Stoicism

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.

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.

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

rip Chrysippus

Seneca, Natural Questions

I think this app is simple and effective. @zikalify thanks.

• Epictitus

• Marcus Aurelius

• Marcus Aurelius

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