"A six-story building is going up
catty-corner to where I live, and from 7 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. every weekday a
torrent of robust and erratic noise is transmitted through the thin walls of my
apartment. Specifically, there is a great deal of screaming — not screams of
pain (thank God), but screams as a form of communication: about moving an
object from one place to another, or telling someone to get out of the way of
the moving object, or coordinating the arrival or departure of a vehicle
containing more objects to move.
Background noise typically doesn’t
bother me. Directly beneath my apartment, and audible through many holes in the
floor (it’s an old building) is a warehouse that does a brisk traffic in
cabbages and soybean oil. I’ve long been able to mentally delete the whirring
of forklifts and stacking of crates. But the sound of a human scream is —
perhaps for evolutionary reasons — difficult to tune out.
I didn’t come to Stoic philosophy as
a result of the construction site, but the site did offer an ideal beginner’s
challenge: a persistently annoying but not materially threatening situation
that was completely outside the bounds of my control.
Stoicism, which originated with the
Hellenistic philosopher Zeno of Citium, has experienced a revival over the past
decade or so, with another uptick in interest at the start of the pandemic,
when books like Seneca’s “Letters From a Stoic” and Marcus Aurelius’s
“Meditations” became more popular.
This is not surprising. One of the
premises of Stoicism is that it will help you assimilate horrible events with
equanimity. The proper way to respond to catastrophe, the Stoics will tell you,
is to perceive it as a training exercise. Or, as Seneca put it: “Disaster is
virtue’s opportunity.”
The most commercially successful of
the modern Stoic interpreters might be Ryan Holiday, whose books bear blurbs
from former defense secretary James Mattis and Matthew McConaughey. On
Holiday’s website, you can buy Stoic-themed pendants and prints and coins,
along with a “premium display” for the Stoic coins featuring “a metallic
mountain range and a silhouette of a man conquering that obstacle.” The tiny
man pictured in the display carries an even tinier stick, for conquering
purposes.
Another option is the annual online
workshop known as Stoic Week, a course that originated at the University of
Exeter. Stoic Week provides seven days’ worth of guidance and mini-lectures, as
well as surveys to complete before and after the week is up. I heard about the
2021 edition a week before it was scheduled to begin and was elated at the rare
alignment of impulse (self-improvement) with timing (soon) and cost (nothing).
According to the surveys, my “Satisfaction With Life” score increased from
“Neutral” at the onset of the week to “Slightly Satisfied” after it concluded.
Baby steps.
Stoicism is many things — it was
devised and refined over centuries — but the basic principles can be summed up
quickly.
Excellence of character, or virtue,
is the only true good, and we should spend our lives pursuing it.
Virtue is its own reward, but as a
free bonus it will also make us happy.
We should cultivate feelings of
kinship toward all humans.
We should not whine or gossip.
We should mentally rehearse all the
undesirable events that might befall us (including death) so that we’ll be
prepared if and when they do happen. But we should not do this in an obsessive
way; more of an imaginary-exposure-therapy way.
We should make a distinction between what we
can and cannot control, and quit worrying about things in the second category.
All of the above is easier said than
done, but what isn’t?
Stoicism is also a protocol of
attentiveness, which makes it an attractive remedy for those who feel absented
and estranged from themselves or the world. One of the recommended practices is
the “daily review,” in which you take a moment each evening to reflect on the
previous waking hours. The idea is not to flog yourself for mistakes but to
acknowledge them with future improvements in mind.
I find this to be a crafty
psychological maneuver: Knowing, each morning, that I’ll have to reflect upon
my day in detail that evening functions as a prophylactic against messing up
too badly. (Sometimes.)
To the Stoics, lack of attentiveness
amounted to psychological slavery.
Both Epictetus, a former slave whose
name means “owned,” and Seneca used the metaphor with an intent to startle.
(Epictetus in particular enjoyed telling his wealthy aristocratic students that
they were “slaves.”)
The modern equivalent is probably
the framework of addiction; today you’re less likely to complain about being
“enslaved” by your phone than “addicted” to it. In both metaphors the absence
of self-mastery and freedom derive from an external agent: for the enslaved
person, his owner; for the addict, his substance.
When I first read Seneca in translation
a few years ago, what I noted was less the content than the easygoing
conversational style. “I am far from being a tolerable person, much less a
perfect one,” he admitted to his friend Lucilius, to whom the “Letters From a
Stoic” are addressed. I loved how he ended all of his dispatches with the word
“Farewell” (vale in Latin), and it occurred to me at the time that
“farewell” would make a nice email valediction, offering more warmth than a
simple dash and communicating politeness without the formality of “best” or the
mawkishness of “sincerely” or the overpromise of “yours.” I liked the way
Seneca’s letters delivered their lessons succinctly, with no throat-clearing at
the start or denouement at the finish. After a spiel about education in Letter 88,
for example, he wraps up with:
“I cannot readily say whether I am
more vexed at those who would have it that we know nothing, or with those who
would not leave us even this privilege. Farewell.”
When I revisited the Stoics at the
onset of the pandemic, it was with the more serious intention of seeking
instruction at a time of fear. But it was Seneca, again, who vibrated my
heartstrings. His “Letters” were written to Lucilius while the latter was
undergoing what we’d now call a midlife crisis, and they brim with both
affection and rigor. “There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us
than there are to crush us,” Seneca wrote.
“We suffer more often in imagination
than in reality.”
Some contemporary proponents of
Stoicism, like Massimo Pigliucci, present it as a strategy for living a
meaningful secular existence, as though Stoicism might be swapped in for
religion like Lactaid for regular milk. (Got a God intolerance? Try Epictetus!)
Many emphasize the philosophy’s practical orientation. In “Breakfast With
Seneca,” David Fideler calls it a “supremely practical philosophy.” In “The
Daily Stoic,” Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman propose Stoicism as “a set of
practical tools meant for daily use.”
It would be a mistake to conflate
“practical” with “easy.” As Pigliucci points out in “How to Be a Stoic,”
“Philosophy is no miracle cure, and it should not be treated as one.”
Pigliucci’s book does an excellent job writing about each stage of wrestling
with a philosophical system, starting with what I’d call the “life hack” stage
and progressing through the interrogation stage, the
reconciling-of-internal-contradictions (especially between the earlier Greek
Stoics and the later Roman Stoics) stage and, finally, into the actual adoption
of Stoic exercises, of which he offers a large menu.
“Breakfast with Seneca” — the most
companionable of the new Stoic books — includes an appendix of these practices.
Try the “view from above” exercise, Fideler suggests, in which you imagine that
you are hovering miles above Earth and gazing down at the speck of yourself,
pondering the insignificance of your troubles in the grand scheme. Or the
“contemplation of the sage” exercise, in which you imagine that a wise person
(for example: Socrates) is watching over your actions, so that you can behave
with appropriate virtue. Or the “contemplation of impermanence” exercise, in
which you consider all of your possessions and relationships as temporary loans
that might be recalled at any time.
The building outside my window is
still in its skeletal stage, which means there are weeks of screaming to come;
perhaps months. But all is well, because the Stoics have led me to the major
philosophical insight that while I can’t control someone else’s construction
site, it is within my power to purchase earplugs and then watch a detailed
YouTube tutorial about how to “Stop Inserting Earplugs Wrong!” Now I work in
hushed tranquillity — free of the restlessness that Seneca described as
“symptomatic of a sick mind.” Farewell."
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