On stoicism, railways and not giving a fuck

Hello,

due to my experience with social anxiety I thought I might wanted to share a method with which I am recently combating it quite effecitvely to maybe help others.
The idea is that you look at the world as determined. The stoics of the old greecs followed a similar "soft determinism", and they hold indifference towards happiness and suffering. It is thought that people get happy when something good happens and sad when something bad happens. Now we want to eliminate this.
We don't want to get moved by our emotions easily and so we try to reach an indifference towards things that normally fill us with bad emotions, like in the case of social anxiety, people and places with people.

Or said more modern, just not giving a fuck.

Now to achieve this, the stoics thought of the world of determined by fate. It doesn't matter what you do, because it would happen anyway, so why bother? A cute girl looking at you? What does it matter, she would have looked at you anyway. Why feel nervous? You can't feel nervous about fate. And that's the point. You can't control what happens around you, you are not the other people. Other people are like things of some quality that move around on determined railways, you can't stop them. The only thing you have to do is to realise this and stop worrying about things that would happen anyway, because there is no point in fighting fate.
The only thing that you can change is your attitude about things that are going to happen anyway . And why not a good nice attitude, that a person of great self-confidence would have? Why fear of the cute girl when you can just smile and flirt with her? It doesn't matter anyway, she would have looked at you anyway.

This is giving me great calm and I thought I want to share it.

PS: I don't want to get into a debate of free will VS determinism here, I just wanted to point out that there are certain advantages of looking at the world as determined by fate.

Edit: Omg I wrote "faith" instead of "fate". This was totally unconscious. Im gonna answer you later ferdy.

 

I like the idea of making ideas adequat, before you fall prey to your passions.
I think I once read something similar in defense of free will, that you can insofar determine what will happen in the future by developing a correct idea about it and reflect about it. It was about wether a man could tame himself of raping a voloptuous woman he saw walking in the desert or not. The idea is, that if he would be uneducated and unreflected he would rape the woman, but if he beforehand willingly confronted himself with the horrors of rape with a woman's perspective, he wouldn't rape the woman. This is this small bit of will that is given and if used good(whatever that means), it will protect you from doing stupid things, which have their cause in the compulsive nature of humans, like rape.

So yeah, in so far you mean that, I can understand how informing and constantly builiding our adequate idea of PMO can help us in staying clean of it. If we are not prepared at the moment where the impulse comes in, we relapse, but if we built up, with the little will we have, an adequate idea about it, we may not relapse. I'm not sure who said it, but someone on here had a similar idea about it, that will is limited, and constant reflection of why we want to quit is needed to stay strong in the moment of truth.

I actually wrote an exam today about Kant and how he thinks that as a rational being, a man (or a woman) can set up his maxims according to his will, as manifestation of it. That's actually quite a nice way to think about it, that we build up our maxim of not wanting to PMO.

Why? Science believes in causation and I think most scientists believe in a pre-deterimined world through and endless chain of causes. Does this notion come from religion? That a creator has some plan and that we are pre-determined through that? But thats not the kind of determinism I talk about. I talk about determinism in the sense that there was somewhen something, maybe the Big Bang, and from there a chain of causes goes until today. But please let's not talk about this, this was just a little remark of mine, we know we won't reach a conclusion about the existence of a creator so we might as well not talk about it.