How To Be A Stoic Re-read, Chapter 11 On Death and Suicide, Week12

Chapter 11, On Death and Suicide, begins Part 3 of How To Be A Stoic. Death and suicide are not popular conversation topics at lunch even during the worst project. However, as I read this chapter for a second time I considered the topic from two directions which helped me extract ideas from the chapter that made the topic less likely to clear the room.

I am concurrently reading (or rather listening via Libby) Ray Kurtzweil’s The Singularity Is Nearer (a follow-up to The Singularity is Near 1997). One of the central messages in the book is that we are very close or are beginning to deploy technologies that will extend life “exponentially.” The idea opens up several moral and ethical problems, but the one that has struck me is the competition for resources, and population growth would ignite. Kurtzweil’s arguments assume perfect, nearly frictionless markets — he refers to this as optimism. Even if life-lengthening treatments were cheaply and fairly available (I think the observable evidence would suggest this is a bit of a pipe dream) how do all of these people live a good life? The complexity increases if food and clean water are unaffordable or if automation has erased many jobs. Paraphrasing Pigliucci, at some point we all need to leave the party. Unless we wrestle with the ethics of death (rather than the economics of death), we will someday arrive in the universe of Soylent Green or Logan’s Run. Philosophically Marcus Aurelius in Meditations: A New Translation (Modern Library) drew a line in the sand for us to consider, “Life is short. That’s all there is to say. Get what you can from the present-thoughtfully, justly. Unrestrained moderation.”

If we consider suicide as a metaphor for leaving a job and striking out into an undiscovered country, we can use the Stoic thoughts on death and suicide to consider the shelf life of a person in a specific role. Coach, change agents, project managers (to a lesser extent), and other roles that inject energy and change into organizations lose steam over time. Like a steam engine whose fire has run down, when their ability to bring new ideas and thoughts into an organization ebbs it is time for them to change jobs or perhaps retire. You can even think about “leaving” as the decision that you can not provide value to a team as a scrum master and it is time to go to a new team. Deciding when you can’t provide positive input into a system and when it is time to leave is a matter of ethics. Reflecting on many conversations with unhappy people in the workforce, they get little to no positive feedback from their job and neither do those they work with. Everyone is surprised when there is a reduction in force (a layoff). Many people in the agile world have become locked into specific roles in specific teams leading to them losing their edge /competitive advantage. I am aware that conflating leaving a job with death and suicide is not really where Pigaluici was going in this chapter; however, I see a linkage between the ideas and the fear people tend to have with change. The quote from Marcus Aurelius cemented the linkage; “Will you not realize once and for all that it is not death that is the source of all man’s evils, and of the mean and cowardly spirit, but rather the fear of death?”

The point is that we fear the thought rather than the thing itself.

Catch on all of the entries in the re-read of How To Be A Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci (buy a copy and read along)

Week 1: Logistics and Opening Thoughts

Week 2: The Unstraightforward Path

Week 3: A Roadmap For The Journey

Week 4: Some Things Are In Our Power, Others Are Not

Week 5: Live According To Nature

Week 6: Playing Ball With Socrates

Week 7: God or Atoms?

Week 8: It’s All About Character

Week 9: A Very Crucial Word

Week 10: The Role of Role Models