thing that makes me think of.
00:28:50
Speaker
This Hannah rent is like, I just like just calling out the, the far reference, but I'll live it back. Hannah rent talks about in Eichmann in Jerusalem, the banality of evil. And the idea there, I don't know if you've read that book, but the idea there is that evil is not this kind of creative genius. Evil is actually a lacking. It's a lacking of thinking. Uh, it's, it's banal. It's, it's, it's, it's the, it's the inability to think that causes us to do evil things, not some sort of creativity.
00:29:19
Speaker
Um, and Hannah rent talks about the political, this is a very influential argument for me.
Role of Different Notebooks
00:29:27
Speaker
The political is about unification. So in order to act, you need to have one position that you're going to do. And then thinking and the philosophical is about actually division. It's about splitting apart.
00:29:37
Speaker
And that's why the kind of Socratic dialogue is like the start of philosophy is it's like the splitting the part of options as opposed to I'm going to tell you what to do. This is the right answer. And then this also has this parallel between art and propaganda. Art is about ambiguity, potentiality. Propaganda is about this is the good guy. This is the bad guy. This is how you should live. And so I think about that with the soliloquy is like if you want to think.
00:30:02
Speaker
divide yourself. That's real thinking. Otherwise you might just be kind of working yourself up into, uh, kind of, um, telling yourself what you want to hear you falling back into a similar thought pattern. It's like, you can't get real thinking without division. And to kind of make that an exercise, I think it's such a smart way to pull out. Yeah. Real genuine thinking. If you're, if you're giving the other side as strong of you as possible, and you're giving yourself as strong as you as possible. Now you're, you're, you're really going to come to something new and novel. Yeah.
00:30:32
Speaker
No, I think that's great. And it's another tool, right? It's not everything. I don't only do these. I do this along with other things. And based on the amount of notebooks that I keep or the number of notebooks I keep, people will think I'm only notbooking all the time. I have three maybe staple notebooks, and the others I use when the appropriate time comes up. These are tools. They don't rule my life. These help me live my life well.
00:31:00
Speaker
And so yeah, like, like pulling them out. Uh, someone said something to you and it really, really messed with you. Why, why was it that thing? Okay. Let's do a soliloquy about that. And if you do come to a conclusion, maybe you don't have to every time, but let's say you do and you get down to the heart of it and you think, this is why I think I was so upset at my dad for saying that. Okay. Now you can actually like journal in the classical sense about that or keep it in your diary or something like that, or bring that up to them.
00:31:29
Speaker
And they say, well, I didn't mean that. Okay. But you're, you're working through, you know, you're, you're putting your, your emotions and your thoughts down on paper. And yeah, it has some finality finality to it, which is really fun. Yeah. Making progress. Yeah. And so what are some of the other examples of the notebooks that you keep around or some of your other practices? Yeah. Um, so I do have a.
00:31:51
Speaker
My staple staple is a catch-all. Um, the audience can't see it, but I always have a catch-all with me. This is like, man, if I have good ideas for a science fiction story that I'm writing, I just pick that back up. Um, I will write that in here to do lists go in here. This is like my working memory.
Organizing Thoughts with Notebooks
00:32:08
Speaker
And it, it really helps me not have to ruminate on the things I need to remember. Someone tells me something important that's actionable. Okay. I'm going to put that in here.
00:32:18
Speaker
And, uh, I'm going to go back through that at the end of the day and put those all in the right kind of place. So this is the first step, the first stop. And then the ideas move into the other types of notebooks. So I have, um, like, so say I have a good science fiction story idea. I will put that in my science fiction notebook. I write most of my stories in here. Um, at least like the points I want to hit.
00:32:43
Speaker
And then I will read from that when i'm actually typing up if it's uh If it's like a podcast idea a question that I have for one of my podcast guests i'm going to put that in a different notebook And probably a specific page for that thinker here are the questions that I have because if you have to come up with all the questions in one hour before your Before your guest shows up. They won't be as good as if you've been ruining on that since the time you scheduled that that episode so I have um one for my podcast one for
00:33:13
Speaker
Science fiction. I'm going to sound pretty manic and crazy here because a lot of time, but it's because, well, it's because I keep this, this one on me. I can move them from my catch-all whenever I do end up having time. I have a lot of projects going on. Not everyone's going to have that. Maybe you only have like three or four things in your life. You got your kids, you got your job, you got your spouse, and then a couple hobbies. You're going to have ideas about all that. You want a new, uh, kayak.
00:33:44
Speaker
You're going to ruminate on that. Oh, I really want this one. Oh, well, this one's got different specs. Just write it down. And now it's offloaded. It's not outmoded. You don't have to not think about it anymore, but you've made some progress and you said, Oh, I actually like this back better. So I'm going to just edit it, you know, edit your thing. So I found that it really helps me not be anxious because I'm not keeping all these loose threads going at once. I've, I've, I put them down. I can feel okay. Not thinking about that right now because I've,
00:34:05
Speaker
because you're a kayak fisherman.
00:34:13
Speaker
I put it somewhere. I've been responsible with that actionable idea. So I always keep a catch-all with me, and I usually keep some sort of commonplace book with me with quotes that I do want to ruminate on, that I want to put in here to chew on, and that I want to put in here to act on.
00:34:32
Speaker
So we've got the soliloquy soliloquy and the catch-all, uh, I'm still trying to make this like mental model of these. Cause I think it's, it's, it's not a way I've heard this talked about before. Um, but you seem to have like a really great model about it. What I'm thinking about with the catch-all is I think about a lot about stoicism, both ethically.
00:34:50
Speaker
And in all aspects of your life, it's about attention. It's about the proper application of attention and mindfulness. And that's something that, you know, we, we talk a lot about on, on this channel. And so what I'm hearing from this is I'm hearing about
Writing to Enhance Presence
00:35:01
Speaker
it. So it's a way to kind of actually free up attention or at least one aspect of this, it's a way to free up attention by, you know, offloading this into, um, your catch-all.
00:35:12
Speaker
And then not only will you end the day with a better set of ideas than if you tried to hold onto it, but then each new situation you encounter, you'll encounter more mindfully and more present because you're not thinking about your kayak. You're not thinking about the task the person gave you an hour ago that you're trying to not lose track of. Am I onto something there? Is that something you experience?
00:35:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're totally onto it. And actually I have an example right here. So I have this notebook. This is just for you, Michael, but I have this notebook. I'm keeping notes that I want to talk about with you right now. So something comes up and instead of interrupting you, because I don't want to forget it.
00:35:55
Speaker
I'm tempted to interrupt you to help the conversation move along or to agree with you. I'm trying to help, but I've learned you can't just interrupt people, especially when you're not in person as much. There's different social cues. So if I write it down, then I know, hey, it's there. I can look back at this. I can just glance down and glance back up at you, but I can actually be more present with you because I'm not worried about saying that point that I wanted to make or that good phrase that just popped in my head.
00:36:22
Speaker
I can just make a note to myself and be more present. So I think what you said does resonate like that is the main reason that I'm using notebooks and so many of them is so I can be, Oh, I want to be a better thinker and stuff like that too, but I want to be present. I don't want the, I want the thoughts to help me live well and not get in the way.
00:36:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it's inspiring. Um, I just want to get these, I want to get this down. Cause I think there's such a practical value to going through these, even though I think I could deep dive into a single one. So, so little quiz seems to me like a more intensive practice. You got really something you're chewing on. Um, maybe it doesn't have to be an intense topic, but it's like, you know, it's a, it's a focused exercise. Catch all something you carry around with you and then you offload what you have in the catchalls into your, these are your notebooks.
Time for Personal Reflection
00:37:10
Speaker
These are journals. What do you call the things that you.
00:37:13
Speaker
Well, so there are notebooks because I think I have a specific understanding of journal and diary and come. I've been thinking about these for a little bit. So they're all notebooks and these are different ways of using a notebook. So yeah, I'll offload them into the different notebooks that I have. So sometimes it's a, let's say I have an idea for a soliloquy that I want to do on a Saturday morning when I have some time.
00:37:37
Speaker
over coffee. Okay. I'll just make a note of that. Hey, think about this, a little quiz, circle it. And then maybe later you even schedule it into your, into your calendar and you block off some time. Like you're in a meeting. I'm in a meeting right then. Hey, you have any time to do this? If it's, you know, not something like with your family or something, I'm sorry, I'm in a meeting and it's, it's a meeting with me. You know, you don't have to tell them that, but it's, it is important. If, if it's important to think through and examine your life and get clear on what you're feeling and thinking, then it's important enough to schedule into your, into your calendar.
Diaries vs Journals
00:38:09
Speaker
And I think that's great. And so what are the, what's that model of a diary in a journal? I think I would use those interchangeably. So yeah, a lot of people do. Yeah. I used to do those. I think I, I think I started not, I think I started making a distinction because I thought diaries were for girls and I was trying to be much, I have a journal. Okay. That's right. That's right. Leather journal. That's right. That's right.
00:38:35
Speaker
I'm going to put it in my leather satchel and it's not a purse either, so shut up. Well, so that is just genuinely speaking. That's why I started it. But then I found that other people also made some distinctions. Cal Newport will make distinctions like this.
00:38:51
Speaker
And it's just helpful if we clarify what we mean. So if you're just making it up on your own, you can do that. You can just, uh, stipulate this is what I mean, but also it helps if you find other people doing this practice as well. So I think a diary is a, uh, time bound collection of your emotions, whatever you want to say it, your emotions, your feelings. This is what I'm feeling today. Here's what happened to me.
00:39:19
Speaker
here's how it made me feel, here's what I was experiencing. It's a collection of time-bound emotions for you to go back and see what you were thinking when. So I can look back from a diary and usually these are kept daily or weekly, some kind of time component, mostly daily. So that's what a diary is going to be, but you're not going to see a whole ton of
00:39:44
Speaker
interplay with yourself. It's not like a soliloquy where you're, why did I feel like that? Here's what Steve said to me and here's what it made me feel. Okay, why did it make you feel like that? You don't see that a lot with diary. Diary is like, today, this happened to me. And then it's a log of what is happening to you. And you'll often say, I was mad about it or something like that.
00:40:04
Speaker
It's for you to look back and see your progress or see what you were feeling and what day. And so, um, that, that's how I define diary. And I, it's not just me making it up. I found other people who also make this distinction. A journal on the other hand is a collection of your ideas. So it doesn't have to be time bound. It could be whenever I always put a date. Cause I do want to know when this idea started or, you know, see the progress myself, but these are about your thoughts. These aren't necessarily like.
00:40:34
Speaker
Here's what happened today, and here's how it made me feel. It's maybe like, I'm synthesizing two ideas between Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. And so here's this idea that I have.
00:40:47
Speaker
You can write the whole thing without saying it, and it made me feel sad or made me feel happy. You know what I'm saying? The distinction between emotions and thoughts, I think, tracks the distinction between journals and diaries. What do you think about that?
00:41:05
Speaker
Okay, so yeah, so in consulting, so I work as a consultant. In consulting, we have this thing called design thinking and it's this, basically it's this way of creative problem solving. The first stage of design thinking is discovery, which is like nonjudgmentally taking in as much information as possible and describing it. And then the next phase is definition or synthesis.
00:41:28
Speaker
And it's often used in this kind of diamond model. So the diamond opens up as you accept more information in, and then it closes down as you get to the root of it.
00:41:39
Speaker
And I think that's a really valuable distinction between diary and journal. And what I'm hearing is the Jair diary is nonjudgmental, descriptive. It's that kind of discovery phase. What do I think? And for me, as someone who is like, that might sound, if you're listening to the podcast, you're interested in philosophy, that might sound less interesting than the journal. So who cares if you felt mad or sad. What matters is, you know, how can you combine that with what Epictetus thinks? How can you bounce that off? You know, what Plato thought, that's the journal. It's that kind of synthesis part.
00:42:07
Speaker
the sentence you want to stand behind. But I also think the diary seems to me, we all have areas of self-knowledge, which is rather poor, or a capacity to not always be sensitive or mindful of the things that are popping up
00:42:24
Speaker
and flowing through us. And so I see that, that, that diary is that practice of just identification. Like if you can even just get to the point was today was a bad day and I recognize that it was a bad day. I'm not going to pretend it wasn't, I'm not going to over conceptualize this. I just felt sad today. I think that is like, uh, that's a hugely helpful stage in, in self-development because you know, you, you, you understand what you're working with. So that's to me how I see that distinction. Yeah, totally. I think that that terminology is really.
00:42:54
Speaker
Really tracks well and just think about
Self-Examination Through Diaries
00:42:57
Speaker
it. So you say maybe you have a self-conception that you're a happy person You start keeping a diary and you see hey for the past eight months I've been not a happy person, you know or not a kind maybe I think I'm kind and actually like if you're being honest with yourself I yelled at him I yelled at him I yelled at her I'm like
00:43:14
Speaker
Uh, is it's insofar as you're being honest with yourself and why wouldn't you be? Because no one else is reading over your shoulder. You need to get over that. A lot of us think, well, I'm writing this as if someone's reading it. They're not, you know, don't, don't do that. Just be honest. And I think that discovery is really helpful. Um, I like that terminology. So I, I used to keep more of a diary. I don't keep diaries anymore. Um,
00:43:36
Speaker
It was more of a prayer journal. I'm praying. I'm just going to mark down what I've been praying for. It's the same thing. Like if I think I'm really selfless and I keep praying for myself all the time and never anyone else, I don't know, man. Maybe it may say something about your relation to God or how you think about God.
00:43:55
Speaker
It also could say something about you, like maybe you are less selfless and more selfish than you think. So I think it is a good, yeah, it's a log, it's time bound because it shows like a period of time. Hey, here's what happened in this chunk of time. And a journal's, a journal's different. A journal is.
00:44:16
Speaker
for your ideas and ideas are connected to your emotions and how you think will shape how you feel and vice versa, but they can be separated. And we do this all the time because you write papers on stoicism and often you're not including your emotions on those texts.
00:44:35
Speaker
And then by this definition, I would think of Marcus Renius's meditation as a journal, not as a diary, as a synthesis of ideas, as you said, informed by what he's feeling, informed by his personal circumstances, but an articulation of ideas. That's really what he uses it for, right? Like a lot of the times he smashes these things together. The synthesis is important. I think the synthesis is what makes it a journal.
00:44:59
Speaker
a dianoia journal, which just means thinking through it. It's like discursive thought. And that's where I'm doing more analytic philosophy type stuff. Here's a premise. Now I'm going to either defend it or destroy it. And so I'm thinking through it. I'm showing a record of my discursive thought. And that is going to be different. So I think I agree with you that Marcus is more of a journal, but things like a bullet journal, I think should probably be called a bullet diary because it's literally a time bound
00:45:29
Speaker
daily thing.
Commonplace Books and Compendiums
00:45:30
Speaker
You're collecting what you do and what you have done. You're collecting how you felt about those types of things. I think it's more rightly called a bullet diary, but whatever, man. I'm not in charge of branding for that. Yeah, fair enough.
00:45:50
Speaker
You've mentioned commonplace book and a compendium. What are those and how do they fit into your writing practice? Maybe I'll lean on you here for Epictetus's handbook. I think a compendium was probably going to be like that. It's an abstraction of ideas, so a classic compendium would be like
00:46:16
Speaker
a field guide book for turtles or North American birds or something. You're not collecting quotes from the other books that you've read in order to describe these birds. Maybe you cite footnotes or something like that.
00:46:30
Speaker
or end notes probably in something like that, but you're just, what's the turtle? What turtles live in North America? Okay, here's a list of them. Here's the information about them. I've collected it. It's supposed to be comprehensive and it should be probably systematic so you can actually look up what you need to do. Now these are for us, so they may be less systematic. They may be more ad hoc. You just are adding to it what you need. I've always had a problem with like systematic or systematizing my stuff because
00:46:59
Speaker
I have it going one way in my head and then when I end up writing it, I need to switch things around.
00:47:05
Speaker
Maybe you make yourself like a handbook for life. Hey, this is the type of person I want to be. You've read some stuff. You've thought about it a lot. Now give yourself bullet notes or give yourself pages. Hey, this is the kind of man I want to be. This is the kind of father that I want to be. This is something I want to strive towards. So it's like making your own personal handbook. I also have compendiums where it's just abstracted out information for different topics.
00:47:33
Speaker
that I'm going to speak on or that I think about a lot, uh, often. So like I have a simulation hypothesis compendium because all the college athletes I work with, they always ask me about simulation hypothesis and I've read some stuff on it. I want to have that information on hand. And, uh, I don't necessarily need to have all the quotes for it. I just need the facts. You might do this with like different views on theoretical physics or whatever you're, you're making yourself a compendium to help you understand.
00:48:03
Speaker
help you remember the concepts. A commonplace book is a collection of quotes. And I actually have four different ways that I keep those. I don't know if you want to get into that or not. Yeah, let's do it. Break it down. Yeah. Okay. Well, I've been keeping commonplace books almost as long as I've been keeping pocket notebooks. And this was just a practice I started on my own. I was reading a lot of great books and
00:48:29
Speaker
in order to go back and think about that really good quote that I just read, I'd have to go pick up the book from my shelf. It just seemed like it was easier to put them all in one spot. I was doing some public speaking and I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have all these quotes in one spot so I can pull from them and put them in my speeches? That'd be great.
00:48:50
Speaker
So I didn't find out until later that this is like a long tradition and the word commonplace or common places goes all the way back to Aristotle. Aristotle meant more of a compendium. He's making a commonplace for syllogisms and different forms of argument.
00:49:08
Speaker
And then actually Seneca started adding to them and adding quotes. And so some of the Roman rhetoricians actually were changing the way that commonplaces were thought of and they had more
00:49:24
Speaker
They had the modern notion of commonplace book more in mind. And then Boethius was like, no, no, this is not true to Aristotle. He's a great interpreter of Aristotle. So he tried to pare it back, but it was too late. So I think it's fine. Just call what Aristotle was doing. Call it a compendium. It's just a guidebook, a handbook of syllogisms and different Barbara and Celerin different ways to argue.
00:49:48
Speaker
And the other things are commonplace. It makes more sense. It's a commonplace for quotes. So first up, OK, there's two things that can determine what kind of commonplace book you're going to have. One is the scope and the other is whether or not you're adding your own thoughts to it. So the scope, if you have just a general commonplace book, that's just you're reading books and you like the quote, you put it all in one notebook.
00:50:19
Speaker
So you can have fiction, nonfiction, whatever. It's fine. It's just, uh, this is my commonplace book. I think as you do that, you might end up getting frustrated because you're like, these don't fit together and I need to get in the right head space. So then you start making topic specific commonplace books. So I have a philosophy of mind commonplace book. It's that's the topic is philosophy of mind. I want to be an expert in philosophy of mind. And so I take all the good quotes that I need to know as an expert of philosophy
Printed Commonplace Books
00:50:45
Speaker
of mind. I put it in one spot.
00:50:47
Speaker
And, um, I, I don't add in my own notes in there. That's just for me to read and ruminate on and reflect on to memorize, to chew on, to get in the right head space. That's what that notebook is for. And then I have a manuscript commonplace book that is, uh, I used to do this for all my graduate papers. I didn't want to just write the paper and then be done with it. I wanted that to be my paper. I wanted to be able to talk about it. So I would actually manuscript them out in a commonplace book.
00:51:17
Speaker
And that meant I would write out the quotes that I was going to use, and then I would do arrows and all sorts of things. Here's how I'm using it. I'm going to argue against it. So I'm adding my own thoughts and making it a little bit more like a journal than just a straight up commonplace book. And these aren't just artificial distinctions. I did a deep dive into the history of commonplace books and realized that this was a distinction that I found in the literature. Printed commonplace books, these were
00:51:44
Speaker
thinkers would collect a bunch of quotes on physics or the Bible or whatever, and they would put them together, and then they would publish them and sell them to people. So you could get a good understanding of the topic from an expert who's done all the relevant readings. So those are called printed commonplace book. I call those treasury commonplace books because I'm not really printing them. It's like my treasury. I've collected these.
00:52:12
Speaker
And then the manuscript one was exactly what I use. That's people manuscripting on a book or a paper or something, but blocking off the quotes and stringing them along, how they're going to use them in their paper and then manuscripting them out. The difference is, I mean, they didn't have digital stuff to do this with. So now people just do this on a Word document, but I think, you know, writing on hand and having it in a notebook is really helpful because when I'm writing a new one,
00:52:37
Speaker
I can thumb through my old papers, my old ideas in that one same notebook and I oftentimes generate new ideas. So there's a lot for you. So general specific treasury or manuscript. And then you can mix and match those and come up with four different types of commonplace book.
00:52:55
Speaker
Yeah, nice. That's great. I've never thought of that as a distinct form of text. I have this book right next to me, Hellenistic Philosophers by Anthony Long and David Sedley, and it's a collection of quotes by Stoics, Epicureans, and skeptics on a variety of topics, so there'll be a chapter on the soul, and it'll just be a bunch of quotes about what the Stoics think about the soul.
Benefits of Commonplace Books
00:53:22
Speaker
You don't often think, this is probably the book I use the most after the primary, after actually going and reading Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius. You don't see that that often, but just the value of somebody who is a world expert in something,
00:53:37
Speaker
putting together, okay, I've done the readings, I can actually tell which of these are valuable or not. And putting them in order for you is incredibly, incredibly helpful. Obviously, you have to be careful because you're missing context. But that's when you're using as a research term for somebody just research source for somebody who's just trying to get into it.
00:53:54
Speaker
That's fine too. But yeah, I never thought of that as a genre of writing before. I only have this one. I'm like, this is amazing. But apparently it's more, it's more, well, I would say more commonplace, but it's, it is, uh, yeah, a style, which is really cool. And so, so someone listening might go, well, what about an anthology? That just sounds like an anthology. Well, in an anthology, uh, these all have different definitions depending on who's using them and when, but I would think of an anthology as collecting.
00:54:22
Speaker
Um, like it would be a collection of stories. So it's the whole thing is in there and, and anthology will usually be multiple authors. So it's not the same author. That would be a, I forgot what they call
Framework for Writing Practices
00:54:35
Speaker
that. It's just that that's a collection. There's another word for it, but an anthology is going to be different authors and the complete work all paired together. Whereas the common places, like what you just talked about, here are excerpts that are relevant to this topic. Here's what all of these thinkers thought about this.
00:54:51
Speaker
Yeah, cool. And it's great. It's so helpful. So, so tying that together, I'm just going to try to take a run at it and you, you let me know if I'm getting any of these wrong. You've got your diary, which is your time bound. This is how I feel every day. Nonjudgmental. You have a journal, which is like what you think you're attempting to simple synthesize how you feel about certain, or what you think about certain things. Um, you got a pocket notebook, which is what you carry around on the day to day.
00:55:17
Speaker
Um, or sorry, how does the pocket notebook, I guess, vary from the, the catchall or the catchall is what you carry around on the day to day and you put things in pocket notebook is just kind of is, is that, is that different? That's the same. So, so, um, yeah, well, I, I'm using that interchangeably. A pocket notebook is just a thing, right? It's just the physical medium and you can use it as a journal, a diary, or a catchall. I use my pocket notebook, the one that I put in my pocket as a catchall. Yeah. Great. Got it. And then the catchall is the thing that you, you.
00:55:44
Speaker
You know, is that we were talking about that offloading or I'm going to come back to this or I don't want to have to think about this. I'm going to put it down and return to it. Um, then the, the three that seem to be a bit more focused soliloquies you're personifying one part of an argument to engage in kind of a conversation around it commonplace book, which is, um, a collection of quotes on a certain topic.
00:56:07
Speaker
And then a compendium, which is, as you said, almost like a field guide, how to a systematic approach, maybe what Epictetus is. Epictetus's handbook would be a compendium. Marcus Aurelius' meditation would be somewhere between a diary or journal, depending on where we're going with that. Was that, is that the, is that the framework?
00:56:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. The compendium doesn't necessarily have to be a how-to. It could just be, this is how you are doing this. Think about, hey, I'm in the woods all the time. This isn't great because you need pictures for this, but it's just the abstracted ideas. It's just the information. It's a collection of information about a given topic.
00:56:48
Speaker
which doesn't necessarily mean to be information about what you should be doing. It can be any kind of, as you say, this is a type of turtle, not that I have to do anything about that, but then it just is. Right. So if you, let's say you read that, that book that you have, that's the, uh, the Hellenistic philosophers. And then instead of taking the quotes, you just take the information from there and you put that into your own notebook. I would say that's a compendium. You're saying this is what they did say or whatever, but it's just the information. Yeah.
00:57:17
Speaker
So for someone that resonated, let someone listening that's resonated with this conversation, do you have any recommendations about like, Hey, you should
Challenging Diary Stereotypes
00:57:25
Speaker
start here. If you're looking at building up this practice, it's not like, Hey, go and do all these things at the same time. That's quite a bit. How do you, how do you think a practice should start? What recommendations would you have for somebody listening?
00:57:35
Speaker
I would say everyone should probably keep a catch-all, especially if you struggle with anxiety. It's really helpful. It's really, really helpful just to put down your ideas. It's a way to be responsible. It's a way to respect your mind. I do take my ideas seriously. I'm going to write them down. So I think the catch-all can be super helpful if you have ADHD. It's a working memory. It's an external working memory. I won't say hard drive because it's not digital or whatever, but that's the function that it's playing.
00:58:03
Speaker
I think that's super helpful to people, especially if you struggle with ruminations in bed. I think this is helpful. So that's universally applicable, I think. But then I'm going to say, if you've heard the different options, do some self-examination and see what you need. I think that most of us can benefit from using one of these.
00:58:25
Speaker
If not, then that's great. That's fine. But if this sounds like a tool that could help you, I would go for that one and not the one that sounds the coolest to you. Maybe you think a commonplace book would be really cool because you can have all these great quotes from philosophers or something. But if it's going to be a burden for you to do that and it's not exciting, then don't do it. If a diary sounds more helpful for you,
00:58:49
Speaker
then get over the fact that it's called a diary and just use it. It's okay.
Balancing Note-Keeping and Interaction
00:58:54
Speaker
We always think, oh, little girls do this. No, lots of men have done this throughout history. And if a little girl does that, I think good for her. That's awesome. Sometimes people will comment that on my things. This is exactly like a soliloquy something said. This is exactly what little girls do. I'm like, wow, then they're advanced, man. That's exactly what ancient philosophers were doing. Maybe we could learn something. Yeah. Exactly, yeah.
00:59:18
Speaker
Um, okay. So this is really, I think this is really great. I want to push back a bit. Yeah.
00:59:26
Speaker
Do you think there's a risk of over-intellectualizing your life or a risk of walking around and being like, because I just made this argument about it being good for mindfulness, but do you ever have the opposite problem where somebody's doing something and you're like, I should write that down instead of engaging, instead of making human connection, instead of focusing on them? Does that ever happen? Have you experienced that? Do you think that's a problem or a concern?
00:59:51
Speaker
I think it definitely can be a problem if you're more interested in information than the people that you're interacting with. And that will show up by you saying, hang on, I need to write this down. Shut up. There's ways to do it that actually honors the person, right? They say something profound and you write it down. That's really good. That's a way to honor them. Hey, can you hang on or can you say that again? That was really profound. I would love to write that down.
01:00:17
Speaker
You know, like that, that actually is a way to honor them. So it depends on what you're doing. Some of us really like information and we're information junkies and it's like, Hey, you need to like respect people, man. You need to treat them like people and not just information machines. So I think that's, that's true. I think that can be a problem.
01:00:38
Speaker
Another negative is sometimes when we offload our ideas, we have the sense of completion and we don't go back to work on them. So it feels like I'm already done with that idea because I wrote it down.
01:00:49
Speaker
No, that was the first step. You go back, go back and do that. This is why I stopped using my phone to take notes because I still, dude, I still have three years of notes in here that I've never looked at. And I'm like, I'm telling you right now, but I'm not going to go back later. I'm going to forget to go in there because I see, when I see my phone, I see texts, I see emails, I see YouTube, I see, I don't see thoughts here, but I have a dedicated thing. All I see here are my thoughts. That's all that it's for. And so it's not, um,
01:01:19
Speaker
It's not like super efficient, because I'm not trying to be efficient. I'm trying to think well. And sometimes those two go together, but when they come apart, I'd rather think well than be super efficient. So it's maybe not as practical to have two things in my pocket than to have one. But if that's what I need to do, then that's what I need to do to live well. Yeah.
01:01:47
Speaker
Don't be more interested in information than in people. Sometimes you may have to hold that thought in your mind.
Enhancing Self-Reflection
01:01:55
Speaker
That's fine. We know how to do that and write it down later. That's fine. You know, be respectful of people and don't be so obsessed with information that you lose grip on what's going on around you.
01:02:08
Speaker
Yeah, like everything else, doing it in moderation, right? Anything can be done incorrectly. Yeah. As long as you're, as long as you're, um, cautious of not doing that. The other thing I was thinking of just, just, just, just one last thought here.
01:02:23
Speaker
I was watching a podcast recently and a psychiatrist was talking about how people are kind of losing the capacity for an internal dialogue because there's so much constant stimulation. Like you'll listen to a podcast, then you'll watch a YouTube video and then you'll go on Instagram on your phone that there's no kind of internal, they don't actually develop the ability, something like a soliloquy, for example, that's something you have to practice. A diary is something you have to practice.
01:02:49
Speaker
So, um, this isn't a criticism, but I just, the thing that I think is really cool about this is like, A, you have, part of that practice is self-generation, like a diary in a journal. That is, you just have to sit down and you have to pull things out of yourself.
01:03:05
Speaker
But then there's other parts of this practice that is kind of like information, just like grabbing, retrieving, storing. But even that, as you said, with the mind-body connection, through the process of writing it down, through the process of deciding where to put it, deciding how to put it into your journal, for example, it gets passed through the filter of you.
01:03:26
Speaker
Like it takes part of your own identity in a way and you participate in the idea. You, I assume you add to it, subtract to it, change it in a way. And I think that is like a great way of, because you don't want to be somebody who's a skilled at trivia, right? Trivia is not self-transformation.
Wisdom vs Trivia
01:03:43
Speaker
The ability to pull out a quote out of your head or pull out your book and read a quote is not, uh, does not make you a good person.
01:03:50
Speaker
Um, like Appictetus talks about this, he criticizes the students who can quote Chrysippus, um, the, you know, the third head of the Stoke school. He says, man, it's not like I don't care that you can sit here and you can quote Chrysippus. I mean, it's just not what it's about. Um, so I think there's that risk, but I'm kind of answering my own question here or kind of defeating the straw man a bit. I think one of the benefits to this is that your.
01:04:12
Speaker
uh, yeah, so if you only had a quote of books, maybe you could be kind of trivial with that and be shallow with it. But when you do a journal, you are synthesizing it with your own thoughts. When you do a soliloquy, you are participating in it and you're digesting it a bit. A hundred percent. And I love that you caught that there's a.
01:04:29
Speaker
two categories. There's self-generation and then there's the input. That's exactly how I think about it. That's why I have, I usually carry a commonplace book, which is other people's thoughts that's coming in. Those are things I want to ruminate on, make them part of me. And then there's the self-generation of the catch-all because I think those are the two categories. So I like to carry two with me. You don't, you don't have to do that, but that's the way I like to do it. And then everything else fits in those categories. That's why that the manuscript commonplace book
01:04:58
Speaker
is a blend of the two. Here's someone else's thought, and here's my thoughts on that. So yeah, man, I love that. I have a Pocket Proverbs commonplace book. It's gold. It's a really shiny, gaudy gold color, and that's because the book of Proverbs says wisdom is more valuable than gold. And so I'm like, this is part of me proving that to myself. Remember that.
01:05:23
Speaker
It's great to be able to quote that. It's even better to live your life that way, that it's better to get wisdom than to chase money. It's better to get wisdom than to sell yourself to an unwise person. It's better. Do you really believe that? And so I have the collection of Proverbs and if I just memorized them,
01:05:44
Speaker
then that would be not good enough. I need to actually live those out because wisdom isn't just reflecting a no-mix statement. It's not just spitting that out. It's actually making that part of yourself so that you act wisely as well, even if you're not reciting the
Philosophical Insights in Communication
01:05:58
Speaker
proverb. Though, I think it's great if you can recite a proverb to someone in need. Someone comes to you and you've set yourself up as the wise person, not in a way to be a jerk or arrogant.
01:06:11
Speaker
But people come to you and they're like, hey man, I need some advice. And you can pull something that's really wise and give that to them. That's the best of scholarship. That's the best of the academy. I'm helping you with your life by giving you an inspirational quote or a right word at the right time like that.
01:06:32
Speaker
A word fitly spoken is like, uh, apples of gold in a setting of silver. That's a, that's a proverb, right? And that's, that's, that's, I didn't have that memorized beforehand, but I've made that a part of me and it just comes, you know what I mean? It comes out. Yeah. And the cup is tipped. That's great. And I mean, the thing that I love about that too.
01:06:52
Speaker
is that there is something about, it isn't trivia in that case. When a friend comes to you and says, what should I do? And you then take in the context of, I understand my friend, I understand what they're going through. I understand our relationship and that power dynamic. And I also have internalized these ideas from Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, whoever your philosophers were.
01:07:14
Speaker
thinkers of choice are you're combining all those things at the same time. You're not just being a Google search. It's the right thing at the right time because you know something about them that the book wouldn't know. So you're providing, you know, there's a value add by matching that need with the solution, right? Totally, totally. And this is something that a lot of philosophers get wrong. And you see it in kind of the analytic continental split.
01:07:42
Speaker
The wisdom tradition used to be part of philosophy and it split off and now the philosophers call them gurus. I'm not a guru. The best of the ancient philosophers knew when to give a syllogism and knew when to give an aphorism.
01:07:58
Speaker
So sometimes they would give an aphorism and you, you go chew on this, you go figure this out. Here's, here's a riddle. Here's a puzzle. Here's a no mix statement. Here's a proverb. You go chew on that. And other times they would spell it out for them, depending on who it was, depending on the situation and depending on the intended goal. So if I, if I want you to come to this conclusion yourself.
01:08:20
Speaker
I might give you an aphorism. If I want to help you see this, then I'm going to help you walk through it. You know, dianoia, I'm going to help you reason your way to it the way that I see it. And we can argue in dialogue, but I think that's like the best of the philosophers. They can do both. They can tell you a joke and they can give you an argument. No, that's great. And anything that we didn't cover or any idea you'd like to bring up along these same lines that you think is worth people hearing about?
Nature Log and Connecting with Nature
01:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, um, right now I'm working on, uh, okay. Skill acquisition is really cool because it's really humbling. You start something new, a new skill, especially a new skill. You look like a fool doing it. And so it's, it's really helpful. Something that I've just recently started is a nature log. It's probably, it's probably, is it a journal or diary? Um, it's probably a journal, but, uh,
01:09:19
Speaker
Kind of a compendium. I don't know. I don't know. It's hard to analyze, but it's a nature log. When I go out and I'm in the woods or if I'm around a pond and I see an animal, I want to look that animal up. I want to mark the conditions. What kind of day was it? You may add how you're feeling and stuff, but I feel like this is a really helpful way to get in touch with nature and to remember the seasons. So I'm always like, man, last year was it this cold at this time?
01:09:44
Speaker
wouldn't it be sweet if I had a journal from like when I was outside and I saw a black squirrel and here's the Latin name for a squirrel or something like that. Like I've looked up this stuff and I've collected it here and it's helping me stay in contact with my surroundings. It's helping me bloom where I'm planted.
01:10:02
Speaker
So that's something that was lacking in my life. I really love herpetology, frogs, turtles, ichthyology, fish, all that stuff. And man, so often I'm just stuck in my office here reading books, which is cool, but I also want to get back in touch with nature. And so I'm forcing myself to do that with this journal that when you have an empty journal, you want to go fill it.
01:10:23
Speaker
So I want to go back out into nature and I started drawing. They look like little kid pictures because I haven't drawn since I was a little kid. So I'm very bad at it. It's really humbling. I'm going to get better at it. I just will do that. And I watch a YouTube video on botanic art and how to draw sticks and stuff and plants. So I think that's one that if people haven't resonated with any of the more heady type stuff, then keep a nature log. That'd be really great.
01:10:52
Speaker
I mean, I think that's a lovely idea to end on the term use was, I mean, I should have written it down. So they're being grounded in the world. Because there's this in just the versatility of this I'm taking away is, you know, yeah, there's the soliloquy, there's the going into yourself more. There's a self discovery and knowledge, but then there's there, there's this opportunity to be more present with the worlds. And that's a beautiful idea. And I'll come back to that idea. I mentioned at the start of just like.
01:11:20
Speaker
taking thinking seriously, taking your mind seriously, thinking this is worth recording, writing down and participating in the development of. Um, and this has given me a lot to chew on. So, so thank you very much for that. Yeah, man. This was, this was fun. I love talking with you, dude. It's, it's fun. Like a Kindred, Kindred spirit here from the opposite side, from the stoic side of things. And it's like, what would I be like if I were a stoic dude? I'm seeing it. This is really cool. So I always love talking with you, man.
01:11:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's great. Um, no, I feel the same way, maybe the same, same destination, just different angles.
Additional Content and Contact Information
01:11:53
Speaker
Um, for those that were listening and were like, Oh, this was a great conversation. Parker seems like the kind of guy I'd like to learn more from. Um, what do you have going on? Where can they check you out? Yeah. Um, you can find lots of really great conversations, podcast conversations on my podcast, Parker's pencils.
01:12:10
Speaker
I know it's Ponce, but I'm an American swine, so I pronounce it Pensy. There's a lot to that, but you can find that on YouTube or wherever your favorite pod catcher. And, uh, you'll find amazing thinkers like Michael Tremblay talking about stoicism on there.
01:12:25
Speaker
Uh, I also have the, the big, the big Mac daddy is park notes. That's where I talk about all the journaling habits. That's the, uh, the syntax of my, of my philosophy and theology study, the semantics, the actual content will, you'll find that over on Parker's pencils. And then I have a sub stack called Parker's pondering and there that's a catch all, I guess, for all of my ideas and stuff. That's where you can read my science fiction stories as well. So there's a lot.
01:12:53
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thanks so much. Yeah, thanks again, man. Thanks for listening to Stoa Conversations. Please give us a rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify and share it with a friend. If you want to dive deeper still, search Stoa in the app store or play store for a complete app with routines, meditations, and lessons designed to help people become more.
01:13:17
Speaker
Stoic. And I'd also like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. You can find more of his work at ancientlyre.com. And finally, please get in touch with us. Send a message to stoa at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback, questions, or recommendations. Until next