Those who can’t handle my lows don’t deserve my highs
The whole life is a sinusoid between hypomania and subsyndromal depression. Periods of intense enthusiasm alternate with periods of intense despair. Ecclesiastes 3: ‘There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing’. This captures the sinusoid rhythm of human living really well. Unlike, say, Aristotle who argued we should aim for the golden mean between two extremes.
There’s no such thing as a stable mood. It’s either really bad, like life-shatteringly bad, or really great. And I don’t even have BPD. I’m normal. This is normal. *
I’m kind of a depressive person. I’m prone to depressions. But I’m also effective and prone to prolonged states of productivity and excitement. When things are going well, those productive states prevail, and the depressive phases occupy only a small fraction of time.
Sages, merchants, and warriors
Many societies across the world – and across history – organized themselves into social castes.
Hindus came up with 4 varnas. The caste of priests (Brahmins), the caste of warriors and secular leaders (Kshatriyas), the caste of merchants (Vaishyas), and the caste of labourers (Shudras).
Similarly, Plato in his Republic justified the existence of 3 castes, dividing the ideal city into three classes: philosopher-rulers guided by reason (logos), warriors that embody spirit (thymos), and workers that represent the appetites of the soul.
Even Mencius Moldbug came up with his own goddamn taxonomy of American castes.
I have a friend who, in the best tradition of Julius Evola, René Guénon, and Indo-European traditionalism, entertains himself by classifying everyone around according to the ancient system of castes. On the one hand, it’s sensible. In terms of activities they cover, the four varnas represent pretty much all archetypes (and types of endeavours) available to man: a wiseman (knowledge, wisdom), a warrior (changing the world, political action), a merchant (making money, entrepreneurship), and a dutiful labourer (doing well what ought to be done).
Say, the criterion for classification is not the status assigned by birth but the natural talents and predispositions of every particular man. Disagreeable types are natural-born warriors who can channel their innate passion, flamboyance, and capacity for justified anger toward noble ends. Those who gravitate towards abstract thought and score high on openness to ideas are better off as thinkers and priests. Those who prefer to occupy themselves with practical matters rather than the abstract and theoretical are good merchants. After all, Benjamin Franklin listed industriousness as a virtue in his catalogue of American bourgeois ethics.
The limits of compassion
In antiquity love was mostly understood as love for something good (someone who’s beautiful, courageous, wise, etc). In modernity (in post-Christian world), love is more often understood as something more similar to pity and compassion. The more miserable someone is and the more they suffer, the more love they deserve.
Alasdair McIntyre, in his book After Virtue, notes that there’s never been agreement on a definitive list of moral virtues. Every tradition and every school of thought had its own set of values that were considered most important. For instance, Aristotle listed courage, moderation, proper ambition, and reason, among others.
There’s a big church in the center of Prague called Our Lady of the Snow or Marie Snezné cathedral. Behind its massive wooden altar, there is a Latin inscription carved into dark wood that lists what Christians understand as primary virtues.
Humilitas. Patientia. Obedientia. Charitas. Paupertas. Castitas.
Humility, patience, obedience, charity, poverty, chastity. When I first saw it, I was struck by how different this list is from the list of classical Greek virtues.
80 years of victory in Europe
On the 8th and 9th of May, Russia celebrated the Victory Day in Europe, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II on the continent. I happened to be in Vienna at the time. The celebrations took place at Maria-Theresien-Platz and Schwarzenbergplatz.
It was the year 2025. The Soviet Victory songs on stage were accompanied by the sounds coming from a demonstration on the opposite side of the road, this one younger, louder, more certain of its place on the right side of history. They had slogans instead of songs.
RUSSLAND IST EIN TERRORSTAAT, was one of the slogans.
On the Russian side, the event reeked of resentment, of bitterness, of offence. There was talk of Russian representatives being excluded from a memorial ceremony marking the liberation of an Austrian concentration camp near Linz. A story of some Red Army monument vandalized in Teplice by unspecified ‘enemies’, one more in a growing list of Soviet memorials removed or defaced since 2022.
A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offence, Dostoevsky wrote.
I stood on the side watching, I found it amusing in a sense – a masterful fit of deliberate unwillingness to comprehend the relationship of cause and effect, to connect past and present. The past is no longer something to be linked to the present, only something to be curated – displayed when convenient, discarded when not. And somehow, everyone agrees not to notice.
The siege of Sarajevo
Sarajevo is a lovely little town at the foothills of Dinaric Alps. It combines best elements of Slavic and Ottoman cultures: relics of 1984 Olympic Games, Yugoslavian modernism, courtyards with sebil-fountains, and minarets of old mosques. But no city would ever be so fascinating if it didn’t carry remnants and reminiscences of past tragedies in its streets. The most interesting part of Prague history is the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and London’s Cheapside wouldn’t feel same without the Blitz. Something about the superimposed layers of history where the total sum of accumulated human suffering lived through and bled through the same houses and streets, still lingering somewhere in them.
Especially if it’s recent history. Sarajevo was at the heart of bloody events throughout the 20th century – from the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 to the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. And from 1992 to 1996, only 30 years ago, Sarajevo withstood 1,425 days of a devastating siege by the Serbian army.
It’s open to debate whether war is a rule-based activity, but one principle that’s at least universally recognized is that civilians shouldn’t be the primary target of military action.
During the siege of Sarajevo, it was mostly civilians that were a target of military action.
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