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by
Jules Evans
I believe that schools, universities, and adult education should offer some guidance to people, not just for their careers, but for life at its best and worst. That’s what the teachers depicted in The School of Athens once provided: they taught their students how to transform their emotions, how to cope with adversity, how to live the best possible lives.
I found university to be more like a factory system: we clocked in, handed in our essay, clocked out, and then were left to our own devices.
There seemed to be little institutional concern for undergraduates’ well-being or the broader development of our characters.1 Nor was there much hope among students that what we studied might actually be applicable to our life, let alone able to transform society. A degree was simply a preparation for the market, that bi...
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Stoic philosopher Epictetus: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about them.”
it was the meaning of events rather than the events themselves that affected people.
It was my beliefs. I held certain toxic beliefs and habits of thinking which were poisoning me, such as “I have permanently damaged myself ” and “Everyone must approve of me, and if they don’t, it’s a disaster.” These toxic beliefs were at the core of my emotional suffering.
When the Delphic Oracle pronounced him the wisest person in Greece, he suggested that it was only because he realized how little he knew. But he was also aware of how little everyone else knew too.
Socrates declared that it’s our responsibility to take “care of our souls,” and this is what philosophy teaches us — the art of psychotherapy, which comes from the Greek for “taking care of the soul.”
The optimistic message at the heart of Socratic philosophy is that we have the power to heal ourselves.
Michel de Montaigne, the great Renaissance essayist, put it well. Socrates, he said, “has done human nature a great kindness, in showing it how much it can do of itself. We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow and to beg…[And yet] we need little doctrine to live at our ease; and Socrates teaches us, that this is in us, and the way to find it, and how to use it.”
Neuroscientists have a word for this remarkable ability of the human brain to change itself: “plasticity.”
Daniel Kahneman suggest we have “dual processor” brains, with one thinking system that is mainly automatic and habit-based, and another thinking system capable of more conscious and rational reflection.
And that was what ancient Greek philosophy did. It involved a two-fold process: first make the habitual conscious, then make the conscious habitual.
“We acquire the virtues by practice,” Aristotle wrote.
The Greeks didn’t claim that humans are born free, conscious, and perfectly rational beings. They suggested
that humans are, in fact, deeply unconscious and automatic creatures who sleepwalk through life.
A whole nation will never agree to one model of happiness, so any attempt by a government to impose one philosophy on its citizens would necessarily be coercive and despotic.
I would fix what I could fix and I wouldn’t complain about what I couldn’t.”
In fact, we only have limited control over what happens in the world. We have to accept this, otherwise we’re going to be angry, afraid, and miserable for most of our life.
A lot of suffering arises, Epictetus argues, because we make two mistakes. Firstly, we try to exert absolute sovereign control over something in Zone 2, which is not in our control. Then, when we fail to control it, we feel helpless, out of control, angry, guilty, anxious, or depressed. Secondly, we don’t take responsibility for Zone 1, our thoughts and beliefs, which are under our control. Instead, we blame our thoughts on the outside world, on our parents, our friends, our lover, our boss, the economy, the environment, the class system, and then we end up, again, feeling bitter, helpless,
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The feeling of being out of control and powerless to help one’s loved ones is more demoralizing than any Taliban bomb.
The US Army’s Leadership Manual puts it in very Epictetan terms: “It is critical for leaders to remain calm under pressure and to expend energy on things they can positively influence and not worry about things they cannot affect.”8
“Lord, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can change, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
It is also an attitude advocated by Stephen R. Covey, the author of the self-help bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey advises us to be “proactive”: “You need to develop the awareness ‘I am a separate person to all that’s happened to me — my moods, my impulses, even my genetic make-up. I have the capacity to take responsibility. I am responseable.’ We have the power to choose our response even in situations we have little control over. Between the stimulus and the response lies a space, and in that space lies our freedom and power.”
You do what you can to improve the world, while recognizing and accepting the limits of your control.
“It is circumstances which show what men are.”
getting over it meant accepting this was a situation where she was powerless.
He says you should see food as nutrients for strength. Look at it from a detached point of view. Why do we eat? We eat because of what the body needs. It’s a necessity. But you’re in danger of letting it control you when you take too much pleasure in it.
It’s remarkable how plentiful our lives are today, and yet we never stop complaining.”
“the beginning and foundation of temperance lies in self-control in eating and drinking.”
Philosophical training takes time. It’s not enough to come back from a class feeling like you’ve really made a breakthrough and are a changed person.
Aurelius used his journal as a resource, as an inner gymnasium in which he could retreat from the demands of imperial life, go over his thoughts, and rehearse spiritual training.
if you want to improve yourself, you need to take a rational, scientific approach to self-improvement, which means keeping account of yourself, so that you can see what progress you’re making, which interventions are really working, and which are a waste of time.
Baden Powell wrote: “Character is a difficult thing to develop in the boy within the school walls, however good the system, since it cannot be taught in class.”24
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.”
I overheard one of my deputies making jokes about me. We were fuelling up the cop cars, and he gave me this grin, like I was a big idiot, and it made me very angry. I wanted to grab him by the neck. But instead, I went home at the end of the day, and I sat down and tried to think it through logically. I thought about this guy, how he talks about his friends, and I thought “This isn’t to do with me, this is typical of this guy, this is how he always behaves.” And it actually worked.
“The greatest cure for anger is to wait,” Seneca writes, “so that the initial passion it engenders may die down, and the fog that shrouds the mind may subside.”
We decide that we ought not to be harmed even by our enemies; each one in his heart has the king’s point of view, and is willing to use license, but unwilling to suffer from it.5
There is something spoilt, infantile, and ungrateful about anger. We kick and
scream like a child when the world does not immediately adopt our “king’s point of view.” We think of what the world owes us, ra...
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The angry person is acutely sensitive to all they are owed by the world, and blind to all they have received.
The Stoic tries to see the world as it really is, rather than demanding that it fit their expectations.
Rage stems from an overestimation of our power to get what we want.
Watching tragedies was for Seneca, as for Aristotle, a form of mass therapy, a reminder to the audience of the worst that can happen in this world, so that when they leave the theater and go back to their pampered lives, their complacency and petulance are shaken, and they learn to be grateful for what they have.
nothing can harm their soul except their own vices, like anger.
Expect suffering. Expect pain. To be a soldier is to be in a certain measure of pain.
"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional", Haruki Murakami.
He and his friends tried to escape the horrors of office life by raving at the weekend, but the ecstasy comedowns “only heightened the misery on Mondays.”
“The future is a capitalist construct,” Tom declared. “We are kept quiet by means of the idea that, at some point in the future, things are going to get better. But rather than waiting for the glory days of retirement, let us take our pleasures now.”
“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life.”
“No pleasure is in itself evil,” Epicurus assured his followers, “but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.”
