How to be a stoic

As a sci­en­tist, Mas­si­mo Pigli­uc­ci under­took research in the field of genet­ics, which sat­is­fied him for 25 years, until he expe­ri­enced a midlife cri­sis and decid­ed to do some­thing else. “I stud­ied phi­los­o­phy in high school, because it was manda­to­ry. I liked it, I had a very good teacher.” Fol­low­ing his inter­est in phi­los­o­phy, he went back to school, obtained a PhD and became a pro­fes­sion­al philoso­pher. “My area is philo­soph­i­cal sci­ence. Once you start study­ing phi­los­o­phy – espe­cial­ly when it is the result of a midlife cri­sis – you can’t avoid think­ing about the big pic­ture.” The ques­tions he had about the lat­ter, result­ed in a search for a spe­cif­ic phi­los­o­phy that suit­ed him.

“My friends told me I had become calmer and more thought­ful.”

After hav­ing tried var­i­ous philoso­phies, he dis­cov­ered sto­icism. “One day I saw ‘Help us cel­e­brate sto­ic week’ on Twit­ter, a world­wide ini­tia­tive organ­ised by a group of philoso­phers and cog­ni­tive behav­iour ther­a­pists. You sign up, down­load a man­u­al, do some exer­cis­es and fill in a ques­tion­naire. At the end of the week, I thought it was real­ly help­ful, so I kept doing it until the end of that year. My friends told me I had become calmer and more thought­ful, and now, four years lat­er, I’m still doing it.” Dur­ing his fas­ci­nat­ing and often fun­ny – sto­ics appar­ent­ly have a quirky sense of humour – lec­ture, he explained what the prac­tice of sto­icism was real­ly about. He also pro­vid­ed us with some sim­ple rules we could fol­low on our path to sto­icism. “I got new rules, I count’em …”

Rule n°1 : Do not suppress your emotions

First of all, prac­tic­ing sto­icism doesn’t mean you have to sup­press your emo­tions, like Spock from Star Trek. Hav­ing a pok­er face is not what sto­icism is about. Pigli­uc­ci: “With­out emo­tions we are not moti­vat­ed to do any­thing. Sto­icism isn’t about sup­press­ing emo­tions, because if you sup­press your emo­tions, you don’t give a damn about any­thing and you become a psy­chopath. We don’t want psy­chopaths. That is not our goal.”

“We don’t want psy­chopaths, that’s not our goal”

As sup­press­ing your emo­tions is a no-go, han­dling them is what sto­icism is about, which is the rea­son why it is often linked to cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­a­py (CBT). He gives us the exam­ple of anger, an emo­tion lots of peo­ple strug­gle with. When you feel anger, you have to acknowl­edge the emo­tion, and then you decide what to do with it. Maybe go for a walk to cool down? You keep repeat­ing that process, and after a while you will become less angry.

Rule no 2 : Let it go!

“We are brought up now think­ing we have more con­trol than we actu­al­ly do. We live in this bub­ble, think­ing that our rep­u­ta­tion is up to us, our wealth is up to us, and that if we real­ly work hard, we are going to get stuff. Well, if you work hard it is more like­ly you are going to get stuff, but it is not guar­an­teed. Things hap­pen. Just remem­ber the 2008 finan­cial col­lapse. Lots of peo­ple worked real­ly hard and their sav­ings were wiped out overnight by some­thing they could not con­trol.” Mas­si­mo explains that the belief every­thing is going to work out if you do the right thing, is a child­ish belief, a kind of ‘Dis­ney­ish’ belief even. “If things go as planned, good. But if they don’t, peo­ple get crushed by their own expec­ta­tions.”

“Peo­ple get crushed by their own expec­ta­tions.” 

Not only con­tem­po­rary peo­ple get crushed by soci­ety. Ancient Greeks had to deal with very sim­i­lar feel­ings. Sto­ic philoso­phers con­tem­plat­ed this prob­lem and came up with prac­ti­cal advice: to let go of the things that are out of our con­trol. But if you think the ‘out of con­trol’ idea is a per­fect excuse to main­tain your couch pota­to liv­ing style, you’ve got it wrong. “One of the mis­un­der­stand­ings about sto­icism is that it is a qui­et phi­los­o­phy, mean­ing you don’t under­take action because things might not work out. That is def­i­nite­ly not what the sto­ics meant, and if you look at who the sto­ics were, it ought to be clear.” Mas­si­mo gives us the exam­ple of Mar­cus Aure­lius, a Roman emper­or and sto­ic who dealt with a plague, two wars, inter­nal rebel­lion and much more. “[Mar­cus Aure­lius] was not a guy just sit­ting around doing noth­ing. What he tried to do was devel­op the fol­low­ing atti­tude: what I can do is to put all of my ener­gy and efforts in doing the right thing, but after that I have to accept the uni­verse isn’t always going to work the way I want.”

As our friend Mar­cus used this way of think­ing in ancient times, we can also apply it to our own, mod­ern and some­times nerve-rack­ing lives. “The idea is not to sit back and do noth­ing. Do every­thing you can and devel­op the atti­tude of accept­ing the out­comes, what­ev­er they might be. Some­times it goes your way, some­times it doesn’t. Enjoy when it does, don’t get pissed off when it doesn’t.”

Rule no 3 : Be a doom-monger (but don’t exaggerate though)

We can­not get pissed off when the uni­verse is not bend­ing to our wish­es, we must pre­pare our­selves for that pos­si­bil­i­ty. Sto­ics call this process of prepar­ing your­self the ‘praemed­i­ta­tio mal­o­rum’, a Latin phrase for sto­ic doom-mon­ger­ing, or as Mas­si­mo explained: “It’s think­ing about bad shit hap­pen­ing before it’s hap­pen­ing.” This is anoth­er con­cept that has been tak­en over by CBT ther­a­pists. “The idea is that if some­thing both­ers you, you try to think your way through it by imag­in­ing it hap­pen­ing to you. At the end of your men­tal visu­al­iza­tion, you say: ‘Okay, well, that is not too bad’. In that way, you pre­pare your­self men­tal­ly to accept some­thing that might not go your way.”

“You have to have a ref­er­ence, some­thing that is straight, so you can see how crooked you are”

The extreme­ly trained sto­ics get up in the morn­ing and imag­ine their own death, but this is a no-go for begin­ners like us (and if you do have these thoughts, please vis­it a psy­chi­a­trist). Instead, Mas­si­mo gives the advice to think about sim­ple things going wrong, like fail­ing a test or miss­ing a train. When you get more and more advanced, you can grad­u­al­ly wors­en your ideas, but go easy on this. As imag­in­ing your own death is not advis­able, tor­tur­ing your­self all day and night by over­think­ing ‘bad shit hap­pen­ing’ isn’t good for you either. Mas­si­mo advis­es you to lim­it your praed­i­ta­tio mal­o­rum to a max­i­mum of five min­utes, prefer­ably in the morn­ing, before start­ing your day.

Rule n°4 : Choose a role model

“A major point of sto­ic train­ing is to improve your fac­ul­ty of judge­ment. What you want to do is arrive at bet­ter and bet­ter judge­ments. The prob­lem is: we are human. We are imper­fect. If we are left to our own devices, we can eas­i­ly make up our mind and do stuff that actu­al­ly makes no sense. You have to con­front your own opin­ions with oth­ers, espe­cial­ly with peo­ple who are bet­ter than you in that par­tic­u­lar area. The way Seneca explains it: you have to have a ref­er­ence, so you can see how crooked you are.” “If you want to become sto­ic, you have to analyse some­one who is already sto­ic. The idea is to con­front your­self with the best peo­ple you can find. Sto­ics are big in to adopt­ing role mod­els. You select some peo­ple who you think are real­ly good and then you emu­late them. Try to behave as they behave. Use your own per­son­al­i­ty and your own judge­ment. But in order to improve, you need to have some kind of stan­dard that you are going after.”

“Peo­ple need some kind of prac­ti­cal guid­ance. Espe­cial­ly in an age where there is less and less reliance on reli­gion”

Role mod­els are not hard to find. A politi­cian, a good friend, your moth­er and even fic­ti­tious peo­ple like Her­cules are pos­si­ble. Nonethe­less, you could pos­si­bly make the wrong choice: “There is always a chance of mak­ing mis­takes, but sto­icism is an active phi­los­o­phy that is con­scious­ly try­ing to make you a bet­ter per­son.” To this, Mas­si­mo adds: “Often you get clos­er to the truth by dis­card­ing – like Socrates did – a bunch of stuff that doesn’t work.”

The comeback of Stoicism?

Mas­si­mo shows us that phi­los­o­phy can be prac­ticed by us, ordi­nary peo­ple, in our ordi­nary lives. A remark­able and inter­est­ing idea now, but ancient Greek cit­i­zens would have shrugged their shoul­ders, as it was com­mon sense to them. “You don’t learn phi­los­o­phy in the lec­ture hall. You learn it on the street. The rest is bull­shit, and you know it.” A famous quote of Socrates, which explains how things rolled dur­ing ancient Greek times. Phi­los­o­phy still has this old aris­to­crat­ic image, fed by the major­i­ty of mod­ern aca­d­e­m­ic philoso­phers, which “keeps going after these entire­ly arti­fi­cial exam­ples like the trol­ley dilem­ma”, but lit­tle by lit­tle shakes off the dusti­ness. “Does that explain the resur­gence of sto­icism? I think so. Not only sto­icism, but also Bud­dhism and a num­ber of philo­soph­i­cal or reli­gious approach­es that are very prac­ti­cal­ly mind­ed, are pop­u­lar. Peo­ple need some kind of prac­ti­cal guid­ance. Espe­cial­ly in an age where there is less and less reliance on reli­gion. Even in the US, which is the most reli­gious coun­try in the West­ern world. Not rec­og­niz­ing your­self in a reli­gion doesn’t mean that you don’t need guid­ance in your life.”

“Much like in ancient Rome, we live in a soci­ety with a large gap between the poor and the super rich. It still is the same shit”

Sto­icism is back and that is not a coin­ci­dence, if we may believe Mas­si­mo, “It is not just sto­icism, it is all of the Hel­lenis­tic philoso­phies. They all arose in the Hel­lenis­tic peri­od, the peri­od from the death of Alexan­der the Great up until the Bat­tle of Actium, which basi­cal­ly marks the begin­ning of the Roman Empire. That was a peri­od of tur­moil, a peri­od peo­ple felt big things were hap­pen­ing. They had no con­trol over it and they didn’t know what to do with their lives. These philoso­phies devel­oped at that time, like­ly for those rea­sons, and I think they’re back because we do live in times where more and more peo­ple feel that they don’t have con­trol over a lot of stuff.”

“That said, I think there is anoth­er rea­son why sto­icism is com­ing back. Even though the specifics are dif­fer­ent, human nature is the same. We deal with the same prob­lems; peo­ple who are sup­posed to be our friends stab us in the back, our part­ner leaves us for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son, we get fired with­out notice … Today we live in a soci­ety with a large gap between the poor and the super rich, much like in ancient Rome. It still is the same shit.”