Massimo Pigliucci

And then I opened the meditations.

And one of the first phrases, so the meditation is not the kind of book that you necessarily read cover to cover because it was a personal philosophical diary or journal of the emperor.

So it was not in fact meant for publication.

So when I opened it up at random, one of the first few sentences that I found is in one of the later books.

And it said something like, you don't like the cucumber because it's bitter, right?

Well, don't eat it.

Why do you have to go on and complain about the fact that there are bitter cucumbers in the world?

That struck me as very powerful and very insightful.

We tend to complain all the time about the fact that things don't go our way, that the world is not the way we would like it to be.

And those complaints don't do anything good.

practical.

They're not actionable.

So complaining about it becomes a way to wallow in your self-pity or to fuel your own dissatisfaction with the world, which makes the thing worse.

So now you have both an external situation, some aspect of the world that you don't like, and you are making yourself inwardly worse by complaining about it in a way that it gets frustrating because you can't do anything about it.

So I went back to that phrase.

It says, OK, there are bitter cucumbers in the world.

That's a fact, right?

I do not have the power to eliminate bitter cucumbers from the world.

I do have the power to refuse to eat them.

And that's it.