- Well, hello there?
Well, hello there?
I'm trying to practice sitting up straight.
It's not gonna work, I give up.
So I got a question for you guys,
have you ever found yourself in a mind numbingly,
frustrating situation?
Like a grocery store line that was just taking forever
or maybe it was a comment on Facebook
that cost you a few IQ points?
How do you react in this situation?
Every day of our lives,
we are dealt challenges that we have to overcome.
Those challenges are petty, you know, stubbing your toe,
and they gonna be more serious,
like the death of a loved one,
or losing your job.
And so we all have to learn to deal with those things.
And there have been hundreds,
maybe thousands of religions and philosophies
and belief systems that have attempted to help us do this.
So on today's Indirect Message,
I wanna talk about Stoicism.
The ancient Greeks, you know,
they left us this treasure trove of ideas about how
to lead the good life.
And so much of it still applies now 2,000 years later.
But before we dive in a little qualifier,
this philosophy, isn't gonna be for everyone, right?
And it's not gonna fix all your problems,
but I think that it's perspective that's worth considering
even if it outrages you.(laughing)
Fortunately, the Stoics welcomed critique,
and they actually gave us some tools to deal with anger too.
(upbeat music)
So when I first told my therapist about stoicism,
she was kind of alarmed.
In retrospect, I think it's
because she thought I meant I wanted to be stoicle,
you know kind of like unfeeling and emotionless.
- The immediate assumption is that I'm gonna be the kind
of person who just pushes down emotions,
represses them.
Uppercase s Stoicism refers to the philosophy
for living described by the ancient Stoic philosophers.
They had a very curious kind of reaction to emotion.
- This is William B. Irvine.
He's a practicing Stoic,
and he's written some of my favorite books on the topic.
As a general rule,
the Stoics wanted us to take a closer look at
how we manage our negative emotions
and the Stoics didn't want us to push these feelings down
or to deny their existence,
but to try to prevent them in the first place.
And if we can't prevent them to try to keep them
from clouding our judgment.
At the same time,
they were interested in maximizing the number
of positive emotions that we feel every day.
- They were interested in developing their sense of awe
and their sense of wonder about the world around them.
Because if you have developed that sense,
you can take a walk outside, see a tree,
and you can look at the park
and it's just amazing.
And you know the different kinds
of tree have different kinds of bark
and you can be blown away by that.
Or you can not even see the tree,
which is what a lot of people end up doing.
(upbeat music)
- So let's get into the practical stuff.
One of the key techniques that the Stoics practiced,
was accepting the things that are out of your control.
- I think accepting is not quite the right word,
it's embracing.
One illustration, if those of you who can see this on video,
I'm pointing to my ear,
it's bandaged 'cause yesterday I had a minor,
little surgery and you can sort of curse fate
or you can embrace the experience.
And I did my best to embrace the experience.
It's just practice,
'cause I suspect someday life will present me
with a very big challenge and by practicing,
I'll be ready for it.
So life can throw you some really brutal curve balls.
What are you gonna do with them?
And the Stoic is gonna say to the extent possible,
you're gonna hit them out of the park.
- This simple practice embracing the things
that we can't control has so many applications.
But I think one of the big ones
is how it applies to other people.
We can't control other people's behavior
and we can't control how other people see us.
I mean, look, there will always be someone
who doesn't like you.
Probably for extremely dumb reasons,
because there's probably a lot of things to like about you,
good taste in YouTube videos for starters,
but how someone might feel about you, that's their choice.
And we don't get a say in that.
So seeking validation and seeking approval
from other people while very tempting,
is likely to result in some of those negative emotions.
And this is something that gets infinitely more complicated
and dumb when social media is thrown into the mix,
because now we can quantify social approval.
- Social media, I try to stay off of.
Problem is you've just got
this dopamine slot machine in your pocket there.
And you know, it'll tell you, "Oh, they like me."
and who are these people?
In most cases, they're complete strangers.
I'm always seeking mentors.
These are people who know a whole bunch about something.
And when I encounter such a person,
I will just simply go into learning mode.
There would be a second group of people
that I would refer to,
this is a little bit snarky,
but they are anti-mentors.
As if they approve of something that I'm doing,
I should think twice about whether to do it or not.
- The take away being that on social media,
there is not a distinction between the types
of feedback that you're getting.
And so that kind of makes the feedback questionable.
(upbeat music)
Now there's a little paradox here, right?
Between I'm gonna accept my reality,
I'm gonna embrace my life as it is.
And Oh, there are injustices happening
and I'm not going to embrace that.
And so Stoicism might come off
to some people as being at odds
with social change movements.
- I would argue in Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher,
I think would agree with me on this,
that your fight for social change will be more efficient,
if you play the role of target
rather than the role of victim.
- So just to clarify here,
Bill is making the distinction
between framing ourselves as a victim,
which is sort of reveling
and living in these negative feelings,
living in an angry cloud about the ways
that you've been wronged versus,
being a target,
which is someone that sees injustice as a challenge
to rise to and to conquer.
- Despite my more than decade of Stoic practice,
I'm still perfectly capable of lying awake at night angry,
over some stupid thing that happened years ago
and that's because I'm a human being.
That just means I'm a human being.
That's the way that we're wired.
They were very cautious about anger.
Seneca has a, one of his longest essays is an essay on anger
and on the harm it does to human beings,
and the harm it does to societies
and we go to war and we kill each other.
The psychological insight was anger is this sneaky emotion
that starts out as just a little spark
and then the key thing to dealing
with it is don't let it go into a flame.
- It warrants that it can exhaust us,
it can distract us and it makes us less effective.
- So what we do, we've got these deep inner portions
of our brain, this reptilian portion
and this mammalian portion,
and they're still with us.
And so the idea is not just to stop them from acting,
but to harness the energy they have
and use it on our behalf.
(upbeat music)
- So let's talk about how to deal with setbacks.
There are a lot of ways
to approach the challenges in your life.
And you've probably already had a bunch of things
that work for you.
And maybe you could even share those below,
but the Stoics argued in typical fashion
that we need to change the way we frame our setbacks.
- The comedic frames.
So you take something that happened to you
and you turn it into a joke.
That requires a little bit of skill.
You gotta be a little bit quick on your feet,
but it's highly effective if you can do it.
Another frame is this whole thing you regarded as a test
and you're being tested by these imaginary Stoic gods.
They're like tough coaches.
And what they want to do is make you strong and resilient.
One more I'll throw into the pile
here is the storytelling frame.
- The storytelling technique is one
of my personal favorites.
You imagine that your life is a movie or a sitcom
because sometimes life does feel like a sitcom. (laughing)
In that framework, we ask ourselves, you know,
what kind of character do I wanna be in my story?
What kind of decisions do I want to make?
What, how do I want this story to end?
Bill says, that this also helps us
to live in the present moment.
- We are biologically programmed to live in the past.
That's part of what anger is about
and to live in the future.
That's part of what anxiety is about.
And as a result,
we find it very difficult to live in the present moment.
But if we did, we'll realize there's so much,
that's delightful, so much that's absolutely awesome.
- One of the setbacks
that can sit in our little lizard brains
for an unreasonable amount of time is when we fail
at something or we're rejected.
So the Stoics rethink what failure actually is
to put us in a growth mindset.
- One reason people don't do difficult things
is because there's the possibility of failure.
If you look into the lives of highly successful people,
one of the things that makes them stand out is
how extensively they failed.
How come 'cause they tried something hard to do.
If you try something hard to do,
there's a really good chance you're gonna fail.
What makes them special too?
Is that they bounced, they didn't break,
they were resilient, they bounced back.
So they said, "Oh, I just failed.
"Let's see, what can I learn from that?"
So there's a part of tennis that you can control
and the part you can't control.
What can you control?
You can control how hard you train, the strategy you have.
Can you control winning the game?
No, they just might be better than you are.
So suppose you lose the game, does that mean you failed?
No.
And you know what, you're gonna walk away feeling good
about yourself, going to be saying, "You know what?
"that was a challenge
"and I rose to that challenge."
(upbeat music)
- So the last technique I'm gonna talk about today,
and there are more on the pod.
If you want to check out the full conversation,
is wanting what you have, right?
Wanting what you already have.
Humans have such a fetal flaw, right?
We always want more.
Consumerists culture makes this worse, right?
You want more things, bigger things, better things,
a bigger house, a nice new car,
a fancy gadget that after a certain baseline,
and all of our needs is met,
these things don't make us much happier.
And so here again,
we're setting ourselves up to experience
those negative emotions.
In psychology, this phenomenon is called
the hedonic treadmill.
I actually made a video about it ages and ages ago,
specifically in reference to keeping the flame
of life in a longterm relationship.
So I'll put a link to that down below if you're interested.
- So the trick is, instead of going through life,
forming new desires and then chasing them,
figure out how to like the things you've already got,
appreciate them, savor them, embrace them.
And one way you can bring yourself
to that state of mind is through the negative visualization
that we were just talking about.
- Negative visualization is something
that I do every single day.
It's a brief momentary meditation
where I imagine what life would be like if this thing
that I've been taking for granted was suddenly gone
and I couldn't get it back.
It puts my gratitude in really clear focus.
And it helps me to remember why I want the things
that I have in my life, or perhaps more importantly,
the people that I have in my life.
- You know, you can always be in pursuit
of the perfect relationship.
And that's one way to spend your energy.
The other way is to number one, pick wisely,
and number two, is invest your energy
into making the relationship work.
The worst is if one side's giving 110%,
the other side's giving 90, right?
And then you have this kind of a symmetry.
And it's only recently that I become aware of this,
is the importance of communication.
The whole notion of conversation,
that what we regard as conversation consists,
but me waiting until you stop talking
so I can reveal to you what the truth of the matter is.
If you encounter somebody
and you just ask them sensible questions
and listen to them,
you'll learn some wonderful things,
but for them it will be a breakthrough
it can be a breakthrough experience.
- Bill is sort of getting at embodying the spirit
of curiosity about other people, right?
Not feeling competitive,
feeling intimidated or feeling better than,
just wanting to know more about them.
And to really do that,
we have to overcome parts of our ego here.
We have to overcome our own self-importance.
- There's an element of being secure, self secure.
And there's an element of embracing the life you happen
to be living.
Whoa, let me see what I can do with my life.
Let me see how much joy I can extract
from this life that I find myself living.
And that's a Stoic approach.
- I just adore him.
And also his voice is so soothing.
I was like getting asthma tingles (laughing)
during the interview.
Anyways, I hope this was useful to you guys in some way,
before you X out,
please consider ringing the bell down below
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when I post new episodes.
(laughing)
And if you enjoyed this episode, please give me a thumbs up.
It really helps me out guys.
Thanks, take care of my dears
and I'll see you next time.