/lit/ - Literature

>>13137180
Not that guy, but I've been interested in reading Stoicism (got Aurelius next to my desk) for a while, but everyone I see who subscribes to it seems to just make their lives unhappier than they need to be, then pride themselves on withstanding it.

Aurelius's description of sex as rubbing your dick on someone until you spurt (paraphrasing obviously) and absolutely nothing else at all is as false as someone who thinks jizzing in someone is "the joining of souls" but the other way. As a low IQ hedonist who lacks self-control, I'm fully aware I need to become more disciplined and less prone to emotional flights of fancy, and Stoicism seems like the obvious route, but now that I've done a little research Stoics just seem stunted and no less deluded than cumbrained stoners, so I really don't know if it's a path I want to go down.

Are there Stoics who don't romanticise bleakness? Is that even a fair characterisation? Sincerely curious about Stoicism, just worried about what it will actually do to me.

I used to think coffee shops were pretentious and reading in them was turbopretentious. Then I had to move in with a loud stoner for a year for Uni, and I realised that they're basically the only place in a big city where you can go and read without too much noise (the Uni library I had access to was really sterile so it was hard to read fiction there, and the city library's reading area was so silent that turning a page filled the entire room with an echo, which is just its own form of noisiness).

Good coffee shops are open into the evening, have music quiet enough to just blur the other noises into a samey background, and people tend to talk with actual indoor voices. They also tend to have better views than where I'm living/a library.

I tried it once and never looked back. If I'm reading fiction I'll go out of my way to find a quiet coffee shop. It's not even to show off or look "smart" or meet girls - I stopped being conscious of being watched after the third or fourth time and now the idea that people care what I'm doing is gone. It's just nice to read about other people's lives whilst quietly surrounded by them.

Not a novel idea, but I want to do a short story about a shut-in who gets added by a female friend of a friend on Goodreads who proceeds to enter into what he thinks as an epic romance with her through what they read, what they shelve, how quickly they read, etc. He spends weeks sat alone in his room, reading books he doesn't like in a dark corner just so he can post it on Goodreads and continue their "dialogue," their "dance."

I haven't decided whether he discovers that she doesn't even know who he is, or if she's actually in love with him. I'm leaning towards a surrealist angle where it's only at the bottom of the rabbit hole that he meets her so his entire narration of the meeting is unreliable, so I can focus more on his experience of going off the deep end with her.