Askesis — Voluntary Hardship
This week's concept is askesis (the Greek word, pronounced "ah-SKEH-sis"), which simply means voluntary hardship: the practice of deliberately choosing difficulty in order to build the character and strength that fortune cannot give you and cannot easily take away. It is not self-punishment or performance; it is training, the same way an athlete trains, except the goal is a well-ordered soul rather than a stronger body. By the end of this week you will understand what askesis is, why the Stoics thought it was non-negotiable, and how to weave it into ordinary days without turning your life into a monastery.
Passage
From Diognetus: to avoid idle enthusiasms; to disbelieve the professions of sorcerers and impostors about incantations and exorcism of spirits and the like; not to cock-fight or to be excited about such sports; to put up with plain-speaking and to become familiar with philosophy; to hear the lectures first of Baccheius, then of Tandasis and Marcian, in boyhood to write essays and to aspire to the camp-bed and skin coverlet and the other things which are part of the Greek training.
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations I.6
Reflection
Marcus Aurelius is remembering a teacher named Diognetus, and one of the gifts Diognetus gave him was early exposure to the Greek practice of training, which included sleeping on a camp-bed with a plain skin coverlet. What strikes you in this passage, once you look past the list, is that Marcus is grateful. He is recording this in his private notebook, for no audience, decades later. The voluntary hardship was not remembered as misery; it was remembered as formation. Askesis, when it is freely chosen and honestly practiced, does not feel like deprivation in retrospect; it feels like the thing that made you.
Go deeper
Looking back at your own life, what difficulty, whether chosen or forced on you, most shaped the person you are now, and what does that tell you about what you might be willing to choose deliberately going forward?
Practice
Write a Gratitude for Hardship
Spend eight minutes writing about one difficulty from your past, chosen or unchosen, that you are now glad you went through. Be specific: what did it build? What can you do now, or be now, that you could not before? Keep the writing private and honest.