Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

So, every few years, I re-read Seneca the Younger's philosophical letters. One thing I find rewarding about reading the Stoics is that, because of their relentless focus on virtue, they repeatedly emphasize the essential vanity of human pleasures.¹ Which is to say, the Stoics were absolutely first-class haters, and Seneca was no exception. Stoicism is currently having a cultural moment (repackaged as TED-talk-style self-help), but the modern treatments have a way of ignoring the truly endless complaining and fault-finding in the sources, which is one of my favorite parts of Stoic philosophy. Check out this example from Seneca's 56th letter to Lucilius:

Here is cacophony sounding all about me—for I am living right upstairs from the bathhouse. Call to mind every sort of awful noise that grates on the ears. When the stronger men do their exercises, swinging their hand weights about and straining with the effort (or pretending to), I hear the grunts each time they exhale, their rasping and gasping for breath. When I get some idle fellow who’s happy with an ordinary man’s massage, I hear the hands slapping his shoulders and the change of sound when they strike with the cupped hand or with the palm. Then if a ballplayer shows up and starts counting how many he catches, I’m done for! Now add the quarrelsome type—and the one caught stealing—and the one who likes to hear himself sing in the bath chamber—and also the ones who jump into the swimming pool with a great splash.

[...]

Yet for me, in truth, the racket is of no more concern than waves or falling water.

-- trans. Graver & Long

This is intrinsically interesting because of how shockingly modern the complaints are. Here, circa 60 A.D., he's complaining about people loudly playing ball, singing in the bath, and rudely doing cannonballs into the pool. This is also of historical interest because it is one of a handful of early sources describing people lifting weights as a form of deliberate exercise. But returning to our theme of throwing shade, it would also appear that exaggeratedly groaning and grunting while lifting weights is as old as weightlifting, and talking trash about other people working out is part of a rich cultural tradition extending back nearly 2,000 years.

So next time you see someone doing curls in the squat rack, do the Stoic thing: complain about it to a friend at length, while insisting that you're not really bothered at all.