A (Very) Brief Introduction to Stoicism

Most of the time, we don’t know what we’re doing. There doesn’t exist a manual for the daily struggles of work and life. Without guidance, we’re left with acting on raw thoughts and emotions – our basic instincts. Sometimes they help us, but more often they don’t. Without being deliberate in what we say and do, relying solely on our knee-jerk reactions usually makes things worse. We are left angry, anxious, and disappointed. People in ancient times were aware of this problem. They knew that humans are bad at living.

Their remedy to this was the development of a system that makes people wiser and more resilient to adversity: philosophy. Before you roll your eyes, understand that there’s a reason that philosophy has stuck around for more than 2,000 years. Most people think that philosophy is condescending and about asking big fancy questions like what is the meaning of life? What is good and evil?

Its original intent was much deeper than that: to strengthen the soul.

One branch of philosophy that’s regaining popularity today is called Stoicism. I was introduced to it in 2016 by the author and blogger, Tim Ferriss, who defined the philosophy as “an operating system for making better decisions and being less emotionally reactive.”

I don’t think he could have said it better.

Stoicism was founded in Ancient Greece by a guy named Zeno in the early third century BC. It was one of the four major Hellenistic schools of philosophy which rivaled the Cynics, Skeptics, and Epicureans. After the Greeks, it was adopted and refined by the Romans as seen in the remaining works of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius.

The Stoics believed that living your life in a virtuous manner was necessary for happiness and fulfillment. They didn’t focus on trying to figure out the meaning of life, as most people commonly believe is the main purpose of philosophy, but rather on overcoming life’s problems by being resilient, having courage, not being carried away by thoughts and emotions, and practicing self-control.

As a foundation to these virtues, one of their main dogmas is understanding and acting only on what is in your control.

Essentially, it was designed to help people deal with the unpredictability of life and overcome destructive emotions. According to the Stoics, striving to master these habits and characteristics are the key to becoming a better and happier person. This is a lifelong endeavor that takes a lot of work. They strongly believed that only constant daily vigilance over your thoughts and actions will drive change.

In addition to the ton of wisdom found in Stoic texts, they had many practical exercises designed to help cultivate the virtues. Some of the most well-known include premeditation of adversity or premeditatio malorum, practicing indifference, and journaling in the morning and evening.

Premeditatio malorum involves visualizing the realistic and absolute worst thing that can happen in a situation you’re anxiously anticipating. It sounds like a pessimistic and counter-intuitive way to gain strength, but if you mentally rehearse and visualize going through something scary or sad in your mind repeatedly, the mind gets tired and eventually bored with the situation, making the negative event much more bearable if it does happen. Often, bad things aren’t as bad as we think they are and they can usually be fixed. It’s only our view, or perception, of the thing that makes it bad. After having an unpleasant experience that you anticipated or knew was going to happen, how often do you tell yourself that it wasn’t as bad as you thought?

Practicing indifference is a concept that many people first learning Stoicism get wrong, including myself. When someone displays Stoic indifference,it means that regardless of what happens or how bad something can get, they’re okay – they can manage with it and calmly move on. Yes, they may prefer things like health, wealth, and events to play out favorably for them, but ultimately those things are not up to them and not in their control. Can we prevent getting diagnosed from any terminal disease? Can we do anything about the stock market wiping out our 401K? What about our reputation?

We may have some level of influence on these matters, but we still don’t have complete control of life’s steering wheel and the sooner we accept that, the more we’ll get out of life. The Stoics were experts at the art of letting things go and letting them play out as they should. It’s not that they didn’t care about anything as that’s what Webster’s definition of the word indifference. They were just strong enough for things to go either way. They didn’t need circumstances to go as planned.

Practicing indifference is so important because lashing out irrationally to something we didn’t like only takes up time, energy and concentration that can be used on things that matter. Once anger, frustration, and regret pollute your mentality, it’s hard to make any good decisions after that.

Remember, events don’t happen to spite you for a past misdeed nor do they care about how they affect you and your feelings. They just happen. That’s all.

Stoicism also helped me get into journaling in the morning and evening. The purpose of this is to help you prepare for the day ahead and then review how you did at the end of it. I think it’s like premeditatio malorum because when I write in the morning, I list my top one or two challenges that I will face that day and how I will deal with them. It can be a presentation to management at work, anxiety that I may go through, dealing with a difficult person, meeting a deadline – anything I’m worried about or dreading. In the evening, I review my day by looking at my successes and opportunities for improvement. I ask myself three questions:

• What went right?
• What went wrong?
• How can I improve tomorrow?

This has helped me stay on a consistent path of self-development. My progress on being a better person may look like a stock market graph but I’m happy knowing that I’m overcoming obstacles at least a few times a week.

The Stoic exercises and views I just mentioned aren’t everything there is to the philosophy nor are they the best. I’m still in my early days of practicing Stoicism and I’ve got so much more to learn and apply. However, just in this past year of studying the philosophy, my view of life has changed a lot. I’m much calmer and I don’t get angry as easily as I used to. I’m more comfortable when bad things happen and doing things that scare me. I live simpler and I’m much more content with having less because I’ve grown to appreciate what I have. As a type 1 diabetic, I’m much more accepting when my blood sugar is out of control and I’m getting better at staying calm and correcting it.

I still have occasional bouts of anxiety, but I don’t think it’s something that can be eliminated in life. It’s a natural response that we need to learn to live with, understand, and even gain strength from. We need a healthy dose of anxiety to get anything done.

I feel Stoicism has also helped me shift my purpose more towards helping others. In high school and college, the typical American Dream was my fuel – having a big house, a big truck, lots of money, and being the inventor of something that will change the world. I’m not saying those things are bad. I’ve just noticed that being around the people I love, helping others, and consistently exercising has given me more happiness than any material object or position of power can offer.

If you want to learn more about Stoicism or are curious about where to get started then I highly recommend reading The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. It’s one of my favorite books of all time. It helped me get started in practicing Stoicism, even though the book is not directly about Stoicism. He also has a great website called The Daily Stoic. It has articles on Stoicism which cover exercises, explanations of Stoic concepts, interviews, and daily emails. They also have a book by the same name which has a Stoic excerpt for each day of the year. I read it every morning.

After that, I recommend diving into the remaining three ancient texts of Stoicism (supposedly only one percent of all Stoic texts ever written are what remain): The Discourses and Enchiridion by Epictetus, The Moral Letters to Lucilius by Seneca, and The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

They’re all good but my favorite of the three is Gregory Hays’ translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. It’s a short read, stripped of thee’s and thou’s, and doesn’t have structure like a regular book. You can go to any page and get a small but powerful dose of wisdom to meditate on for the day. Dr. William B. Irvine has a very good book called A Guide to The Good Life which helped make Stoicism simple and easy for me. Dr. Donald Robertson also has a book that came out in 2013 called Stoicism and the Art of Happiness which is a little more formal like a small college textbook but it breaks down concepts clearly and has short Stoic exercises at the end of each chapter.

As I’ve said, I’ve still got a lot to learn about Stoicism and there are many resources out there that I haven’t gotten to yet such as the works of Massimo Pigliucci, Pierre Hadot, Musonius Rufus, most of the letters of Seneca (there are 124 total), and many other contemporary and ancient writers.

If you decide to study Stoicism and other types of philosophy, you’ll see a pattern: it’s not the problems of life that are the problem but your view of them. Stoicism isn’t the only or end-all solution to those problems but one of many that has served as a life manual for some of history’s greatest men and women over the last two thousand years.