Transcription
We are born into this world hungry, vulnerable, and confused. As we go through life, we attempt to eliminate these feelings by trying to control the conditions of the world around us. We seek to accomplish and obtain things: achieve higher status, acquire wealth or fame, develop power, and so on. We live with the persisting hopefulness that in the future we will have and control enough stuff to free ourselves of our emptiness, vulnerability, and confusion and find some ultimate happiness and security outside of ourselves. This hopeful vision of the future might sound reasonable, but perhaps it is what keeps us contained in our problems.
To help us better understand and deal with our seemingly unquenchable hunger for ultimate control and happiness outside of ourselves, we will look to the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. Stoicism is a philosophy that started in ancient Greece and was then further popularized in ancient Rome. Stoicism is an especially unique philosophy, and how potently it has withstood the test of time across thousands of years. Arguably, the teachings and wisdom of Stoic philosophy are equally, if not more, relevant today than ever in recent history. Stoicism has found huge appeal. It was used and encouraged by recent historical leaders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Nelson Mandela; written about by current popular authors like Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Ryan Holiday, just to name a few; and has found a rather large community on the Internet. Stoicism’s enduring popularity is not without good reason. The principles of Stoicism can help us find calmness, presence, and resilience in a world of increasingly overt chaos, anxiety, and insatiable desire for more.
In Stoicism, we exist in a reality that does not care about our personal opinion of it. We cannot ask it nicely to remove the chaos, suffering, hardship, and uncertainty, nor can we will ourselves onto it with force in order to do so. However, Stoicism suggests that that does not mean we are subject to be helpless victims of the world. Rather, Stoicism proclaims that there are two domains of life: our external being—the things outside of our mind which we cannot control—and the internal—our interpretations and reactions to the external which we can control. When we persist with the belief that things outside ourselves or things in the future will provide us with the form of ultimate happiness, we become dependent on things that are not part of us nor part of what we can control and thus remain endlessly unsatisfied and unhappy. We can and should pursue the things that we deem preferable and interesting and not live an inactive life. However, we must ensure that on our pursuits our focus remains on the internal and that we work to derive our sense of joy from how we think and act within our pursuits. No matter what task we undertake, we will do it wastefully if we assume that any of what comes beyond the task will provide anything better than the experience of focus and presence in the task itself.
There’s nothing inherently wrong about working towards and achieving wealth, fame, or power, but in the Stoics’ mind, these things are merely to be enjoyed if they do work out, but not to be depended on for one’s happiness. For if one is dependent on them, their happiness and peace in life are especially susceptible to being inconsistent, taken, or never achieved at all. Stoicism suggests that the sign of a truly successful person is someone who can be okay without the things he or she typically desires or depends on for comfort. For no wealth, materialistic abundance, fame, or power has any value to a happy life if the person who possesses them has not yet learned to live properly without them. Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful person in the world during his time. He had access to anything he could have ever wanted, yet he writes, “almost nothing material is needed for a happy life,” for he who has understood existence with access to the world. Marcus Aurelius lived with little interest in the self-indulgence of things outside of himself. In order to develop this fortitude, a common practice in Stoicism is to, on occasion, temporarily strip oneself of the things they ordinarily depend on for comfort in order to prove to themselves how strong they truly are without the things they think they need.
In the peace of classic literature entitled *Letters from a Stoic*, Roman statesman and one of the most renowned Stoic philosophers, Seneca, writes, “Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.” It isn’t our constant expectation that something outside ourselves or in the future is needed for a worthy experience of life that causes our inability to ever find worthy experiences in life in the first place. And led us from a Stoic. Seneca discusses the idea of how to properly handle one’s time and derive meaningful experience. When referring to time, Seneca writes, “I advise you 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—of that which remains at the bottom, the amount is slight and the quality is vile. It is now that we must find time, and it is now that we must find happiness, if it is either that we are seeking for.” If we do not focus the lens through which we view life right now, everything we see from this moment forward will remain out of focus.
For the Stoic, the ability to find happiness in spite of what occurs around us is developed through character and perspective. We must realize that nothing is good or bad inherently, but only our judgments and interpretations of things can be good or bad. The wise man, Seneca writes, “is neither raised up by prosperity nor cast down by adversity, for always he is driven to rely predominantly on himself and to derive all joy from himself.” In other words, we must try to form our perspective to best serve our ability to remain with happiness and wonder regardless of the ups and downs of life. Stoicism suggests that we are but a tiny feature of the entire body of nature, and everything that happens to us is a matter of relevance and necessity to everything beyond us. In this, we must strive towards an acceptance and indifference towards everything that happens to us and instead focus our attention on controlling our reactions to the things that happen. We must put our best foot forward, acting and living with self-honesty, humility, and good virtue and welcome whatever the world deals us in return, good or bad. With this, we can begin to free ourselves from the chaos of the world and find some form of happiness and presence within ourselves.
The practice of Stoicism is not easy by any stretch, and arguably to live a completely Stoic life is impossible. Likely, no person can be without moments of desire or negative reaction to the world around them. However, Stoicism gifts us with a target of wisdom to aim for, a happiness and calmness to strive for when things are at their apparent worst. In a time where chaos and anxiety run rampant across our screens, where cultural pressures to live certain ways and achieve certain things overwhelm us 24/7, where we spend a huge amount of time comparing ourselves to and wanting the approval of others, our sense of happiness and peace is becoming increasingly susceptible, and it is perhaps through Stoicism that we can attempt to hold on to it.
Starting from birth, we seemingly run, if not sprint, through life, racing out of every moment, unsatisfied with what life is and constantly looking to the future for what life could be if we just obtain something more or different. Our culture overwhelms us with the reinforcements of this idea, convincing us that in order to be happy we have to achieve, by our own means, and live perfect, unaffected lives. This delusion, however, frenzies us with an anxiety that we are then told by culture we can rid ourselves of if we just achieve a few more things, make a little more money, be a little more popular, and buy a little more stuff, creating an endless feedback loop of unsatisfied hunger. If we cave into this, we surrender our life; we give up ourselves. We should not, like sheep, follow the herd of creatures in front of us, making our way where others go, not where we ought to go. Seneca writes, “In the Stoic view, the stuff we often find ourselves chasing in life is revealed to be rather petty and meaningless from a sufficient distance.” We don’t have much, if any, control on what happens to us, how people see and treat us, nor what happens because of what we do, and in the big picture, none of it really matters all that much. And so we must define our happiness not by what we own or achieve, not by how others see us, not by some bigger picture of life, but by how we think and see ourselves and live our own life through what we deem virtuous and relevant. Stoicism tells us we can, at last, if we wish, calmly accept the conditions of our different reality and one-up it with our own different attitude in return.