Stoicism offers practical techniques, rooted in ancient philosophy and validated by modern science, to cultivate better human beings by managing emotions, making sound judgments, and accepting what is beyond our control, ultimately leading to a more fulfilling life.
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- The very goal of Stoic
philosophy, of Stoicism, is to make us into better human beings,
into the kind of human beings that lives a life that is worth living.
But what does that mean in practice?
You might be tempted to think this is just too simple.
Some things are up to me.
Other things are not up to me. Yeah, sure, everybody knows that.
So what? How is that going to make a difference in my life?
But the issue is not that things are simple or not.
The issue is are you going to act on those things?
Are you actually going to practice those things?
I am Massimo Pigliucci.
I am an evolutionary biologist and a philosopher of science,
and my latest book is called “Beyond Stoicism,”
coauthored with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz.
- [Narrator] The Stoic toolkit.
- I'm gonna try to teach you a few basic Stoic techniques
that hopefully are gonna make your life better
in the long run, maybe even in the very short run
because a lot of Stoic techniques
tend to be efficacious almost immediately.
You can see the difference yourself after a few days
or a few weeks of practice.
And perhaps there is no better way to start
than with the connection between reason and emotions.
How do we deal with emotions?
Emotions are a big part, of course, of the human experience.
They are inevitable.
Even if we wanted to avoid them, we cannot.
They are an intrinsic part
of our biology and our psychology.
Sometimes they're useful.
They are alarm bells, for instance.
They alert us to certain things going right or going wrong.
Sometimes they deceive us and they create problems.
They push us to react in ways
that then we're later going to regret.
The Stoics thought quite a bit about emotions.
All of the major Stoic authors write about emotions,
perhaps none more than Seneca,
who was a Roman senator who lived in the first century.
He wrote one of the best books on emotions,
I think, ever written.
It's called "On Anger."
And it focuses on that particular emotion
because it's important.
We all experience anger under different conditions.
We all react in a way that is driven by anger.
And sometimes we regret the way we have acted.
So let's try to understand
what the Stoics actually say about this.
The fundamental idea is that emotions
are not in fact distinct or sharply distinct from reason.
A lot of people seem to think that reason is one thing
and emotion's another thing,
and they're sometimes in conflict with each other.
So reason might have to overcome emotions
or perhaps if you are a so-called emotional person,
you actually prefer the other way around.
But in reality, the two are actually highly interconnected.
And this is one insight,
one intuition of the ancient Stoics,
that is definitely confirmed by modern cognitive science.
We do know that the anatomical area
from where human emotions, many human emotions, originate
is the amygdala, which is the base of the brain.
And we do know that our reasoning faculty
resides mostly in the frontal parietal lobes of the brain.
But we also know that those two areas
are massively interconnected.
There are literally billions of neuronal fibers
that go back and forth between the two
so that there is no such a thing
as an emotional response independent of the way you think,
and there is no such a thing as thinking independently
of your emotional reactions.
Well, if that's true, the Stoics say there is your key
to a better relationship with your emotions.
What you need to do is a two or three-step process
that begins with cognition.
It begins with thinking carefully
before you get into any situation
that might be emotionally complex
about what you want to do and why.
Once you set the stage in terms of thinking,
then you try to behave accordingly
to that particular way of thinking.
If you think that one thing is right or wrong,
then presumably you will want to behave
according to that judgment.
And it's this combination of cognition and behavior
repeated over and over and over
that eventually affects your emotions,
sinks in at the emotional level,
and in fact will alter your emotions.
Let me give you an example.
Let's say that somebody insults you.
Epictetus talks a lot in his writings about insults
and ways to deal with insults.
And most of us would get upset at an insult
and in fact we would probably react.
We start escalating things.
You feel that rush of adrenaline, you're getting angry.
How dare this person talk to me in this way.
And then you start raising your voice
and then it escalates into a confrontation,
possibly even a physical confrontation.
The Stoics would say, well, before all of that,
think about it this way.
What exactly is an insult?
An insult is somebody opening their mouth,
saying certain words.
Those words arrive to your ears.
You interpret them in a certain way.
And because of that interpretation, you react.
In other words, it's your thinking,
it's your cognition that is the first step.
If you think this is unacceptable, this is an insult,
how dare the person talk to me like that,
then your emotions will follow.
Then you're now fueling your anger.
You're fueling your aggressive reaction to those words.
But if instead of going that way, you say to yourself
an insult is nothing, it's just air moving around.
It doesn't actually touch me.
It doesn't actually do anything to me.
If that person is saying something
about me that is insulting, what does that mean?
Well, either that person is right,
and maybe he's expressing his opinion in a clumsy way,
but he's actually right,
in which case, why am I going to be upset about it?
If somebody is right and it's setting me right,
then it's a good thing for me to accept that counsel,
to accept that observation and do something about it.
Or the person in question is wrong,
in which case, that's his problem, not mine.
I'm not the one in wrong.
He is the one that is wrong.
He should be concerned with it, not I.
So either way, it is in my power not to react
because it is in my power to reframe the situation to myself
and think, this is not an insult.
This is just air bouncing off
and it doesn't actually touch me.
It doesn't actually hurt me.
Once you do that,
you're now deescalating your emotional response
because your emotions will react, will go along,
with whatever way you're thinking about the situation.
If you're thinking that you're being offended,
your emotions will escalate.
If you're thinking that, oh, this is funny,
this is really ridiculous.
Doesn't the person in question know
that he's embarrassing himself?
Then your emotions will go in a different direction.
It will deescalate.
You're not gonna get angry.
Now, this is of course easier said than done.
This is not gonna happen on your first try.
But the key here is to constantly ask yourself,
what exactly is going on here and what is a good reaction?
What might be a good reaction to what is going on?
Once you reframed
whatever is happening to yourself that way,
your emotions eventually will follow.
The problem in dealing with situations as they're happening
is that after we're not mentally prepared.
And so we react in the moment,
and then perhaps we misjudge the situation,
our emotions start running away from us,
and then we regret later on
whatever we did or whatever we said.
So the Stoics have a very important technique
to help us prepare ourselves to difficult situations,
to deal with difficult situations.
That technique goes under a number of names.
Often it's referred to as philosophical journaling.
And I say philosophical
because it's a particular type of journaling.
This is not a diary where you just write down,
oh, today I went and did this or did that
and it was fun, that sort of stuff.
It's a journal of reflection.
And perhaps the best model
of that journal available to Stoic practitioners
is the "Meditations" of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
The "Meditations" was never meant for publication.
It is in fact the Emperor's personal philosophical journal.
And if you read it,
you'll see there is no particular structure.
There are 12 chapters, but the 12 chapters
don't have any particular subheadings,
there is no particular topic,
because Marcus is going through his life
and he is reflecting
on whatever was happening at that moment
and how he was reacting to what was happening.
And so, often, people read the "Meditations," for instance,
and they come across with this notion that it's repetitive
and it's a little preachy.
Both of those things are true.
It's repetitive because Marcus, just like the rest of us,
kept running into the same problems over and over again.
So for instance, he had an issue with anger management.
And so you will see in the "Meditations"
that there are several places where Marcus says to himself,
"Why did you get upset about this today?
What is a better way to answer that situation,
to react to that situation instead of getting angry?"
And it's preachy because he's preaching to himself.
He's not talking to an audience, he's talking to himself,
and he says, "Look, you really need to do things this way
and not that way."
So how does that work in practice?
Incidentally, this is another thing
where there is very good evidence
from modern cognitive behavioral therapy in particular,
but also cognitive science in general,
that this technique of philosophical journaling,
of reflection on your actions, actually does work.
It's a very good tool for self-improvement,
for ethical self-improvement.
There are different ways
in which you can do philosophical journaling.
Both Seneca and Epictetus actually give you details.
There are bits in their writings where they say,
"This is how you do it."
And as I said, Marcus Aurelius is a great example.
There is a whole book there
where you can read it and see how it is done.
My favorite way of doing it
is carving out a little bit of time at the end of the day,
before you go to bed, when you're not too tired,
quiet down, open up your journal, or your tablet,
or however you prefer to do it.
It doesn't have to be a written exercise either.
You can just think about it.
But it's better to be done as a written exercise
because then you have a record
of what you've been doing and thinking
over eventually a period of years,
and then you can go back and check
if you have improved in certain areas
or if there are certain issues
that are particularly problematic and recurring for you.
And you ask yourself, you pick a particular example
of something that happened during the day,
for instance, let's say somebody came up to me
and trying to insult me,
and you said something that is rude or uncalled for.
And I reacted in a certain way.
So I describe to myself in the journal the situation
as objectively as I can without using emotional language,
as analytically as I can.
Because the point is not to relive the experience,
the point is to analyze the experience and learn from it.
In fact, if you notice, Marcus Aurelius writes his journal
in the second person.
He says, "You did this and you reacted this way."
This may sound strange and it may feel a little awkward
to do it that way,
but again, there is very good evidence from modern studies
that it does help keeping the distance
from your emotional responses, which is in fact helpful
in trying to learn analytically
from what you did and what you perhaps didn't do.
Imagine you're just talking to a friend.
You're writing to a friend.
You say, "You did this,
how come you reacted this way or that way?"
So you pick a particular instance,
so something that happened,
an incident that happened during the day,
you briefly describe that incident to your friend,
and then you ask yourself three questions.
What did I do wrong?
What did I do right?
And what could I do next time?
Why ask yourself those questions?
The first one, what did I do wrong?
The point is not to indulge in sort of regret,
and self-flagellation, and things like,
those are all useless according to the Stoics.
Whatever you did, it's done.
You cannot change it.
You cannot go back in time and change it.
However, you can learn from it.
The second question is, well, what did I do right?
It's essentially the same idea,
only in the the flip side of that coin,
that is, you don't just want to remind yourself
the kinds of things that you do wrong,
you also want to set goals
that you're gonna achieve over and over.
Here's where I don't wanna go the next time,
here's where I do want to go the next time,
or here's what I wanna do less and less moving forward,
and here's what I want to do more and more moving forward.
The third question is arguably the most crucial one,
what could I have done differently?
Again, this is not about regret
because you can't change what you did.
But it's about the fact that,
you know, as much as we think of our lives
as endlessly fascinating, and different,
and varied, and all that sort of stuff,
in fact, most of the time we tend to do the same things
pretty much every day.
That's an advantage as far as the Stoics are concerned,
because what that means is that whatever situation
you did not handle properly today
is likely going to happen again, possibly soon.
So if a colleague, for instance, came in
and said something insulting, or rude, or whatever,
well, you know, that person
isn't gonna go away very likely anytime soon,
and his behavior is not gonna change necessarily
in any radical fashion.
So you can expect reasonably then,
in a few days, or next week, or next month,
something close to that will happen again.
But now you're ready.
You may not have been ready today when it happened,
that's why you're doing this self-analysis
in your philosophical journal,
but you're gonna be ready next time.
You're telling yourself, "Okay, well if this happens again,
here is a better way to respond."
That way you're prepared.
And Seneca says a prepared mind handles difficulties,
handles delicate situations much better.
Perhaps not perfectly,
but the goal is not perfection necessarily, but better.
You may have heard of something called the Serenity Prayer,
which is not exactly the same thing that comes to mind
when we talk about Stoicism.
But bear with me for a second, there is a connection.
The Serenity Prayer, which is often recited
at the beginning of meetings of 12-step organizations
such as Alcoholic Anonymous goes something like this.
It asks God to have the wisdom to tell the difference
between what we can change and what we cannot change,
the courage to change what we can,
and the serenity to accept what we cannot.
That notion, that Serenity Prayer,
was written at the beginning of the 20th century
by an American theologian,
but in fact it's a rephrasing of a fundamental insight
by the Stoic Epictetus
that goes back to the beginning of the second century.
The two are in fact connected historically
because it turns out
that Epictetus's manual for a good life
was used throughout the middle ages by Christian monks
as a source of spiritual exercises.
Now, Epictetus doesn't quite phrase it that way,
but the same idea holds,
and it's one of the most interesting
and most useful ideas in Stoicism.
Epictetus talks about some things are up to us,
and some things are not up to us,
and we should focus on the things
that are up to us and act on them
because that is where our agency is efficacious,
and we should develop an attitude of acceptance
and equanimity toward the things that are not up to us.
Now, we all live in a complex world
where there are all sorts of things
that we don't necessarily control,
both at a macroscopic level,
let's say political change, social change, things like that,
and at a personal level.
You know, things happen in our life
that we don't necessarily have much to say
or do about because they depend on a number of factors
that we do not control.
So how do the Stoics deal with those kinds of uncertainties
and that kind of limited agency
that, at the end of the day, we all have.
Let's pick an example, a specific example.
Let's say that tomorrow morning
I'm going to have a job interview.
And it's a job that I really want.
It's important for me to do well in that interview,.
Epictetus would say,
well, the best way you can prepare yourself
for that challenge is the day before, let's say,
to ask yourself, what under these circumstances
is up to me and what is not up to me?
And you can do this literally by making two lists.
You can do it in your mind,
or better yet, you can write down a table.
You can draw a table with two columns and say up to me,
not up to me.
It's surprising, once you start paying attention
to the question,
how many things you actually will be able to list.
For instance, actually getting the job, not up to me.
It depends on the competition,
it depends on who's doing the interview
and how they're feeling that day,
and on a number of other things
that are really not under my control,
which means, according to Epictetus,
that I have to be ready to accept the possibility
that things will not go my way
and accept that with serenity, with equanimity,
because that's the way the world works.
Sometimes job interviews are successful
and other times they're not.
And we're adults.
We don't throw a tantrum when things don't go our way.
What is up to me?
Well, clearly to prepare myself as much as possible
and as carefully as possible for the job interview.
What else is up to me?
Well, try to get a good night's sleep
because we know that being rested and all that helps.
But notice that I said to try to get a good night's sleep,
not to actually get a good night's sleep,
because it's possible that my neighbor,
you know, in the next apartment is throwing a party
into the late night and I will not be able to sleep
as many hours as I should or want to
because there are, again, circumstances
that are outside of my control
that are gonna interfere with it, with my intentions.
So the intention is mine,
but the outcome is not under my control.
What else?
Well, it's certainly a good idea
to show up on time for the job interview.
That means that you care,
that you are a professional, and so on and so forth.
But again, there, what is up to me
is to try to show up on time.
I live in New York.
That's not a guarantee.
I can get on the subway and the subway all of a sudden stops
in the middle of the tracks and it's not gonna move,
or I may take a taxi and there's a lot of traffic
and I may actually get there late.
So to try to have the intention to do my best
in order to get there on time is up to me,
actually getting there on time is not up to me,
and so on and so forth.
So we can come up with these lists
that are actually fairly detailed.
The more detailed, the better.
And the idea is that once you have these lists
of things that are up to me
and things that are not up to me,
you focus only on the one to the left side,
the things that are up to me.
Those are the ones that I want to rehearse,
think carefully about, be as prepared as possible
because my agency lies in that direction.
All of the other ones, I can still be aware of them
and I can mentally prepare myself
for the possibility that they are
or they're not going to go in my preferred direction.
But that's all I can do about it.
The result is that you're much more efficacious
in the things you do because your agency
is in fact at play there.
But it's also true that you accept things
in a way that maintains calm, tranquility, serenity.
You don't upset yourself over things
for which frankly there is no point in getting upset.
The same approach of focusing on things that are up to us
and accepting with equanimity things that are not up to us
can be applied to pretty much every situation
and every challenge or potential setback we might suffer,
not just at an individual level, at a personal level,
but also at a societal level or a political level.
And the Stoics themselves lived in really turbulent times.
The Hellenistic period,
which went from the death of Alexander the Great
and the collapse of the Macedonian Empire
to the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE,
which basically marked the beginning of the Roman Empire,
was in fact a period of major turmoil
where things were changing very rapidly,
seemingly completely outside the control
of most individuals.
Well, we might live in a similar situation.
We're facing major challenges that all of us, most of us,
feel unprepared and not particularly able
to do anything about.
You know, there's political change, there's social change,
we're facing the possibility of climate catastrophe.
We are still facing the possibility
of, you know, a nuclear war, for instance,
and things like that.
How does a Stoic deal with those kinds of situations?
It's exactly the same approach.
Again, you ask yourself, what here is up to me
and what is not up to me?
You make the two lists, you focus on the first one,
and then you try to do your best
to accept with serenity the second.
For instance, let's say
that I'm concerned about climate change, as I should be.
Well, I can't change anything dramatically
at that level for that kind of problem on my own.
And this is not an individual level.
Arguably, it's not even a problem
that can be solved by an individual society.
It requires literally global actions.
But that doesn't mean that I cannot do anything about it.
So if I start writing down the things that are up to me,
I can come up, for instance,
with the following partial list.
Well, I can inform myself.
The first basis for rational decisions is to get informed.
I can also donate to organizations
that actively work in that direction.
I can vote.
I can talk to people.
I can go in the streets and join other people
that are vocal about these kind of things.
All of these approaches are in fact up to me.
They're under my agency.
And doing them by themselves
of course will not solve the problem,
but it will contribute toward the solution of the problem,
and just as importantly, at a personal level,
will make me feel better
because I'm doing something about it.
But by the same token, there's the second column,
the things that are not up to me.
Actually solving the problem of climate change
is certainly not up to me.
Actually even getting a particular politician
that might contribute to the solution elected
is not up to me.
Actually achieving in fact
all of those things that I just mentioned
is not really up to me.
And therefore, although I hope
that things are gonna go in a certain direction,
I have to be ready for the possibility that they won't.
And that's okay because, again, not everything in life
goes the way we prefer, and we need to accept
as rational, reasonable adults
that we may not have a choice,
and we need to be okay with the notion
that we don't have a choice on everything.
We cannot act on everything.
We cannot solve everything.
I'm sure you noticed that one of the things in life
is that sometimes we have to make tough decisions.
And we second guess ourselves.
We tend to go one way and then think,
maybe I should have gone the other way.
We tend to think in a dichotomous fashion.
We tend to think that it's either black or white,
either this or that.
The Stoics thought a lot about decision making.
In fact, Epictetus thought that our most important faculty
was something that he called prohairesis,
which is Greek for will, the decision,
the ability to actually arrive at a judgment
and an assessment of a situation
and then try to act on it, do your best to act on it.
The problem is of course that life sometimes is complicated.
There are multiple choices.
We have a tendency to want to simplify things
and go for something that it's stark,
that it's clear, that it's obvious.
That's just not the way the world works.
And according to the Stoics, it's much better
to try to understand how the world works
and then act accordingly
rather than trying to impose on the world
the way we want to think
or the way we prefer things to be.
There are several passages in Epictetus's discourses
where he talks to his students and he reminds them,
to design the world in a certain way
that it's convenient for you is not up to you.
At one point, in fact, it gets even pretty funny.
One of the students apparently complained
of having a cold and a running nose.
And Epictetus looks at him and says,
"So what do you think?
The universe should rearrange yourself
so that you don't have a running nose?
Why don't you just get a handkerchief and wipe it off?"
So sometimes it's about obvious things,
sometimes it's about things that are complicated.
And there is no sure way to make right decisions.
The only thing that we can do is to make sure
that we fine-tune as much as possible our prohairesis,
that is, our faculty of judgment.
That is what the third discipline
of Epictetus is about, right?
The discipline of assent.
Assent means to agree to something.
According to the Stoics,
we are constantly bombarded by impressions,
what they call impressions.
An impression is essentially a combination
of a sensorial experience
and an immediate, usually instinctive judgment.
For instance, I might walk down the street
and I have the impression that it's good to go buy
and eat that gelato that I just saw displayed.
Because it tastes good, it looks good,
it's attractive, I should do it.
That's an impression.
It's a combination of, I am seeing something
and I'm immediately arriving at a judgment
that doing something about that object is a good thing.
Epictetus says that's the time
when you wanna stop and think.
Ask yourself.
In fact, talk to your impression.
Say, "Well, wait a minute, is this really a good thing?
Should I actually go on and get the gelato
and eat it right now?
Well, maybe not because I'm on my way to dinner.
Eating a gelato will spoil my appetite.
Also, frankly, my waistline
is not exactly in the best shape possible,
so that's not gonna help either.
No, on second thought, a better decision
is to ignore the gelato, keep walking, and go home.
That's a simple situation.
But we face constantly these kinds
of decision making opportunities, so to speak.
And we also constantly second guess ourselves.
"Oh, I should have done this.
I should have done this other thing."
The Stoics think that what is up to you is your intentions,
not the outcomes of those intentions.
So what you need to do is to work
on why are you trying to do certain things
more than on, will I succeed in doing these things?
And that might simplify our decision making problems.
For instance, let's say that I go
and volunteer in my soup kitchen
around the corner from my apartment.
Is this a good thing to do or is it not a good thing to do?
Well, most people probably would say it's a good thing
because I'm helping other people,
I'm spending my time in a way that it's helpful to others,
and so on and so forth.
But a Stoic would actually frame the question differently.
The question would be not necessarily,
is the action itself good or not,
but are your motivations virtues or not?
Why am I doing this?
If it turns out that I generally want to help people,
then that is in fact a virtuous action,
whether I succeed or not.
However, it's also possible that I decided to do that
because I need a new line on my resume
to look good the next time that I apply for a job
so that I can show that I also volunteer for social causes.
Well, that's not virtuous,
because now I'm using other people as a means to an end,
to my own end, to self aggrandize,
to get my own benefit out of this thing, right?
So it's not virtuous.
Even though it might still be useful to others,
I might still be helpful to others,
this is not really the right thing to do
because it actually undermines my character.
So to shift perspective from the outcome,
is this a good thing or a bad thing,
to my intentions and therefore my character,
is this good for me,
does this make me a better person
or does it actually undermine my character,
it makes me a worse person,
very often will simplify our decision making
because it turns out that the answer to why am I doing this
is often much simpler than the answer to,
is this really truly a good thing to do
or not a good thing to do?
The very goal of Stoic philosophy, of Stoicism,
is to make us into better human beings,
into the kind of human beings that lives
a life that is worth living.
But what does that mean in practice?
Well, it means a number of things,
but one way in which the Stoics answered that question,
you know, what sort of life we should live,
is that they say we should live according to nature.
Now, to live according to nature
doesn't mean running naked into the forest
and hugging trees, although of course
there is nothing wrong with that necessarily.
It means to look at the kind of living being,
of organism, that a human is
and what actually makes that organism flourish,
makes it do good things, better things, have a happier life,
as opposed to the kinds of things
that get in the way of human flourishing.
This turns ethics, remember that for the Stoics,
ethics is the study of how to live a good life,
into essentially an empirical discipline,
because it's about human nature.
You have to observe things
about what makes human beings better or worse,
what makes a human life better or worse.
The Stoics drew an interesting analogy.
They thought that ethics is like medicine.
You know, medicine of course being concerned with the body,
ethics being concerned with the mind, with our psyche.
Now, there are some things, some behaviors,
that are natural for us,
but they're not good from a medical perspective.
For instance, we have a natural attraction to sugar
and to fatty foods.
That probably evolved by natural selection
in a period of human evolution
where there wasn't a lot of food around.
And so every time that we run into a source of fat or sugar,
we were better served
by actually taking advantage of it, right?
But we don't live in that kind of environment anymore.
We don't live in the Pleistocene anymore.
We live in cities where you can find food 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
And so having these natural craving, because it's natural,
for fat and sugar is actually not good for us.
It undermines our physical health.
It causes all sorts of problems, diabetes and so on,
heart attacks, et cetera.
So a doctor will look at this and say,
"Look, this is in fact a natural craving,
but the healthy thing to do would be to resist that craving,
to reorient your priorities elsewhere."
The Stoics make exactly the same argument
in terms of the human psyche.
There are some things that come natural to human beings
in terms of behavior, for instance, anger.
Anger is a natural response to a perceived injustice.
But the Stoics argue anger is the psychological equivalent
of a fatty food or a lot of sugar.
It's just not good for you mentally.
It doesn't lead to a good life.
Then what is good for you at a mental level,
at a psychical level?
Two things.
To reason your way through your problems
instead of bulldozing things
or just reacting in the moment,
and most importantly, to be social,
to cooperate with other people,
because we are, of course, social animals
and we thrive in a society, in a social group.
Now, from there, the step is not very far
to realizing that it's not just my immediate group,
it's not just my family, my friends,
or perhaps the people that live in my city.
It makes sense to cooperate, to be good,
to be positive about any human being that lives anywhere
because after all, we live in an interconnected world.
Now, one of those early Stoics, a guy named Hierocles,
in the second century, wrote a book
called "Principles of Ethics."
Hierocles says what we should try to do
is to metaphorically bring people, all the people,
closer and closer to us.
Imagine that you are the center of your own world.
As soon as you do that, you immediately realize
that you depend on other people,
your parents, for instance, your siblings.
And then eventually you realize
that you depend on other people
that you start calling your friends.
And then you depend on further larger group of people,
outside, you know, acquaintances,
or people that you don't necessarily
directly come in contact with
but that indirectly affect your life.
Well, what Hierocles said was what you need to do
is to bring all those circles, which extend eventually
all the way to the entirety of humanity,
closer and closer to yourself.
You should think of your friends
as if they were your family.
You should think of your acquaintances
as if they were your friends.
You should think of strangers
as if they were your acquaintances,
and so on and so forth.
Bring them closer.
Your circles of concern should shrink
and your concern should expand to all of these people.
And Hierocles actually goes so far
as giving practical advice of how to do that.
It's not just a way of thinking about stuff,
you actually can behave in a way that is cosmopolitan,
because that's ultimately the word that the Stoics used.
And the way you do that is,
Hierocles says just go around, and when you meet strangers,
address them as brother and sister,
or perhaps uncle and aunt,
depending on their age, and their gender, and so on.
In other words, remind yourself and others
that we are in fact all on the same boat together
and that we depend on each other for a good navigation.
Now, at this point, you might be tempted to think,
this is just too simple.
Some things are up to me, other things are not up to me.
Yeah, sure, everybody knows that.
So what?
How is that gonna make a difference in my life?
Well, but the issue is not that things are simple or not,
the issue is, are you going to act on those things?
Are you actually going to practice those things?
Ethics, after all, is not rocket science.
You're not gonna have to build
a rocket that goes to the moon.
You just have to improve your life bit by bit,
action by action, thought by thought.
Here's an analogy that the Stoics themselves
made very often with athletics.
They thought, well, you know, if you go into a gym
and somebody's gonna show you,
a trainer is gonna show you
how to lift weights, for instance,
you might be tempted to say,
"Oh, is that all there is to it?"
It's a simple action.
I, you know, pick up the weights in a certain way,
I make sure that my posture in a certain,
and then that's it, I'm done.
Yes, the action is conceptually simple,
but the difference is going to come only
if, every day or several times a week,
you come to the gym and you actually do that action.
That's how you're gonna get your muscles.
That's how you're gonna get your physical ability improved,
not by the fact that you understand
something that is simple to do,
but by the fact that once you understood it,
you actually practice it over and over and over.
The same goes for the kind of Stoic advice
that we've heard so far.
Yes, it's very simple to say that,
you know, some things are up to me
and other things are not up to me.
What is difficult is to actually follow through.
Every time that you face a challenge,
every time that you face a difficult situation,
you go through that exercise
and then you focus your attention on what is up to you
and trying to develop a good attitude of acceptance
and equanimity toward that that is not up to you.
That is the difficult part.
It's not the conceptual understanding,
it's the actual practice.
I did not start my life or my career as a Stoic
or a Stoic practitioner.
In fact, I was something quite different.
I began my academic career as an evolutionary biologist.
I've always been interested in science
ever since I was a kid.
I decided that biology was my passion
and I went through all of the steps, formal and otherwise,
that eventually build a career in that field.
But then, like many people,
at some point I got to a moment of crisis.
Call it a midlife crisis, if you will.
So you get to a point where you say,
"Well, this was fun, this was interesting.
I've been doing this for, let's say 20 years, 25 years.
Do I really wanna do this same thing
for another 25, 30, or however much time I have?"
And my answer was no.
I need to do something different.
When I was back in high school, in Rome, in Italy,
I had a wonderful teacher of philosophy for three years,
really made the field come alive,
and it really developed a passion for philosophy in me.
So when the crisis came,
the answer was almost immediately obvious.
It's like, oh, well I need to go into philosophy then,
'cause that is the other thing that I'm passionate about.
So I went back to school, and I got my degree,
graduate degree in philosophy, and I moved,
I switched career to philosophy of science.
But, you know, the midlife crisis was still going,
and it wasn't concerned just with the academic career,
just with the job aspect of things, right?
A number of things happened
more or less at the same time in my life.
My father died, for instance.
I knew that this was gonna happen,
but when it did happen, it hurt.
It really hit very hard.
I was hit by an unexpected divorce, for instance.
I moved across country because of my career change.
Now, any psychologist would tell you
that one of those things is pretty stressful.
If three or four happened, as they did to me
in the span of a few months,
that can actually trigger a crisis.
That can make you really reconsider your priorities.
And that is exactly what happened to me.
So I thought, well, I'm studying philosophy.
I'm becoming a professional philosopher.
Philosophy means love of wisdom, literally.
Surely if there is an answer to my current predicament,
surely if there are tools that will allow me
to overcome these challenges and to move forward,
they're gonna come from philosophy.
Yes, but where from philosophy?
Which part of philosophy?
Philosophy is a huge field.
So I studied more or less systematically.
I looked into Buddhism, for instance,
because several friends told me
that Buddhism was a good approach
if you're looking for a philosophy of life.
It didn't quite click, however.
It didn't speak to me at a deep level
as I was hoping and expecting.
So eventually I figured out that the answer,
whatever it was going to be,
was gonna come from virtue ethics.
Virtue ethics is the general Greco-Roman tradition
that has to do with self-improvement
understood as improvement of your character.
But even that is a large field.
We have Aristotle, we have Epicurus,
we have all sorts of ancient authors,
all of whom have something interesting to say.
And I did read some of these, but again, nothing clicked.
Then one day, I was scrolling on my phone
on the thing that at the time was called Twitter
and now called X, and I saw a tweet that said,
"Help us celebrate Stoic Week."
And I thought, that's odd.
Why would anybody want to celebrate the Stoics?
Because of course I thought, like many people,
of the Stoics as, you know, stiff upper lip
and suppression of emotion kind of people,
sort of a Mr. Spock from "Star Trek."
But then I realized, I thought, wait a minute, hold on,
the Stoics, Stoicism also was a type of virtue ethics,
so it was in the general ballpark
of what I was already interested in pursuing.
Then I remember one of the Stoics was Marcus Aurelius,
and I read the "Meditations" when I was in college,
and I found it an interesting, provocative book.
I also remembered that Seneca was another Stoic,
and I translated Seneca from Latin
when I was in high school.
So I thought, okay, maybe there is something here
that might be worth investigating.
So I signed up for Stoic Week,
which by the way is something that happens every year,
usually in October or November.
In fact, now I'm on the board
of the organization called Modern Stoicism
that actually organizes Stoic Week.
But at the time, I signed up and I downloaded their guide,
and their material, their readings.
And the first thing that I read
was by a guy who I never heard of before, named Epictetus.
And one of his students said, you know,
"Wouldn't it be good for me to become rich and powerful?
That way, I can help my family, my friends.
I can even perhaps do something good for my country."
And Epictetus' answer was interesting.
He said, well, who is gonna tell you
what the right thing to do is for your family,
for your friends, and for your country?
The money or the power are not gonna tell you.
Your faculty of judgment is going to tell you,
your prohairesis in Greek,
your ability to think carefully and rationally about things,
which is the very thing that Stoics tend to cultivate
and trying to improve throughout their lives.
That did it.
I almost heard the click at the back of my mind.
I said, "This is my guy."
Epictetus talks in a way that is no nonsense.
It's very clear what he says and what he means.
He doesn't suffer fools easily.
He has a sense of humor that borders onto sarcasm perhaps,
and I respond to that kind of approach.
And so I started devouring everything
that I could possibly find by Epictetus and about Epictetus.
And here we are now, a dozen years later,
we're still talking about Stoicism.
The decision to start studying
and, most importantly, practicing Stoicism
had an immediate effect on my life.
Like, in a matter of days,
I was thinking about certain issues
that had plagued me for a long time in a very different way,
and I was beginning to act differently about those issues.
For instance, ever since I was a kid,
I struggled with weight.
You know, it's never exactly what I wanted
or in fact even close to where I wanted it.
But, you know, as a biologist,
I understand that weight is a complex matter.
It depends on a large number of causes,
some of which I can influence and some of which I don't.
My genetic background and my early development
are certainly not up to me.
That means that there are limits to what I can do,
40 years later, 50 years later,
about that particular problem.
So I accept those limits.
At the same time, however, there are things that I can do.
I can and certainly do now eat a much more healthy diet.
I go and exercise more often and so on and so forth.
Those are things that are up to me.
Now, these are not earth-shattering things,
but the important difference is that they sunk inside me
in a way that it never did before.
It's not that I never heard before
of exercise, or healthy lifestyle, or genetics.
I'm a biologist after all.
But I never really incorporated those things
deep into my thinking,
and therefore they were not reflected into my actions.
Another thing that my friends and family noticed immediately
was that I was getting much less angry
and upset about things.
Just like Marcus Aurelius, I did have an anger problem.
I was sometimes stupefied
by how people can say or do certain things
without considering the effect that they have on others.
And I would get upset.
I would get angry at the perceived injustice,
either toward me or toward people I cared.
But Stoicism made me realize
that that's just the way the world works.
That doesn't mean you cannot do anything about it.
You can certainly talk to people about certain things.
You can certainly reframe things in your own mind
so that they will not upset you.
But as Marcus Aurelius says ,
to expect that people are not gonna do stupid things
or that people are not gonna say things that are hurtful
is just to expect that the world
is gonna be completely different from the way it is.
And if there is anything about the Stoics,
it's that they're very realistic about the world.
They accept the world the way it actually is,
not the way you would want it to be.
Again, let's be clear here.
This is not a counsel for being a doormat
and just take whatever comes your way without reacting.
Actions and reactions are important.
It's the fabric of human life.
But those actions and reactions need to be thought carefully
so that they're most efficacious
and they need to be carried out in a way that is realistic.
You do not expect miracles to happen
because unfortunately that's not the way the world works.
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