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 a 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 ourself.
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 seeming unquenchable hunger fro ultimate control and happiness outside our self, 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 in 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 Nelson
Mandela, written about by current, popular authors like Tim Ferris, 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 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 mental
reactions and interpretations of the external, which we can control.
When we persist with the belief that things outside our self or things in the future will
provide us with a form of ultimate happiness, we exchange every moment of our life for a
moment that does not exist. We become dependent on things outside of our self that we cannot
control and we endlessly run on a treadmill of needing more.
We can and should engage our nature to progress and pursue bigger, faster, better, and more
interesting; but we should ensure that on our pursuits, we are intentional about what
we are doing so to ensure that we are not being careless with our time and wasting our
experience of life. No matter what task we undertake, we will do it wastefully, if we
assume that any of what comes beyond the task itself will provide anything better than the
experience of focus and presence in the task itself.
There is nothing 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 ones 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 ok 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 famous stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius was, in
his time, the most powerful person in world. 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 self indulgence in things outside himself. In order to develop this fortitude, a common
practice in stoicism is to, on occasion, temporarily strip ones self 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 piece 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 is in our constant expectation that something outside ourselves or in the future is needed
for a worthy experience in life that causes our inability to ever find worthy experience
in life in the first place. In Letters 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, fore if we do not focus the lens
through which we view life right now, everything we see from this moment forward will remain
out 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 has striven 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 and instead, focus our attention on controlling
our reactions to the things that happen. With this, we can begin to free ourselves from
the chaos of the world and find some form of happiness and presence within our self.
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 increasingly on the line, 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 cultures overwhelm us with the reinforcement of this idea, convincing
us that our duty is to achieve, buy, own, 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 our self. Seneca writes, “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.” In the stoic view, the stuff we often find
ourselves chasing in life reveal 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 our self
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 indifferent
reality, and one up it with our own indifferent attitude, in return.