Portable Stoicism
Stoic wisdom is eminently quotable and often found dotted around in modern self-help. Tim Ferris, remember, loves Seneca and quotes from him a lot in The 4-Hour Workweek.
To round off our series of posts for Stoic Week, we’ve gone straight to the main sources of Stoic wisdom (Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius) and collected some passages for your quiet contemplation, focusing on subjects most relevant to Escapology.
Seneca on the employed:
They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.
Seneca on money:
Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool.
Epictetus on consumerism:
Who’s my master? Whoever controls what you desire or dislike.
Marcus Aurelius on simple pleasures:
Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.
Seneca on taking our leisure now, not later:
You will hear many men saying: “After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties.” And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? […] Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!
Epictetus on escape plans:
First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.
Marcus Aurelius on internal cultivation:
You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.
Seneca on choosing freedom:
Man is possessed by greed that is insatiable […] by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless.
In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal.
Epictetus on minimalism or simple living:
Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.
Marcus Aurelius on going it alone:
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Seneca on want:
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
Epictetus on distinction or competitiveness:
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.
Seneca on reconnecting with childhood interests (something we cover in New Escapologist Issue 9):
Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms — you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.
Epictetus on freedom:
No man is free who is not master of himself.
Epictetus (and this one’s beautiful) on life:
You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.
All for now. Remember there’s a handbook about Stoic Week if you’d like to indulge in the experiment (the week itself is over but nobody will know if you do it anyway) and New Escapologist recommends William Irvine’s A Guide to the Good Life as a guide to practical Stoicism.
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The Stoic Power of Negative Thinking!
This week is Stoic Week.
Since Stoicism is relevant to Escapology we’re posting something with a Stoical theme each day this week. Today is the third entry.
The Stoics believed that the good life was to live in step with nature and, like Epicurus, taught that simple living was the path to the greatest happiness. Where the Epicureans focussed on the pursuit of pleasure, the Stoics tended to advocate the development of self control and fortitude as a way to overcome misery.
Among other things, the Stoics practiced negative visualisation: a deliberate attempt to value a thing through contemplating (briefly, not obsessively) its loss.
Imagine how it would feel to lose something you currently enjoy. How would you cope if you lost your computer, your looks, your teeth, your winter coat, your favourite coffee cup, a loved one, your mobility, your ability to read? All nightmares of varying degrees of severity.
Contemplating these potential losses makes you deeply grateful for what you have while you have it (and history tells us that gratitude is healthy).
Negative Visualisation is also a way to psychologically prepare yourself for occasions of real loss. In other words, if you do lose something, you’ll on a very important level be prepared for it. It can equip you through rehearsal for when stress is unavoidable.
I read Chris Hadfield’s memoir a couple of years ago. He dedicates a whole chapter to “the power of negative thinking” and attributes it in part to his success in becoming an astronaut:
It’s puzzling to me that so many self-help gurus urge people to visualize victory, and stop there … Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying: it’s productive … You don’t have to walk around perpetually braced for disaster, convinced the sky is about to fall. But it sure is a good idea to have some kind of plan for dealing with unpleasant possibilities. For me, that’s become a reflexive form of mental discipline not just at work but throughout my life.”
Negative visualisation is useful in Escapology. Do you best to escape, but always keep in mind that you might get re-ensnared. What would that be like? Could you face it? Of course you could! At the worst, you’ll be like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape being comically marched back to “the cooler” again and again. That’s not so bad as worst case scenarios go. Better a perpetual escapee than a battery hen.
This all reminds me of Tim Ferriss and his “fear setting” wherein you imagine a worst case scenario and muse around what you’d do should it occur. The contingency plan is probably not as bad as you might have initially imagined, and probably doesn’t even look like total failure.
You come away from that exercise realizing, ‘Wow, I was getting extremely anxious and all worked up over something that is completely preventable, reversible, or just not a very big deal.’
Negative visualisation can fortify against insatiability, making you less likely to want more than you currently have and less likely to fall into the trap of endless consumerism. I think this technique might be the true engine behind my tendency toward minimalism and could be a good (and wholly accessible) way of finding contentment beyond materialism.
Stoicism. It’s what’s for dinner.
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The Skull Beneath the Skin
This week is Stoic Week.
Since Stoicism is relevant to Escapology (equal in relevance perhaps to Epicureanism), we’ll make a little post with a Stoical theme each day.
So let’s kick off with this quote from great Stoic Marcus Aurelius:
Do not act as if you were going to live for a thousand years… while you are alive, while it is still possible, become a good person. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.17
As it happens, I’ve just finished reading Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by mortician Caitlin Doughty. It’s ostensibly a memoir of her first years working with the dead but contains all manner of wisdom about death-acceptance and its significance to what you might call life-acceptance. Every birth contains a death, she says, and it’s an awareness of our mortality that drives us to create and to live well.
Here’s Caitlin:
Death might appear to destroy the meaning in our lives, but in fact it is the very source of our creativity. As Kafka said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” Death is the engine that keeps us running, giving us the motivation to achieve, learn, love, and create.
Doesn’t this remind you of Escapology’s other totem animal, the Bohemian? The Bohemians of history would often keep a human skull around the home as a memento mori: to remind them of death so that they don’t forget to live vigorously.
Of course, this is all just one way of looking at it. Here’s another post about overcoming the fear of death using Stoicism in which he says:
Everything is borrowed, [Stoic Philosopher] Epictetus tells us. And indeed it is. When we lose someone – they are returned to the giver, the universe. And so we, too – are handed back over into the hands of the logos.
Happy Stoic Week!
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