[aufreak3]

Be it stoicism or any school of thought that recommends a way of life, the key fallacy to avoid fall into is that it is these principles that make you happy, or productive, or wealthy, or healthy or whatever. While such principles can be temporarily crutch for a person, over time the crutch gains the status of legs instead of people using it to learn to walk.

My mind keeps coming up with generalizations all the time. For example, "the more space you have for your family, the less valuable time together you spend". Needless, useless generalizations like this about just about everything. So I've formed a mental habit of just pausing and asking "really?" .. and soon these just go poof.

In other words, I automatically question the validity of any concept I construct. This way, I'm free to stick to one temporarily and have no qualms about abandoning concepts that aren't valid for me.

The nice thing about Derek's post is that he's just posing the question and leaving it to the reader to ruminate on what answer would mean to them. The skill to pick up here is to ask these kinds of questions ... like all the time.