“But I was hoping to lead a peaceful life.”

You’ve often heard—you need to suspend desire completely and train aversion only on things within your power. You should dissociate yourself from everything outside yourself— the body, possessions, reputation, books, applause, as well as office or lack of office. Because a preference for any of them immediately makes you a slave, a subordinate, and prone to disappointment.

Keep Cleanthes’ verse handy:
Lead me, Zeus, lead me, Destiny.

Do I have to go to Rome? Then I go to Rome. To Gyara? All right, I go to Gyara instead. To Athens? Then Athens it is. To jail? Well, then I go to jail.

But if you ever think, “When do we get to Athens?” you are already lost. Either you’re going to be depressed when your wish is not realized or foolishly pleased with yourself if it is, overjoyed for the wrong reasons. And next time, if you’re not so lucky, you’ll grow disconsolate when events are not so much to your liking. Give them all up.

“But Athens is lovely.”

It would be lovelier still if you could secure happiness—free of emotion, poised, and dependent on no one except yourself.

“But Rome is all crowds and sycophancy.”

But the reward for enduring inconveniences is peace. So if this is the time for them, why not conquer your aversion? Why endure them like a donkey hit by a stick? […]

There is one road to peace and happiness: renunciation of externals; regard nothing as your own; hand over everything to fortune and the deity.

~ Epictetus, Book IV

Come, come, whoever you are.

Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vow

a thousand times Come, yet again, come, come.

~ Rumi

My two friends and I decided to attend a movie sneak preview, where a theater shows a random film that is currently airing, so you have no idea what the movie is until it starts.

Now, onto the movie. An older woman in a position of power can’t orgasm with her husband and has some masochistic tendencies. She decides to begin an affair with a young intern at her firm, in which the intern sexually dominates her.

First off, the plot feels like it came straight from 4chan with how cliché it is—a female writer creating a story about an older, empowered woman with rape fantasies… okay.
But beyond that, I found the movie’s moral message grotesque: cheat on your husband, abuse your position of power with the person you’re cheating with, and manipulate coworkers you feel threatened by. And in the end? Zero accountability, no consequences, no penance. The movie ends with her still being the CEO of her company, her husband staying with her and even forgiving her completely (they seem happier than ever), and, somehow, he can finally gratify her. So she gets rewarded for cheating? To top it off, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—her daughter is the same way, cheating on her partner with, once again, no consequences.

The second thing that really annoyed me was the film’s obsessive focus on pleasure, especially highlighted in the final scene where the husband finger-bangs his wife, who finally orgasms. Focusing on pleasure itself is fine, but if that’s the case, either make the moral message something meaningful (like cheating is bad and has consequences) or drop the moral preaching entirely and just make it an erotica.

The movie itself: 4/10.
The sneak preview experience—watching other people squirm awkwardly during the BDSM scenes: 6/10.

‘Shouldn’t a thief or an adulterer be eliminated, just for being who he is?’ No, and you’d do better to phrase your question like this: ‘Should we do away with this person because he’s mistaken and misled about matters of supreme importance, and because he’s become blind—not in the sense that he’s lost the ability to distinguish white and black by sight, but because he’s lost the mental ability to distinguish good and bad?’ If you put the question like this, you’ll realize how inhumane it is, and see that it’s no different from saying, ‘So shouldn’t we kill this blind person, or this deaf person?’ If a person is injured most by the loss of the most important things, and if the most important thing in every individual is right will, what’s the point in getting angry with someone if he loses it?

~ Epictetus, Book I