Book Rex: How to Be a Stoic
Some philosophies are built for dealing with chaos
Our mindset is a huge factor in helping us survive chaotic times. People who have trouble with change just don’t do well in moments of upheaval, whereas people who are flexible and adaptable tend to roll with the punches a little bit better.
It’s forgivable that most of us fall into the former camp — our lives have been lived in an era of almost unprecedented stability and material wealth. Major, seismic societal change is barely in living memory, as the so-called “Greatest Generation” that survived the Depression and World War II slowly dies out1. Moreover, modern humans are dealing with truly epidemic levels of trauma, and (as discussed with last week’s Book Rex on The Body Keeps the Score) trauma inhibits our ability to creatively adapt to changing and challenging situations.
But given just how quickly things are becoming more chaotic, it would behoove us to fill our philosophical toolkit with ideas, systems, and methods for coping with change in an adaptive, composed way.
Fortunately for us (but not for those that lived them), history has had no shortage of chaotic eras, and there has been no shortage of ideas and schools of thought that have taught how to take the chaos in stride. I’m hoping to cover a number of these in this blog over time — at the very least, I’ll be touching on Taoism, Stoicism, Buddhism, Discordianism, Witchcraft, and, if I’m feeling generous, some of the more radical and/or contemplative branches of Christianity. But today, let’s dive into Stoicism by looking at the book How to Be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci!
Stoicism as a philosophy is wildly misunderstood by the general public. Because Stoics are traditionally calm in the face of chaos and adversity, it’s come to be conflated with the idea of being stone-faced, shut off, or having a “stiff upper lip.”
Stoicism, to be clear, is not any of these things. The philosophy arose in ancient Greece in response to the teachings of Socrates. Many people complained that philosophers spent too much time discussing ideas, and not enough time developing practical applications for them. Stoicism was a response to that, in that it remained a fairly simple philosophy with a set of practices that made life much easier to bear.
Pigliucci’s book is a breakdown of the philosophy for the common reader — the author himself is a practicing stoic as well as a philosopher at the academic level, but he believes that stoicism should not be confined to the halls of academia. His book is an attempt to make the philosophy clear and easy to use.
At it’s most simple, stoicism about understanding control. Stoics have divided the world into things we can control, and things that we can’t — you can’t control if someone chooses to burn down your house, for example, but you can control your response towards the event. The philosophy is fairly well summed up in the Alcoholic’s Anonymous Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Stoics believe that regret is a fairly useless emotion, because things that have already happened are things we can’t change. Instead, they advocate learning from our past and changing our responses in the future to something we’d be more proud of.
They also emphasize that everything is impermanent, and we should not attach ourself to the idea that we’ll have anything forever. This is a good practice for when you break something of value — say, a plate that was passed down from a grandparent, or a video game console, but is even more important when applied to the humans you love. Pigliucci suggests when you kiss your spouse, parent, or child, that you think to yourself, “I am kissing a mortal.”
While this type of utterance sounds pretty fucking heavy on its face, in a practical sense, it reminds you that you get this, here and now, to enjoy, and are not guaranteed anything else. If you accept that, you’ll appreciate your current moment a whole lot more.
On dealing with ignorance and cruelty
The Stoics believed that all evil acts came from ignorance, not from a person just naturally being evil. They used two different words for the concept of ignorance: Agnoia, which literally translates to “not-knowing” and “amathia” which translates to “not learning.”
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In your debates with people you disagree with, this distinction is important. Do they disagree with you because they just don’t know information that you do? If so, great! You can teach them. But if they are unwilling to learn, your problem has nothing to do with just supplying them with the right facts: it has to do with why they are resistant to learning a new thing. And the reasons for that likely have nothing to do with the argument you’re engaged in. (They likely, once again, have something to do with trauma! The Body Keeps the Score popping in again!)
The Stoics also emphasize that you cannot control the way anyone else treats you. You can ask them, and if they respect you, they will hopefully oblige. But that is ultimately out of your control. And whenever something is out of your control, the stoics say: let it go.
Stoicism as a philosophy has helped people get through pretty horrific ordeals, from concentration camps to torture to POW camps. It emphasizes the importance of maintaining your integrity in these situations, while accepting the fact that you alone aren’t the sole master of your fate.
Practical philosophy
The Stoics understood that for a philosophy to be practical, it had to become a practice, something you learn to do through repetition and make into a reflexive response. They fortunately offer a number of techniques for how to do this (they are what you’d expect: deep breathing, making a habit of reflecting on your day, reminding yourself of your permanence and lack of control, etc.) and Pigliucci goes into them in more detail.
Fortunately for us, there are an enormous amount of resources on the topic, including the Daily Stoic podcast and a whole subgenre of TikTok videos.
A word of warning if you go down that rabbit hole: this is a favorite philosophy of bullshitty Silicon Valley entrepreneur bros like Tim Ferriss. So there will be a lot out there that has that slant. It is also, per Pigliucci, a misunderstanding of stoicism to suggest that one should be disengaged from politics if one wishes to be a stoic. You can be political and stoic about bad things that happen in the world around you — you just need to have an understanding of what you can influence and what you can’t.
ANY DAY NOW, KISSINGER.
Kissinger is still alive?! Also, (thanks to my Google search after you made me aware that he is) did you know he was on the board of Theranos?! Of COURSE he was.