Stoicism

Focus on the present moment. Worrying about tomorrow will not make tomorrow anything different than would otherwise be. The only way you can change what happens is by changing how you meet it. What else are you able to adjust otherwise? I have never seen anyone worry hard enough to change the future. I have tried that, and nothing good happens there. Instead, it is always what happens once we do meet the day which alters events, and that is up to us to decide.

So, instead of worrying about what might happen, think about how absolutely incredible it is that you are a living being capable of contemplating the cosmos, and that whatever you meet tomorrow you will do so as an extension of the cosmos itself trying to rationalize reality. You’re doing just fine. Keep doing your best to be a good human being - give others some slack because they either don’t mean to mess up or they’re not worth your time if they do it intentionally, and most importantly remember that how you categorize what you experience is not always what has actually happened.

Check yourself as you judge an event or person, because you are human - and humans make mistakes.

It is not enough

to want to be virtuous.

The work is required.

And it’s not one act;

a lifetime of improvement

can be expected.

To live in this way,

I must serve the good of All,

and love what happens.

I must see pitfalls

as chances to build up strength

where I’m deficient,

be unmoved by fate

when it arrives differently

than for what I planned,

and, regardless of

the outcome of events, be

grateful for it all.

Live the way you think,

but first be sure that your mind

works for good to All.

The difference between

brooding and reflecting is

direction of thought.

Brooding is backwards,

spiraling fast out of control

without an intent.

It reminisces,

wishing things turned out better,

casting blame and doubt.

Reflecting serves us -

it extracts useful pieces

of experience.

It helps us to grow,

to see how what we have done

can teach us to live.

So - to think forward,

consider how your choices

improve character.

Let the past inform

who you’ll be in the present;

don’t let it rule you.

Today, you might meet

rude ignorant, callous, vile,

and awful people.

Not everybody

will be considerate, and

they may be vicious.

“But does this all mean

that my day is forfeit now?

That I am worse off?”

Only if you choose

to agree with that judgement

of these impressions.

No one can hurt you -

no thief, driver, or stranger -

without your consent.

So, do not give it!

Reflect their angst as kindness -

it is what they’re due.

We know not their lives.

All we know is who we are -

a fellow human.

We think we need a lot to be happy. We think we need piles of money. And power. And fame. And to get that perfect house and to marry that perfect person. There are so many things we tell ourselves we have to have.

They are nice to have. But it’s not what we need. For centuries, the wisest minds have been saying some version of what Marcus wrote in Meditations, “Very little is needed to make a happy life.” A little less than two thousand years later, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote,

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

Seneca similarly suggested that each day, we should find a good quote or read a good story or have a good exchange with a friend. That’s it, he says. “That will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well.” It’s inspiration. Guidance. Reassurance. Clarity.

​Just a few things. A good quote to start the morning. A little song to start the work day. A good poem with lunch. A fine picture next, and a few reasonable words spoken over dinner with a good friend or loved one. Do that each day, and that will make a happy life.

If Memento Mori is there to remind us of how little time we have, how temporary our existence can be—then what do we have to remind us of how powerful we can be, what we can draw on even in the face of events completely outside our control? It’s another Latin phrase embodied and practiced by the Stoics: Amor Fati or “a love of fate.”

Friedrich Nietzsche said that amor fati was his formula for greatness: “That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it….but love it.” Marcus Aurelius would say: “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” And it would be the great Robert Greene (48 Laws of Power, Mastery) who would make the connection between these brilliant ideas. Robert describes Amor Fati as a power “so immense that it’s almost hard to fathom. You feel that everything happens for a purpose, and that it is up to you to make this purpose something positive and active.”

Which is why the Daily Stoic, in collaboration with Robert, created our amor fati medallion. Amor fati is a mindset that you take on for making the best out of anything that happens: Treating each and every moment—no matter how challenging—as something to be embraced, not avoided. To not only be okay with it, but love it and be better for it. So that like oxygen to a fire, obstacles and adversity become fuel for your potential.

The flame on the front is inspired by Marcus Aurelius’s timeless wisdom: “a blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.”

No one likes to be found at fault. In fact, this is what many of us walk around fearing–that we’ll be exposed as imposters, we’ll be put on the spot in front of people, we’ll have to admit error. This makes us defensive, it makes us play it safe, and in some cases, it even makes us dishonest.

It’s a cure, you could say, that’s worse than the disease.

Gandhi, once being interviewed by a reporter, dispensed with all that. “I am very imperfect,” he said. “Before you are gone you will have discovered a hundred of my faults and if you don’t, I will help you to see them.” Why would he do such a thing? Perhaps it was because he knew that as a leader, egotism and an outsized sense of one’s abilities was dangerous and destructive. Perhaps he was inoculating himself against the fear in advance–taking away the power of the reporter to control Gandhi’s fate by disclosing up front what might otherwise be investigated (or even misconstrued).

There is a line from Epictetus who, after being criticized, joked “Yes, and he doesn’t know the half of it, because he could have said more.” It’s not that Epictetus had a bunch of bodies buried somewhere, it was that he had also inoculated himself against criticism by being more aware of his flaws–and more concerned about addressing them–than even his enemies.

​Why should we be afraid of criticism? As Marcus Aurelius writes, if that criticism is correct and we are in error then the person criticizing us has done us a favor by correcting it. If they are wrong, what do we care? More likely, if we are doing our job right, we should already be well aware of the issue that people are raising and already be fixing it. We should have no sense of ourselves as perfect or above critique. Nor should we be so fragile and vulnerable as to not be able to bear being disliked or disagreed with.

It takes a lot of flying time to become a certified pilot. It takes years on stage for a comedian to learn how to command an audience. It takes time to get sober, time in therapy to heal a marriage. No book is written overnight, and few fortunes are made in one swoop. No, they start small and accumulate, the power of compounding interest working on them.

All great things take time. You know this. You know where you want to end up, and yet, and yet still you have not started the clock.

The Stoics say it’s foolish to expect figs in winter. More foolish is expecting outputs without the inputs, final results without basic beginnings. The Stoics say that if you don’t know what port you’re sailing for, no wind is favorable. If you never get on the boat, if you never leave the harbor, no port is possible.

It’s going to take a while–to lose the weight, to acquire the mastery, to turn things around. It’s probably going to take longer than anyone would like it to. You don’t control that. You do control whether you add one more day to that tally. You control whether you push the ETA back unnecessarily. You control whether you start the clock today, whether you stop putting stuff off and get after it.

Oh, you’ve read the works of Heidegger? You finished all of Infinite Jest? You made it through all of Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, all of Faulkner’s lesser works, Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses?

You must be pretty proud of yourself.

​Epictetus once spoke with a student who was pretty proud of themselves for the same reason. They had managed to make their way through a particularly dense work by the Stoic philosopher Chryssipus. They expected Epictetus to be proud. Instead he looked at them and said, “You know, if Chryssipus was a better writer, you’d have less to brag about.”

This is an important Stoic expression for two reasons. One, it reminds us that the Stoics valued clear, straightforward writing. It’s not impressive to use big words or complicated sentences that go over the reader’s heads. In fact, it’s a failure. But two, it’s a reminder to us as readers: There’s also nothing impressive about grunting our way through this bad writing. Life is short. We can quit bad books. We can spend our time and money on writers who respect their audience, who know how to communicate effectively.

To the Stoics, it wasn’t that we read. It’s what we read. We should seek out books that make a difference in our lives…not ones that win prizes. What matters is what we think of the books, not what other people think. What’s impressive is what we get out of them, not how they look on our shelves or that they might impress certain types of company.

Read widely. Read aggressively. But don’t be a glutton for punishment.

Life may have big challenges in store for us. What’s more certain, as we talked about recently, is the ‘petty hazards of the day.’ We may find ourselves thrust in some crisis–a big political moment or some emergency that unfolds in front of us on the street. We will definitely experience traffic and obnoxious people and temptation and burnout.

It’s important we understand that whether the moment is big or small, the Stoic is supposed to respond the same way. That is to say: Calmly. Courageously. With the common good in mind.

In the email we mentioned earlier, we drew on the work of the novelist Jean Webster, who remarked that it may well be easier to respond to crisis or tragedy than it is to respond to the ordinary or mundane. Because we know what’s expected of us, because people are watching, because we understand the stakes.

But again, Stoicism isn’t just about being great in the big moments but also great in the little moments. And perhaps one way to do that is to remove the idea of ‘stakes’ entirely, to see all these situations as equal opportunities for you to practice what you preach–no matter who is or isn’t watching.

“I am going to pretend that all life is just a game which I must play as skillfully and fairly as I can,” Webster has her character say. “If I lose, I am going to shrug my shoulders and laugh—also if I win.” Epictetus himself said that the philosopher was like a skilled ballplayer, they knew how to play the game. No one was better at this than Socrates–who treated life’s little moments and its big ones just the same. He was one with his philosophy, whether he was facing a frustrating person on the street or a potential death sentence. He took it all very seriously…and yet not too seriously at all. He wasn’t playing to win…but to get the best out of himself, always.

That’s the Stoic way.

1. Continue to act thus, my dear Lucilius – set yourself free for your own sake; gather and save your time, which till lately has been forced from you, or filched away, or has merely slipped from your hands. Make yourself believe the truth of my words, – that certain moments are torn from us, that some are gently removed, and that others glide beyond our reach. The most disgraceful kind of loss, however, is that due to carelessness. Furthermore, if you will pay close heed to the problem, you will find that the largest portion of our life passes while we are doing ill, a goodly share while we are doing nothing, and the whole while we are doing that which is not to the purpose. 2. What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years lie behind us are in death's hands.

Therefore, Lucilius, do as you write me that you are doing: hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of to-day's task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow's. While we are postponing, life speeds by. 3. Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time. We were entrusted by nature with the ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools these mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, – time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.

1. You may desire to know how I, who preach to you so freely, am practising. I confess frankly: my expense account balances, as you would expect from one who is free-handed but careful. I cannot boast that I waste nothing, but I can at least tell you what I am wasting, and the cause and manner of the loss; I can give you the reasons why I am a poor man. My situation, however, is the same as that of many who are reduced to slender means through no fault of their own: every one forgives them, but no one comes to their rescue.

2. What is the state of things, then? It is this: I do not regard a man as poor, if the little which remains is enough for him. I advise you, however, to keep what is really yours; and you cannot begin too early. For, as our ancestors believed, it is too late to spare when you reach the dregs of the cask.[1] Of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight, and the quality is vile. Farewell.

You may well have said it yesterday, or overheard someone else saying it, “Oh, I’ll do it in the morning…I’ll do it after I wake up…I’ll get to it later…I just need to do this other thing first.”

It’s one of the oldest, most insidious lies in the world. Yet it’s so common that we don’t even notice it. We don’t even realize that it is a vicious untruth that deprives us and the world of potential, of awareness, of understanding.

As Marcus Aurelius observed 2,000 years ago, it’s the lie that we’ll be good tomorrow. It’s what Seneca said all fools–and all of us are fools–have in common: That we’re getting ready to start.

You won’t get to it tomorrow. You’re deceiving yourself. And even if you somehow weren’t, if you were truly sincere, who is to say you are guaranteed to get a tomorrow?

Procrastination is not just dishonest, it’s arrogant. It’s an old and timeless and terrible vice. You must crush it. Not tomorrow. But today. Now.

It is not enough, of course, to simply tune out the noise around you. One can turn off social media. One can cultivate the quiet country life, as the Stoics did on occasion. One can ignore what is inessential, pay no attention to what makes no difference.​

And still there is noise.

Because the calls are coming from inside the house, so to speak. We have the voices of doubt and anxiety, of envy and ambition, of fear and frustration. We have that ceaseless, running monologue that worries about this, resents that, wonders about this, obsessed over that.

To get to ataraxia, or a place of stillness and peace, the Stoics knew that controlling for externals was not enough. We had to develop an inner calm too, an ability to recognize our own destructive thought patterns and stop them.

This is what Marcus Aurelius was really doing in Meditations: he was trying to turn down the voices inside his head. The ones that made him afraid, the ones that made him angry, the ones that annoyed him or indulged his anxieties. Just as you learn from actual meditation, the process of journaling is a way to discover that you do not have to identify with your own thoughts, you can simply observe them, let them float by without disturbing you. You can hear them without listening to them.

The path to peace is not found through escape to exotic locales or the elimination of external impositions. It’s an inner journey. It’s a battle against the voice in our heads, not the noise out in the world. And because of that, it’s well within our control.

The Stoics were towering figures of their own time. Marcus Aurelius was cheered in the streets. Cato was widely admired. Musonius Rufus was called the Roman Socrates. Their reputations preceded them, as it should with anyone who takes their commitment to the virtues of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom seriously.

But how do we square these reputations, which the men obviously cultivated and worked hard not to betray, with the idea that a Stoic isn’t supposed to care about what others think? How can one simultaneously try to protect their good name…and be indifferent to what their name means to others? After all, isn’t being respected by people, being well-known for our skills and talents and character, something that’s outside of our control?

This paradox is perfectly solved, fittingly, in a play about Cato. Written by Joseph Addison in 1712, Cato was immensely popular in its time, in fact, it was constantly quoted by the Founding Fathers in pivotal moments during the American Revolution. The line says, “We can’t guarantee success, we can do something better, we can deserve it.”

The same goes for reputations. Nothing we do can ensure we get the reputation we deserve, but we can deserve a good one. We don’t know whether people will recognize our honesty or hard work or grace under pressure, so we shouldn’t worry about it. We should spend a lot of time trying to be honest, trying to be dedicated, trying to be poised. Whether a scientist’s groundbreaking ideas will be understood is not up to them. The time they spend in the laboratory, the time they spend trying to communicate their ideas? That’s up to them.

No one can guarantee you a reputation on par with Cato or Marcus or Musonius. But there’s something better out there–deserving one.The Stoics were towering figures of their own time. Marcus Aurelius was cheered in the streets. Cato was widely admired. Musonius Rufus was called the Roman Socrates. Their reputations preceded them, as it should with anyone who takes their commitment to the virtues of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom seriously.

But how do we square these reputations, which the men obviously cultivated and worked hard not to betray, with the idea that a Stoic isn’t supposed to care about what others think? How can one simultaneously try to protect their good name…and be indifferent to what their name means to others? After all, isn’t being respected by people, being well-known for our skills and talents and character, something that’s outside of our control?

This paradox is perfectly solved, fittingly, in a play about Cato. Written by Joseph Addison in 1712, Cato was immensely popular in its time, in fact, it was constantly quoted by the Founding Fathers in pivotal moments during the American Revolution. The line says, “We can’t guarantee success, we can do something better, we can deserve it.”

The same goes for reputations. Nothing we do can ensure we get the reputation we deserve, but we can deserve a good one. We don’t know whether people will recognize our honesty or hard work or grace under pressure, so we shouldn’t worry about it. We should spend a lot of time trying to be honest, trying to be dedicated, trying to be poised. Whether a scientist’s groundbreaking ideas will be understood is not up to them. The time they spend in the laboratory, the time they spend trying to communicate their ideas? That’s up to them.

No one can guarantee you a reputation on par with Cato or Marcus or Musonius. But there’s something better out there–deserving one.

To the Stoics, there wasn’t anything wrong with having money. Marcus Aurelius came from money. So did Cato. Seneca came from money and also made a lot of it. In fact, pretty much all the Stoics except for Cleanthes and Epictetus were incredibly rich.

​Money, nice stuff, living the comfortable life…this was not necessarily the problem.

The problem was the dependence it engendered. The problem was the insatiability that seemed to come along with it. The problem was the fear and jealousy it encouraged–the fear of losing it all, the lust to have more than someone else. It didn’t make you freer, as we talked about last month, but less free, less risk-averse, less connected.

“Slavery,” Seneca would write, “lurks beneath marble and gold.” The things we own…end up owning us. Because now we can’t live without them, now we identify with them, now we’re worried someone will take them from us.

For the Stoics, money, success, and power had to be viewed with a kind of detachment. It was fine if life had given it to you, but you had to understand that life could also take it back (as it did for Zeno and later for Seneca). You had to understand that it didn’t say anything about you as a person, that it didn’t make you better or worse than anyone else. In fact, it might make it harder for you to be a good person because now you have temptation and corruption.

We must not be owned by our possessions. We must not be enslaved by our success. We must remain indifferent to them, our eyes locked on the only thing that matters: Virtue.

The girl couldn’t have been much older than four or five. It was one of those lazy, boring days and she was bothering her mother. She wanted attention. She wanted to be entertained.

But instead of giving her that, Joan Didion’s mother gave her a gift that would last a lifetime…and change the shape of modern literature. Handing the girl a blank notebook, her mother said if she was bored, then she ought to go write a story which she could then read. “I had just learned to read,” Didion later explained, “so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something–and then read it!”

We can imagine Epictetus having similar exchanges with the young students he taught. A philosopher must “blow their own nose,” he used to say. They must understand that they hold in their hands, in their minds, the solutions to almost all of their problems. No one but ourselves can truly alleviate our boredom or our anger. No one else can make us feel better, no one else is responsible for our time.

This is a lesson that we need to learn while we’re young of course, but it’s also so easy to forget when we’re older. We hold in our hands all the tools we need to be happy, to be stimulated, to be productive and have purpose. We just need to put them to use. We need to blow our own nose.

There was a message there in the mirror this morning. Did you see it? It must have been a strange experience for Marcus Aurelius the first time he saw it…waking up, looking at his reflection, and noticing his hair turning gray. Feeling his body creak. Looking at the crows feet at the corners of his eyes and the wild hairs jutting this way and that in his eyebrows. Even for someone who had so actively practiced and meditated on the idea of memento mori, it would have been a rather vivid reminder to him that he was getting older, that each day a little more life left him, never to return.

“The only way to get through this life without losing your mind is to make peace with the fact that you’ll lose everything else at some point—maybe your mind too—and there’s nothing you can do about it,” writes Mary Laura Philpont in her book Bomb Shelter. “You can’t hold onto anything, even your own face, which makes it awfully insulting that you have to look at it all the time. But maybe that’s the job of our faces, to help us get used to letting go.”

In fact, a lot of things in life can do this job. Seneca tells us of the rude awakening he had one day, visiting a family estate and noticing the trees he had planted as a young man were dying…of old age.

We can talk philosophically about time and age all we want. But they’ll mean very little if we ignore the incontrovertible proof that life gives us about these very ideas. It matters little if we wrestle with our mortality on the page while we deny the reality of what is shining back at us in the mirror.

We are on a one-way train, and we are not in control of where it stops. We can’t fool ourselves with expensive creams (or surgeries). Because no amount of dyes or hair pieces will change the urgency of what we need to learn how to accept…and then let go of.

Everything seems fine. Everything seems better than fine. Your life is going great. You’re happy. You’re in love. Your finances are great. But will it last? Or will Fortune, as Seneca said she is wont to do, surprise you with a reversal?

“Could you have seen, had you been walking on Amsterdam Avenue and caught sight of the bridal party that day, how utterly unprepared the mother of the bride was to accept what would happen before the year 2003 had even ended?,” Joan Didion writes hauntingly in her beautiful book Blue Nights (a must read). “The father of the bride died at his own dinner table? The bride herself in an induced coma, breathing only on a respirator, not expected by the doctors in the intensive care unit to live the night? The first in a cascade of medical crises that would end twenty months later with her own death?”

No one can see what Fortune has in store for us, the Stoics remind us. And that’s the point. We are in the dark. We are not in control. We live in an unwalled city. We are vulnerable. Seneca knew this first hand–exiled once by unexpected illness, another time by the whim of the emperor, and a third time, a knock on the door signaled that his death sentence had been handed down.

We cannot take the present moment for granted. Because the future that lies before us is uncertain. Life itself is uncertain. Live accordingly–or rather, as Seneca said, live immediately.

After a long line of incompetence, after a long chain of excuses, after a series of failures, the Union cause finally turned around when General Ulysses S. Grant took command. Other generals had focused on pomp and circumstance, they had been anxious and defensive, they claimed they didn’t have the resources or troops they needed.

As the great historian Bruce Catton wrote in The Hallowed Ground, “when Grant showed up things began to happen.” It didn’t matter if he was in charge of a small army or a big one, he was a leader and when leaders arrive, they make a difference. A staff officer noted the same thing. “We began to see things move,” he noted of Grant’s rescue of a besieged army. “We felt that everything came from a plan. He came into the army quietly, no splendor, no airs, no staff. He used to go about alone. He began the campaign the moment he reached the field. Everything was done like music, everything was in harmony.”

This is a lesson that Marcus Aurelius learned from the Emperor Hadrian, who spent nearly the entirety of his reign touring the empire. He would show up in a city that had languished as a backwater and start a series of public improvements. He would come upon troops who had grown fat and lazy and put them to work building fortifications (many of which still stand). He made reforms. He replaced ineffective bureaucracy. He restored temples. He solved problems.

A leader isn’t a figurehead. They are a doer. They are a solver of problems. They are in command of themselves, confident in themselves, and this feeling is contagious. They make things happen, they help the people around them make things happen. This is not random or a result of their authority, it’s because of their skill–they are playing their instrument, making music, creating harmony and progress.

You can do this too, if you learn the art.

Source: Daily Stoic

With the proliferation of dashcams and the spread of social media, we see these clips everywhere. It’s basically its own genre of video at this point. A driver is frustrated with someone going too slow in front of them, so they honk. Then they swerve, step on the gas to pass them–often waving a middle finger or honking a horn or shouting out a rolled down window as they do so–only to almost immediately get pulled over. Or violently crash. A vivid, painful demonstration of poetic justice a few miles down the road.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.

But at least it is a good reminder: First, that life on the road is dangerous. Any one of us could die in an accident at any moment–in fact, nearly 43,000 people died on U.S. roadways in each of the last two years alone. Our modern cars, modern culture built around highways, is filled with risks, yet we simply choose to not think about it.

It’s also a good reminder that impulsive, emotional decisions are the cause of so much trouble. Yes, slow drivers are annoying. Yes, in many cases, they are breaking the law themselves. And they are preventing us from getting where we are going. Yet trying to get around them, trying to vent our feelings at them? It’s not worth it! Driving is dangerous enough, the Stoics would tell us if they had lived to see cars, don’t add trouble on top of it. Don’t blind yourself, distract yourself–none of us have the cognitive resources to spare.

Seneca’s wonderful essay On Anger is a must read for anyone traveling on the roads these days. He reminds us what an ugly emotion anger is, and how silly it is to be screaming at people you’ll never meet again. Especially since they probably didn’t inconvenience you on purpose in the first place. And certainly none of it is worth dying over.

Source: The Daily Stoic

— Epictetus