Cybernaut's Tetrapharmakos

A compass for navigating the Internet Superhighway,
after the Epicureans.

1. Wax: Your life is both the work of art and its reference; everything beyond that is necessarily a hypothesis.

2. Pitch: It’s not death staining you and scrubbing you clean in cycles; motion is a blessing reserved for the living.

3. Resin: If you only seek pleasure when it promises the end of pain, your moments of joy will start feeling like a locking tomb.

4. Tallow: Know that there is beauty and pleasure to be found everywhere, even in (and sometimes because of) the certain reality of pain.

1. Wax: Be your own reference and creation, the rest of the world is hypothesis.

• A happy and eternal being has no trouble himself and brings no trouble upon any other being; hence he is exempt from movements of anger and partiality.

• Emulate the happiness of the gods, within the limits imposed by human nature.

• This anxiety about death impedes the quality and happiness of one’s life by the theory of afterlife: the worrying about whether or not one’s deeds and actions in life will translate well into the region of the gods and the wondering whether one will be assigned to an eternity of pain or to an eternity of pleasure.

• The judgments of others are irrelevant in the making of my own.

• Being too self-centered hinders any attempt to make meaningful improvements to the world around me and those I love.

• I make my life on the internet and not my body, which houses both that life and a myriad of other things. Those words and images house my mind, but my mind is housed by a body that does not reflect myself as well as that art that I neglect as much as humanity neglects its body, the earth.

• Why do I watch myself and try to guess what others see? When I share something about my life or about media, I feel like I am sharing it because it does not exist if it’s not acknowledged. And yet, it’s such an intensely solipsistic behavior: I can’t exist in the world, and the world cannot exist; it all folds back into myself.

• A curated exposition of one’s thoughts can make a good life update, but it’s always better to talk directly to people about your life than to share with an abstract audience.

• If it hurts to know they are happy, is it because you’re not happy with your own life? What do you need to be happy?

• Only some situations require urgent responses; permanent availability is an expectation, and you can set it to be “I’m not at your disposition unless I want to be,” even with friends. Learn to not care about causing discomfort if the cause is just making someone think you hate them.

• You don’t need to share your every thought on the internet, publicly or in group chats. Sharing is the act of putting your thoughts on the table so that they can reach others, yes, but it’s also opening up the possibility of connection and feedback. If you don’t want something peer reviewed, judged, or to be the basis of your relationships, why are you sharing it?

• No one knows what you don’t tell them. You don’t owe anyone full disclosure of your motives and thoughts. You don’t owe anyone your image or your explanations, just your integrity.

2. Pitch: Loss will both stain and scrub you clean in cycles; motion is a necessity.

• While you are alive, you don’t have to deal with being dead, but when you are dead, you don’t have to deal with it either, because you aren’t there to deal with it.

• Death is nothing to us, for there is no afterlife. Seeing that, when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

• This anxiety about death impedes the quality and happiness of one’s life by the theory of afterlife: the worrying about whether or not one’s deeds and actions in life will translate well into the region of the gods and the wondering whether one will be assigned to an eternity of pain or to an eternity of pleasure.

• A fear of forgetting, losing things, because I got distracted by new input, because I didn’t deem them important. A fear of sudden disappearance of possibility: websites shutting down, losing information, and people.

• The future is a direction, not a location: if I died right now, the state of what I leave does not matter to me. If I must remain alive, what is the next step that alive me needs?

• You’re not at the end yet, so don’t let it define this journey. You can’t experience the journey while hypothesizing about the qualities of its end, so just focus on the step you must take now.

• You are something that is moving towards a future but does not only exist in a future that might not come to happen

• Nothing that exists online will outlive you. It’s a means, not an end. Is it serving you? Is it making a real connection? Do you need to spend 8 hours a day browsing Tumblr or playing League to have any human connection at all? Take notice.

• The value in social media is the people: the ones you talk to, the ones that made the things you like, and the human connection that is possible through this infrastructure.

• Do not endure discomfort for no reason. If it sucks, hit da bricks.

3. Resin: If you expect pleasure to get rid of all pain, your unmet desire will trap you.

• There’s pleasure to be found in everything, but it will never satisfy the desire for no pain.

• The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain.

• Sustenance and shelter— these things can be acquired by anyone (what are your pleasures?)

• If one wants more than one needs, one is limiting the chances of satisfaction and happiness and therefore creating a “needless anxiety” in one’s life.

• The minimum amount of necessity it takes to satisfy an urge is the maximum amount of interest a person should have in satisfying that urge.

• Are you having fun with what you’re doing?

• Is it a distraction?

• Is it a chore?

• Are you scared of missing out?

• Is it adding to your offline baseline quality of life or taking from it?

• Are you neglecting your living space? Your offline relationships? Your online relationships? When was the last time you asked someone how they’re doing?

4. Tallow: There’s pleasure to be found everywhere, even in pain.

• Continuous pain does not last long in the body; on the contrary, pain, if extreme, is present a short time.

• Illnesses of long duration even permit an excess of pleasure over pain in the body.

• Suffering is either “brief or chronic … either mild or intense, but discomfort that is both chronic and intense is very unusual.

• Intense pain is brief, and pleasure follows; chronic pain is temperate and coexists with pleasure.

• Be certain that the other side of pain is always pleasure, so there’s no point in hypothesizing about how long it will last, because you will find pleasure during it or after, no matter what the answer to that is.

• Recognize your physical and mental limit, your pain threshold, without orienting your perception by the end (see Pitch).

• Things like disability or queerness are sources of much pain but also of the greatest joy as sources of new perspectives and community.

• Acute pain is always brief and followed by pleasure; chronic pain makes room for new types of pleasure.

• Sometimes discomfort is a means to an end. But also, sometimes we’ve forgotten what that end was, and it may no longer be relevant. Why do you do the things you do that aren’t joyful?

• Joy and fun are meaningful by themselves.