The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

by Eric Weiner

The Stoics believe our emotions are the product of rational thought, but it is flawed thought. We can change the way we feel by changing the way we think. The Stoic aims not to feel nothing but to feel correctly.

“premeditation of adversity.” Anticipate the arrows of Fortune, says Seneca. Imagine the worst scenarios and “rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck.”

Imagining adversity is not the same as worrying about it, the Stoics say. Worrying is vague, inchoate. Premeditated adversity is specific—the more specific the better. Not “I imagine suffering a financial setback,” but “I imagine losing my house, car, my entire bag collection and am forced to move back in with my mother.” Oh, suggests Epictetus, helpfully, also imagine you’ve lost the ability to speak, hear, walk, breathe, and swallow. By imagining the worst-case scenario we rob future hardships of their bite, and appreciate what we have.

Stoicism is demanding. It’s not easy and they don’t pretend it is. It contains little of that Greek moderation. It is an all-or-nothing philosophy. One is either virtuous or one is not. One either lives in accord with nature or one does not. Like the Epicureans, Stoics saw philosophy as medicine for the soul. Tough medicine.

Too often we confuse what is ours and what is not. There’s no need for this confusion, say the Stoics. It’s simple. Nothing is ours, not even our bodies. We always rent, never own. This is liberating. If there is nothing to lose there is nothing to fear losing.

Like the Japanese, the Stoics know “all things everywhere are perishable.” They see this fact as cause for neither sadness, like many of us, nor celebration, like the Japanese, but merely a fact of life. Rationally there is nothing we can do about it, so best not to worry.

Can you blame me? I am not a man of a certain age but an uncertain one. Older yet not old. What to call this awkward interval?

Must this character amplification always trend negative? Can we reverse the trajectory as we age? Can we become older, better versions of ourselves?

Philosophy doesn’t teach us what to think but how to think, and we need a new way of thinking about old age. The truth is we don’t really think about growing old. We think about staying young. We don’t have a culture of aging. We have a youth culture to which an aging cohort desperately clings.

Old age is not a disease. It is not a pathology. It is not abnormal. It is not a problem. Old age is a continuum, and everyone is on it. We’re all aging all the time. You are aging right now as you read these words—and not any faster or slower than an infant or a grandfather.

“Everyone hopes to reach old age, but when it comes, most of us complain about it,” he says. Why? Old age isn’t so bad. Advancing years makes our voice more melodious, our conversations more pleasurable. “There is no greater satisfaction to be had in life than a leisurely old age devoted to knowledge and learning,” he concludes.

As we age, the balance shifts, from control to acceptance. Acceptance is not the same as resignation. Resignation is resistance masquerading as acceptance. Pretending to accept something is like pretending to love someone.

Recall is not replay. Memory is selective. It requires not only retention but forgetfulness, lest we end up like poor Funes, the character in the Borges story who, after being thrown from a horse, recalls everything in great detail, and suffers terribly.

“I live in a moment that embraces eternity,” she said. “I forget my own existence.”

We need habits. Without them, our lives threaten to splinter into a million meaningless pieces. Habits tether us to this world, to our world. Habits are useful, provided we recall why we formed them and continually question their value to us. We must own the habit, and not the other way around.

Death makes philosophers of us all. Even the least contemplative person wonders at some point: What happens when we die? Is death really something to fear? How can I come to terms with it? Death is philosophy’s true test. If philosophy can’t help us deal with life’s most momentous and terrifying event, what good is it? As Montaigne puts it: “All the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die.”

“Death is nothing to us.” You don’t wake every morning worrying about the time before you were born, so why worry about death? You were absent then and you shall be absent again. “When we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we do not exist.” I’m not buying it. The nothing that was me before I was born is not the same nothing that will be me after I’m gone. One is a nothing that was always nothing while the other is a nothing that was once something, and that makes all the difference. The void of space and a hole in the earth are not the same. Nothingness is defined by its proximity to what was, and what still is.

doubt at a time. Humans, he thought, can never know absolute truth. The best we can do is snare provisional, contingent truths.

Humans excel at denying inconvenient truths, and no truth is more inconvenient than death. I look at death the way I look at my aging visage in the mirror. Sideways, if at all. A desperate, and futile, attempt to inoculate myself against its bite.

We might think life and death are strictly sequential: we live, then we die. The truth, says Montaigne, is that “death mingles and fuses with our lives throughout.” We don’t die because we are sick. We die because we are alive.

death is something we can’t practice. Maybe we can. Maybe we can give it a try, an assay. We can’t see death itself but we can “at least glimpse it and explore the approaches to it.”

eternity. Can you live with that? he asks. Can you love that?