Dear Fellow Mortals,
Welcome to the final day of Resist and Persist.
Today’s practical focus is returning to the practice. We will not always want rightly, judge clearly, or act well. The work is learning to recognize when we have wandered and return, again and again, to the person we are trying to become.
If you missed any of the previous days, catch up here: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4.
I hope today’s final essay helps bring the week together—and gives you something worth carrying beyond the course.
J.W.
Resist and Persist
Resist and Persist is a five-day course on the Stoic art of self-discipline. Through the disciplines of desire, judgment, and action, it explores how to become less governed by impulses, pleasures, fears, and circumstances. *** This course is exclusive to Dying Every Day members.
The Disciplined Life
Resist and Persist (Day 5 of 5)
We have spent this course separating three disciplines that, in ordinary life, rarely arrive separately.
Desire asks, What is worth wanting?
Action asks, What is mine to do?
Assent asks, What am I agreeing to believe?
We separated them because each required attention of its own. But the point was never to leave you carrying three philosophical techniques through the day, trying to remember which one belongs to which moment.
The disciplines belong together.
Consider something ordinary. A colleague receives the promotion you had quietly hoped would be yours, and almost immediately an impression arrives: “I’ve been passed over.” “I’m falling behind.” “This says something about what they think of me.”
You notice it and ask what actually happened. Someone else received a promotion; everything beyond that requires interpretation. That is assent.
Then you notice the desire beneath the reaction. Did you want the work itself? The responsibility? The money? Or had the title begun to serve as evidence that you were succeeding—especially now that someone beside you possesses it? That is desire.
And then comes action. You still have to decide what to do.
Perhaps the disappointment is real. There is no need to pretend otherwise. But disappointment does not determine the conduct that follows from it. You can congratulate your colleague. You can ask what you might learn. You can continue doing your work well. Later, with a clearer mind, you can decide whether something in your circumstances genuinely needs to change.
Assent, desire, action: not three separate exercises, but one movement.
In life, the order will vary. The disciplines are not stages so much as different ways of attending to the same moment.
The Stoics separated the parts because it is difficult to train what we cannot distinguish. Eventually, though, the parts have to disappear back into life.
That is where we are now.
The disciplines also correct one another.
Desire without judgment can attach itself to almost anything. Action without examined desire can make us very efficient at pursuing the wrong things. Assent without action can become another form of intellectualism: endlessly examining thoughts while never doing what the examination requires.
Taken together, they form something more complete. We learn to want with greater care, to think with greater accuracy, and to act with greater fidelity.
Not perfectly, but more deliberately.
