If you’ve ever thought about “leaving everything and going to the mountains,” these thinkers have a lot to tell you

In recent days it has gone viralMrinank Sharma’s departurehead of AI Safeguards at Anthropic (that is, the company’s team focused on security, misuse and model safeguards). In the letter that Sharma made publicafter explaining that “the world was in danger”confessed that he was going to the United Kingdom to study and write poetry.

The idea of ​​”taking back control of your life” has been in the air for years and has an incredible capacity to mutate and adapt. Yes in 2021 lthose who left work spoke of low pay, lack of progress and feeling disrespected, now we talk about ethical issues and existential anxiety.

What persists is that “leave everything and go to the mountains.” AND There are good philosophical arguments for this..

The philosophy of sending everything to hell

Or at least that is what many philosophers throughout history believed. Among the great practical philosophical traditions of Hellenic culture, Epicurism and its proposal to retire to live in peace is perhaps the best-known example.

Although it has often been the product of stereotypes and misunderstandings, the school of Epicurus and company understood philosophy as a kind of philosophy of the soul: a kind of, following the ideas of Christopher Gill, a preventive psychological medicine.

In this sense, withdrawing, stopping depending on the external, was not a way of being right, but rather of living without anxiety: of dedicating oneself to pleasure. At the end of the day, the epicurean garden that has been painted as an ode to hedonism is, in reality, a search for a friendly place that reduces stimuli, comparisons and needs.

In the end, and translating it to our days without all the ontological scaffolding behind it, it is realizing that we are leaving our lives in a race whose goal we have not chosen. Is build a good place to live.

However, it is not the only way to see it.

independent people

Other Hellenic schools, such as the Stoics or the Cynics, were much more radical. Or, rather, hard. With their doctrinal differences, they sought internal independence, autarky. Imported to our days consists of going beyond building a shelter and going on the offensive.

Modern life chains us in a thousand different ways (mortgage, career, reputation, schedules, etc…) and, for this reason, retiring goes far beyond a healing practice: it is a practical theory of freedom (liberation). This connects directly with another tradition: that of the hermits and ascetics that goes from Valerio del Bierzo to the eastern saints.

There are many ways to justify it, but the idea is always the same: if to sustain your life you need to be liked, be productive and be available, you are not free; You are functional. And being functional to the material world, being functional to the system prevents you from aspiring to higher goals.

think better

With the birth of the modern world, we began to think about retirement in a different way: as a way of thinking well, of thinking better. The Montaigne tower or Rousseau’s walks have often been seen as a form of misanthropy. But, in reality, they were a way to get away to gain perspective, calm the soul and practice some mental hygiene.

It has a lot to do with the idea of ​​disconnection retreats, although since the time of the French solitaries, society has spread its tentacles so much that it has become much more difficult: our minds are always foxes.

Withdraw in protest

The arrival of modernity also brought us political retreat. That is, leaving as a protest. When you can’t reform the world, sometimes the only lever is the way out. Or, what is the same: if in classical antiquity ostracism was the punishment par excellence, now it emerged as a tool. Refusing to cooperate with an unjust, corrupting or downright absurd order.

It is true that much literature considers this type of flight as a sign of cowardice, but it is also true that (lucid or not), it is never neutral.

Many reasons, the same gesture

Be that as it may, we must not ignore that, in the background, there are always structural reasons: historically, the impulse to withdraw usually intensifies when certain collective sensations invade society: the feeling of the end of the era, acceleration, saturation, existential anxiety, problems of legitimacy. Just what we suffer today.

And in the face of this, tranquility emerges as a rare commodity to seek and pursuea way to recover in the current mare magnun.

For this reason, many people have begun to understand that ‘going to the mountains’ does not have to be a gesture of evasion, nor a way of disengaging from reality: it can perfectly be a “moral relocation”: a way to become better, to start again, to gain momentum.

In Xataka | Seneca, philosopher: “It is not that we have little time to live, but that we do not stop wasting it”