Wednesday, June 3 2020 - 01:24

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  • Culture. What we can learn from classical philosophers in times of pandemic and confinement
  • Epicurean guide to modern life. "Avoiding pain is more important than seeking pleasure"

Saturday, 9.45 in the morning. You wake up with the comforting feeling of having 48 hours just for you. Two days of idle pleasures, of long savored coffees, of inspired readings, of shared dinners, of sport without blame. That sweet fullness invades you completely, when suddenly ... you realize that the shelf in your room, that precious and faithful Billy, seems about to sink under the weight of the treasures it contains. The fault, no doubt, is the 12 books on meditation bought last year, the photo albums of your high school years, the memories you brought back from India in the summer of 1998 and the encyclopedias that no internet website can convince you of. that you throw away. The solution, certainly, would be to select a little, but you like all those objects, you don't want to part with them. It would only be enough to add one more shelf, right next to it, to place new memories there.

So, fueled by a wave of excitement, you convince your soulmate to go for brunch at the temple of adult fun : Ikea. Some familiar, reassuring letters that follow you since you settled in your first student room. Wood, concepts, sympathetically unpronounceable names, Swedish benevolence; in short, the perfect plan. The car is ready, the trunk empty, ready to receive your new findings, since, in addition to a bookshelf, you have realized that you would undoubtedly need to renew your pots, bedding, change the TV cabinet and think about a low table that is nice to dress up the room a bit. Catalog in hand, you have carefully marked all the pages that interest you. You walk through the door of the store with a smirk at all the possibilities that are hidden in the blue sheet. The tour begins, easier than the rope circuits through the trees. You follow the arrows on the ground, accepting that your free will is forced to follow a marked path. On the first turn, you pick up a tiny wooden pencil with a childish thrill. You admire the model floors that demonstrate, with solid evidence, that living in a loft is just as good as it is in 18 square meters , and that happiness depends on some elegant storage solutions.

Your partner begins to raise the tone a little: and that stuffed animal, will it end the same as last year? At the bottom of the storage room?

You lasciviously continue your walk, experiencing a great fascination with the space of the beds, delimited by a poster that looks like a mantra or a life advice from a family therapist: «The bedroom? Separate without walls ». When you get to the children's section, your legs start to weaken. You've been walking the hallways for two hours. In the basket for now you only have a small synthetic blanket, three packages of paper napkins with stamped reindeer and two plastic scoops that will undoubtedly serve you the day you make a liquid diet based only on soups. You are driven by that irrepressible desire, that impulse that leads you to say that to exist is to persevere in your desire to spend . You try to speed up the cadence, but in the end you are absorbed by the image of an adorable stuffed crocodile. Your partner begins to raise his tone a little: «And that stuffed animal will end the same as last year? At the bottom of the storage room? Saved for moths to eat? Outraged, you face your frustration and pass the cart over your feet. You pretend not to hear her cry of pain. Then, with an outburst of efficiency, you try to resist the imposed path and illegally access the office supplies section, jumping over a three-legged chair that bears the design concept . In the lamps section, with a mixture of anger and heat, you are already sweating the fat. Biting the end of the wooden pencil is not enough to calm you down.

After a few moments of wandering, the long-awaited hour arrives to access the storage space. Meanwhile, you have lost the references of the products that you had located, because the catalog was on top of a stack of towel rack kits. In anger, you end up taking anything. Nothing seems to dampen your nervousness. It is close to breaking when your partner asks you: "And who is going to put all this together?", And then you take an automatic screwdriver with an angry gesture, with an intense feeling of liberation. What's going on? You have overturned. The force you feel inside you cannot be contained, no matter how many speeches you make about the consumer society, here, right now. Your desire is unlimited; its duration, infinite.

The combat ends in the self-service warehouse, where you feel diminished by heights full of packages until you lose your sight

It is the beginning of chaos. The dimensions of the low table had fooled you. You hear in the distance an individual screaming: "But haven't you measured it before?" The TV cabinet, so refined in coated paper, excessively shows its plywood, and the coat rack that you liked so much is the same one that they have in the office and in the last Airbnb where you have been. You pester conformism. That doesn't stop you from losing control and picking up four red berry and vanilla-scented candles, two sets of plates, and a plastic yucca, which you quickly hide in the yellow bag. You no longer know where your desire can take you. The person who accompanies you looks at you with contempt ; it gives you a feeling identical to the moment you have broken a halogen bulb by throwing it hard into the cart. The combat ends in the self-service warehouse, where you feel diminished by those heights full of packages until you lose your sight, promises of entire evenings trying to use the screwdriver. Your items are hidden somewhere between aisles B18 and D24. You pick up your phone to search for the references you had saved, convinced that the release is near. Then you discover, horrified, that the phone has run out of battery. You have to start the whole journey again or say goodbye to your furniture. Your desire cannot be satisfied. The minutes that follow unfold almost in a trance, full of sobs, insults, discouragement and a cash receipt of 236.80 euros for objects whose usefulness you don't really know . You take the car again, overwhelmed. Your partner is about to explode, and you just wanted to buy a shelf. It is 19.14, and the bottleneck back makes you fully aware of your stiffness, your sweat, your infinite despair and how much you hate blue and yellow.

And what does Spinoza say about all this?

It is important to admit, right from the start, that Spinoza certainly never wanted to buy a Billy shelf. But the desire, the virtue, the adversity and everything that follows, the philosopher Spinoza, Baruch by name, knows him very well, and he puts everything at stake to blame you . The first merit of his thought, in case of post-Saturday depression at Ikea, is to make us understand the mechanisms of our humanity, and therefore of our actions. He wants to reassure us, and explains that each individual is characterized by a conatus . Do not panic, this strange term does not mean anything bad, although it may seem so, because it simply means a drive. A kind of force that leads us to get up in the morning and experience the joy of existing. Let's summarize the subject a bit. For Spinoza, man is part of nature, which was created by God. Therefore, each man is the representative of the divine superpowers . In that regard, we are filled with living energy, coming directly from heaven, which we are vehemently determined to conserve, even at the cost of making great efforts to keep it intact. The conatus is therefore our protected area, that which should never be touched and that makes us be natural creatures, and not video game characters.

That conatus often carries another, less extravagant and laughable name, and a little better known: desire. At that point, Spinoza becomes an excellent therapist that we would like to have on a podcast speaking to our ears after each afternoon of shopping . In his philosophy, desire, appetite, will, drive, become universal values ​​that constitute our deep nature and encourage us. It is not worth fighting, it is impossible to get rid of them, because that desire shows that we are alive. More than a tare, having wishes is even good news, the sign that we are on the list of VIPs in the human community. He even writes: "Desire is the essence of man . " You cannot leave it aside, count it, program it carefully, since the desire, that little conatus , is infinite. Only death can stop him, but certainly not a bank account in the red, or an apartment already full of things. Desire is the testimony of our life. But be careful: it is not enough to get up to feel it, nor does it exist abstractly, carried by the wind. Not much less! Desire is only shown through situations, such as going to Ikea and dreaming in front of paper napkin packages. It stirs and lights our thoughts always in context.

The moral, according to the philosopher, is this: if you have wishes that happen every week, whether it is a trip, a coffee, an encounter, an activity or a new object, it is not the umpteenth whimsical tantrum, but simply the conatus spinozista that expresses itself. Since we are alive, it is normal for our desire to manifest, to participate in the effort that keeps us awake, and that makes us honorable representatives of the divine nature. Almost inadvertently, trying only to examine our drives, Spinoza marks a point and lowers the pressure again a few degrees, preventing us from scourging and indicating that all this is finally excellent news.

But that is not all. As Baruch is decidedly an attentive man, he is also ready to calm the storm, giving us some precious advice about virtue. Attention: being virtuous with yourself is not doing a detox cure every week, forbidding yourself to speak ill of the new colleague, not waddling around listening to Beyoncé, or not buying anything in Swedish stores. Rather, it is acquiring an authentic knowledge of our passions, understanding the dynamism that is in us, being able to define what we like. It is this authentic listening to what is real and to ourselves that allows us to reach the fullness , the serenity that we have so much sought. The wise man is not the one who is reasonable, but the one who accesses a real knowledge about himself and about the things that surround him, who comes to understand what elevates us, as well as what weighs us down. Having desires is normal, and even beneficial, but what is essential is learning to recognize them, to feel less upset and therefore agitated, as soon as they manifest. Being virtuous is not to muzzle your conatus , but to make it a relative.

When you take your next walk around Ikea, think of Spinoza, congratulate yourself on being alive and full of wishes. But also listen to yourself for a moment and ask yourself if you really want to have what you are about to buy. Without a doubt the end of the day will be a little more virtuous and, above all, much less painful.

Full reproduction of the first chapter of 'How to save a bad streak', which the publisher Ariel has put up for sale this Tuesday

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