A man must stand erect. Not be kept erect by others. – Marcus Aurelius
We coddle our kids. Heck, we coddle our adults. We tell everyone that they’re special, that they deserve more, and that simply by thinking positively that they’ll get it. So we buy what we can’t afford. We spend what we’ve yet to earn. We reward ourselves before we’ve won a single fucking thing.
A man cannot be a slave to his desires. Aurelius had the opportunity to depend on whatever he wanted, but he saw the weakness that’s incurred when one becomes dependent on the fix that we all get from an impulse buy or from dressing loudly and proudly and spending money on things that make us feel as though we’ve won something, earned some new kind of status, and bought our way into happiness.
A man who could have anything telling men who comparatively have nothing that they have power over their every thought, wish, and desire, and to enact that control over your thoughts, wishes, and desires is real power, is priceless. The temptation to play the role, to get down and up and to show his power was there in a far greater capacity than it is for us, and yet we’re slaves.
We buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. We’re lazy in thought and lazy in action. We rely on quick fixes and pick-me-ups to sprinkle joy into lives we enact no control over.
A man cannot be a dependent. It doesn’t matter if that dependency is another human, or if it’s a desire, or if it’s a guilty pleasure. Dependency comes in many forms and the man who’s held up by others is more male than man.
