Daily Stoic: “The Anvil Breakes the Hammer “

“In real life,” George Orwell observed, “it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.” Yet we seem to think that we’re the exception to this rule. That if we just have enough energy, if we push hard enough, if we want it bad enough, we can do what everyone else has failed to do. That our force is enough to escape death, bad luck, ever having to accept things we don’t want to accept. Critics sometimes say that the Stoics were resigned, but they really weren’t. They were just realists. They understood what Orwell was saying, that the world is the anvil and we’re the hammer. If we’re persistent and resilient, we can use the hardness of the world to shape materials to our liking, but the anvil is a constant. It doesn’t break, but we certainly can.