Comparing Into Thin Air And Master Of My Fate

Sometimes situations arise that make even the strongest people feel weak. The main motivator that keeps us going is persistence and resiliency. Being able to stay strong and find peace through difficult times seems impossible to the average person, but under extreme circumstances, the human spirit can be stunningly extravagant. Works like Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer and “Master of My Fate” by James Stockdale are just two examples of people persevering through horrible circumstances and making it out alive. Persistence and resiliency are intertwined and are a key factor to human sanity. Persistance leads to resiliency because when people like Jon Krakauer and James Stockdale were put into hostile situations where they needed to rely on their

He believed he was doing fine and was able to make it out of Vietnam completely sane due to his beliefs. “Epictetus once gave a lecture to his faculty complaining about the common tendency of new teachers to slight the stark realism of Stoicism 's challenges in favor of giving the students an uplifting, rosy picture of how they could meet the harsh requirements of the good life painlessly. Epictetus said: "Men, the lecture-room of the philosophers is a hospital; students ought not to walk out of it in pleasure, but in pain."If Epictetus's lecture room was a hospital, my prison was a laboratory, a laboratory of human behavior. I chose to test his postulates against the demanding real-life challenges of my laboratory.” James talks about a man from ancient rome to whom he looks up to almost like a childhood teacher or family member. He makes an analogy of his current situation in the prison is like if he were at a lab of human emotions. Even if James had a strong aversion to the people torturing him, he kept using his belief system and connected himself to statements from Epictetus to his own mental sanctuary amongst the virulent pain. Using the beliefs system of Stoicism, James Stockdale was able to stay strong and resilient while he was being tortured in vietnam. He found a way to persistently follow Epictetus’

In “How to be resilient” Maria Konnikova describes how people can develop resiliency after going through a lot of struggles, such as loss, neglect and so forth. In “The lady in number 6”, the old woman, Alice Herz-Sommer, describes how after knowing that it is almost certainly death after being put in a prison camp, she wanted to spend the last moments of her life being happy. She found small things to be grateful for, the world was her trove, and she kept telling herself to stay strong. The human spirit, filled with resiliency, telling her to stay strong is what she says is the reason she made it out alive. “Calmness is strength” is a statement from Alice herself that was her motto to staying alive while death was face to face, sitting right next to her. By “Calmness is strength”, Alice is saying that if she were to cower from the emotions inside of her she may have been killed because it would have showed she was weak, and was an easy target. “When you come up from hell, you see what matters” is another quote from alice, but this time describing her life after the events in the prison camp had occurred. In this quote she is talking about how after being in a dangerous environment where she was thankful for every day she was able to