A while back I had a client who could be genuinely defined as ‘stoic’. And I think it was his stoicism that assisted him whilst he was in our program, and his recovery.
‘Stoicism’ was a philosophy that flourished for around 400 years in Ancient Greece and Rome, gaining widespread support among all classes of society. Apparently it had one overwhelming and highly practical ambition: to teach people how to be calm and brave in the face of overwhelming anxiety and pain.
Many hundreds of philosophers practiced Stoicism but two figures stand out as our best guides to it: the Roman politician, writer and tutor to Nero, Seneca (AD 4-65); and the kind and magnanimous Roman Emperor (who philosophised in his spare time while fighting the Germanic hordes on the edges of the Empire), Marcus Aurelius (AD 121 to 180). Their works remain highly readable (not that I have read them) and deeply consoling – perhaps ideal for sleepless nights – when in those breeding grounds for runaway terrors and paranoia.
Life in the 21st century is, in some respects, little different from the lives these men lead in Ancient Rome. Our tablets might be a bit ‘smarter’ than the wax variety they wrote on. But human nature doesn’t appear to have changed greatly. We live in a society that – while in many respects is better than the Roman one – still has injustice, repression and exploitation. Our individual day-to-day lives incur irritations, disappointments, and having to deal with particular types of people who seem to have no clue or concerns about how they might affect others. We also continue to fall in and out of love, make or lose friends, and work with people who emotions may change at a moment’s notice, upsetting the always precarious balance of our lives.
There’s the opportunity that stoicism can help us with a number of particular everyday problems:
- At all times, so many terrible things might happen. The standard way for people to try and assist us when we’re wired in anxiety is to tell us that we will, after all, be OK: the embarrassing email might not be discovered, sales could yet take off, there might be no scandal… But the Stoics bitterly opposed such a strategy, because they believed that anxiety flourishes in the gap between what we fear might, and what we hope could, happen. The larger the gap, the greater will be the oscillations and disturbances of mood. To regain calm, what we can do is systematically and intelligently crush every last vestige of hope. Rather than appease ourselves with sunny tales, it is far better – the Stoics proposed – to courageously come to terms with the very worst possibilities – and then make ourselves entirely at home with them. When we look our fears in the face and imagine what life might be like if they came true, we stand to come to a crucial realisation: we will cope. We will cope even if we had to go to prison, even if we lost all our money, even if we were publicly shamed, even if our loved ones left us, and even if the growth turned out to be malignant. We generally don’t dare do more than glimpse the horrible eventualities through clenched eyelids, and therefore they maintain a constant sadistic grip on us. Instead, as Seneca put it: ‘To reduce your worry, you must assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.’ To a friend wracked with terror he might be sent to prison, Seneca replied bluntly: ‘Prison can always be endured by someone who has correctly understood existence.’ The Stoics even suggested we take time off to practice worst-case scenarios. We could, for example, mark out a week a year where we eat only stale bread and sleep on the kitchen floor with only one blanket, so we stop being so squeamish about being sacked or imprisoned. We will then realise, as Marcus Aurelius says, ‘that very little is needed to make a happy life.’
- Fury We get angry – commonly with our partners, our children, and politicians. We can smash things up and hurt others. The Stoics thought anger a dangerous indulgence, but most of all, a piece of stupidity, for in their analysis, angry outbursts are only ever caused by one thing: an incorrect picture of existence. Anger is, in the Stoic analysis, caused by the violent collision of hope and reality. We don’t shout every time something sad happens to us, only when it is sad and unexpected. To be calmer, we must, therefore, learn to expect far less from life. Of course our loved ones will disappoint us, naturally our colleagues will fail us, invariably our friends will lie to us… None of this should be a surprise. It may make us sad. The wise stoic aims to reach a state where simply nothing could suddenly disturb their peace of mind. Every tragedy should already be priced in. ‘What need is there to weep over parts of life?’ asked Seneca, ‘The whole of it calls for tears.’
- Us humans pretty naturally exaggerate our own importance. The incidents of our own lives loom very large in our view of the world. And so we get stressed and panicked, we curse and throw things across the room. To regain composure, we could regularly be reduced in our own eyes. We could give up on the very normal but very disturbing illusion that it really matters what we do and who we are. The Stoics were keen astronomers and recommended the contemplation of the heavens to all students of philosophy. On an evening walk we can look up and see the planets. Lots of them.It’s a hint of the unimaginable extensions of space across the solar system, the galaxy and the cosmos. The sight has a calming effect which the Stoics revered, for against such a backdrop, we realise that none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes have any relevance. Nothing that happens to us, or that we do, is – blessedly – of any consequence whatsoever from the cosmic perspective.
- To ease our general sense of panic, us humans love to predict and expect particular things are going to happen. For example, let’s say we’re in a long-term relationship, and we very much love our partner. We want, like most people, to be loved back and for the relationship to last forever and ever and ever. But these outcomes are not especially under our control because they depend on both external circumstances and the feelings of our partner. What is in our control, is to be a loving companion and work towards making the relationship the best we can. We may or may not fail, but success will at least be related to goals internal to us and entirely within our control. The philosopher (and former slave) Epictetus stated “Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and in a word, whatever is not our own doing”. It’s a similar sentiment to the modern Serenity Prayer commonly used in the 12-step fellowship for alcohol and other drug recovery.
Hopefully none of us will ever need to display the courage of sense of justice that characterised the lives of some of the Stoics in Ancient Rome, but maybe a little bit of stoicism would help make our own lives a bit easier. Maybe we would even have the opportunity to feel heroic and defiant in the face of life’s troubles.