So, I became interested in stoicism over the last few years I wrote a book called Happy,
which was delving into stoicism.
Stoicism was the dominant school of philosophy for 500 years before Christianity took over,
so when it did it was the stoics they had to win round.
And because of that they incorporated and appealed to a lot of stoic ideas so for that
reason they still sound familiar to us nowadays.
But when you look into them with the rigor that they were looked into 2000 years ago
they provide I think a very useful and realistic as in really grounded in reality approach
to happiness.
What stoicism says there’s sort of a couple of big building blocks.
One is a familiar idea to us still that it isn’t events in the world that caused our
problems but is our reactions to those events, the stories we form about them, our judgments
about those events that’s where our problems come from.
And we know that to be true because if something is really upsetting us we can always imagine
someone we know who would react to that thing differently and as long as we can always do
that that’s like a big clue that it’s our reaction that’s causing the problem
not the thing itself.
Once you’ve got your head around that the other big building block of it is, and I think
this is where it’s supremely useful, is that we can only control certain things in
life.
If we try and control things we can’t we are going to frustrate ourselves and become
anxious.
The old idea of happiness that the stoic sort of enjoyed was that happiness was a sort of
tranquility so this is really all about a recipe for avoiding unnecessary disturbance
and anxiety so you don’t try and control things that you can’t.
Now, the only things you can control are your thoughts and your actions and that is it.
That’s it.
And if you accept the idea that everything outside of your thoughts and actions are fine,
they’re fine as they are and you let that idea really sort of drip into your soul then
you have a very good template for avoiding unnecessary disturbance and anxiety.
There are gray areas that immediately pop up like what about social injustice what if
you really want to change the world?
That’s outside of my thoughts and actions, but it sort of isn’t.
What is outside of your thoughts and actions is an outcome that you can’t control, but
what is still within your thoughts and your actions is how much effort you put into changing
the world so you can still spend your life trying to create change but your impetus is
to do the very best that you can, the best that you can do, but you’re not committing
yourself to an outcome that is out of your control.
And then, of course, you avoid, you just do a better job because you’re not getting
caught up in bitterness and frustration and anxiety.
It’s like if you were playing a game of tennis, if you’re trying to win well you’re
going to get anxious that the other person is beating you, whereas if you’re playing
from a point of I’ll play as well as I possibly can you’re more likely to succeed and become
less anxious you’re going to play a better game and a tennis player will tell you that
that’s true.
So, those are very helpful things and I find that notion of which side of the line is this
thing that’s upsetting me?
Is it within my thoughts and my actions?
It never is.
Or is it something on the outside world that is actually out of my control?
In which case what if it was fine?
If I’m stressed because my partner handles stress badly himself and therefore is making
me upset, well I’m getting caught up in a whole sort of thing, but what if my starting
point was okay he handled stress badly in this situation, what if that’s sort of okay
or a separate thing I don’t need to get caught up in that that’s sort of his task.
And once you’ve separated it then of course you can decide you’re going to be more helpful
or help change that or whatever, but you’re just making those separations can be very
helpful.
If this person at work is upsetting me well that’s something outside of my thoughts
and my actions.
If you’re in a creative business, Bryan Cranston talks brilliantly about this with
auditions that your job at an audition is not to get the job.
And I think this applies to a lot of creative work you’re job isn’t to get the job,
your job is to present what you do in a compelling way, the other stuff you can’t control.
The Greeks thought of it as fortune and fate all the stuff you can’t control.
The opposite of all of this thinking is the American obsession, forgive me, with positive
thinking and optimism that you can, by believing in yourself and setting your goals, crank
the world up into line with your aims.
And the reality is we just can’t.
And that sort of thinking can be very helpful for a while or short-term goals, but ultimately
it’s probably going to come crashing down and then you’re adding failure to a whole
list of problems that you’ve already got because you think you’ve failed, you’ve
don something wrong as opposed to accepting that on one side of the graph there are your
aims, on the other side of the graph there’s fortune, there’s stuff that life throws
back at you that you can’t control and that actually a happy life is about accepting a
certain amount of unhappiness and living in easy accordance with both of those axis and
not fooling yourself into thinking that you can crank this line up to where it doesn’t
belong.
It’s a Protestant work ethic that whole American obsession with optimism, as opposed
to what I’m talking about which is a strategic pessimism, comes from the Calvinist.
It was the reaction against Calvinism.
But in the same way when you react against something often you sort of inherit the structure
of that thing and you just change the variables within it so in trying to think against that
religious model that Protestant work ethic was inherited.
So, that idea of believe in yourself, set your goals, keep believing in yourself is
still based on a lingering ghost of the protestant past.