How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius by Donald J. Robertson

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius by Donald J. Robertson

 

“I am the consciousness of my own existence.” It reminded me of the famous inscription from the Delphic Oracle’s shrine: Know Thyself. That became one of my maxims. I grew quite obsessed with the pursuit of self-knowledge, through meditation and all forms of contemplative exercises.

4 Cardinal Virtues 

• The four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy, which correspond symbolically with the four corners of the lodge: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. (Wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation, if you prefer more modern terms.)
• For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul, as I say to you: “Wealth does not bring about virtue, but virtue makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.” That’s how he lived his life, and his students sought to emulate that example. We are to place more importance upon wisdom and virtue than anything else. A “philosopher,” in Socrates’s sense, is therefore a person who lives according to these values: someone who literally loves wisdom, the original meaning of the word.

Others Opinions 

• Everyone knows that when we believe very strongly that something very bad has happened, we typically become upset as a result. Likewise, if we believe that something is very good and desirable, we become anxious when it’s threatened or sad if it has already been lost. For example, in order to feel social anxiety, you have to believe that other people’s negative opinions of you are worth getting upset about, that it’s really bad if they dislike you and really important to win their approval. Even people who suffer from severe social anxiety disorder (social phobia) tend to feel “normal” when speaking to children or to their close friends about trivial matters. If your fundamental worldview, by contrast, assumes that your status in the eyes of others is of negligible importance, then it follows that you should be beyond the reach of social anxiety.

VIew From Above

One Stoic technique particularly caught my attention. Although it’s well attested in the ancient sources, there’s very little mention of anything like the “view from above”—as Hadot called it—in modern psychotherapy or self-help literature. It involves picturing events as though seen from high overhead, as they might be seen by the gods atop Mount Olympus, perhaps. Broadening our perspective often induces a sense of emotional equanimity. As I practiced it myself, I noticed, as Hadot did, that it brings together a confluence of themes central to ancient philosophy in a single vision.

Socrates became so wise, and I told her the secret of his wisdom: he asked lots of questions about the most important things in life, and then he listened very carefully to the answers. The Stoics can teach you how to find a sense of purpose in life, how to face adversity, how to conquer anger within yourself, moderate your desires, experience healthy sources of joy, endure pain and illness patiently and with dignity, exhibit courage in the face of your anxieties, cope with loss, and perhaps even confront your own mortality while remaining as unperturbed as Socrates.

 

1. THE DEAD EMPEROR

• To learn how to die, according to the Stoics, is to unlearn how to be a slave.
• “Let him be only a man for once; for neither philosophy nor empire takes away natural feeling.”
• As death is among the most certain things in life, to a man of wisdom it should be among the least feared. He studied the way they met different forms of adversity with calm dignity. He carefully observed how they lived in accord with reason and exhibited the cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. They felt the pain of loss but did not succumb to it. Marcus has been bereaved so many times, has practiced his response to it so often, that he no longer weeps uncontrollably. He no longer cries “Why?” and “How could this happen?” or even entertains such thoughts. He has firmly grasped the truth that death is both a natural and inevitable part of life. Now that his time has come he welcomes it with a philosophical attitude. You might even say that he has learned to befriend death. He still sheds tears and mourns losses, but as a wise man does. He no longer adds to his natural grief by complaining and shaking his fist at the universe.
• From the moment we’re born we’re constantly dying, not only with each stage of life but also one day at a time. Our bodies are no longer the ones to which our mothers gave birth, as Marcus put it. Nobody is the same person he was yesterday. Realizing this makes it easier to let go: we can no more hold on to life than grasp the waters of a rushing stream.
• The ancient philosophy of Cynicism focused on cultivating virtue and strength of character through rigorous training that consisted of enduring various forms of “voluntary hardship.” It was an austere and self-disciplined way of life. Zeno’s followers would later call it a shortcut to virtue.
• Marcus tells himself that true philosophy is both simple and modest, and we should never be seduced into vanity or ostentation in this regard. Always take the shortest route. The short way is the way of Nature, which leads to the soundest words and actions. Simplicity frees us from affectation and the trouble it brings. 
• For Stoics, this honesty and simplicity of language requires two main things: conciseness and objectivity. It would be an oversimplification to say that this just means to stop complaining, but in many cases the Stoics did advise along those lines.
• The point at which our language starts evoking strong emotions is precisely when we start saying things that involve strong value judgments, whether to others or ourselves. According to Stoic philosophy, when we assign intrinsic values like “good” or “bad” to external events, we’re behaving irrationally and even exhibiting a form of self-deception.

5 Virtues of Speech

• Diogenes Laertius, Stoic rhetoric identified five “virtues” of speech: 
  • 1. Correct grammar and good vocabulary 
  • 2. Clarity of expression, making the ideas easily understood 
  • 3. Conciseness, employing no more words than necessary 
  • 4. Appropriateness of style, suited to the subject matter and apparently also to the audience 
  • 5. Distinction, or artistic excellence, and the avoidance of vulgarity

Viewing Objectively 

• “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Only what is up to us can be truly “good” or “bad,” which makes these terms synonymous with virtue and vice. Wisdom therefore consists in grasping external things objectively, as indifferent in this regard. Sometimes the Stoics describe this as staying with our initial impression of things before we impose value judgments.
• Epictetus gives many examples, such as when someone’s ship is lost at sea, we should say only “the ship is lost” and not add value judgments or complaints like “Why me? This is awful!”
• Zeno coined the Stoic technical term phantasia kataleptike to refer to this Stoic way of viewing events objectively, separating value judgments from facts. Pierre Hadot translates it as “objective representation,” which is the term we’ll use. However, it literally means an impression that gets a grip on reality and thereby prevents us from being swept along by our passions. It anchors our thoughts in reality.

Catastrophizing & CBT

• Sticking to the facts can, by itself, often reduce your anxiety. Cognitive therapists use the neologism “catastrophizing,” or dwelling on the worst-case scenario, to help explain to clients how we project our values onto external events. They turn the noun “catastrophe” into a verb to help clients remember that viewing events in this way is actually an activity they’re engaged in. Catastrophizing is also a form of rhetorical hyperbole, or exaggeration. An event like losing your job is not inherently catastrophic; we don’t just passively perceive how bad it is. Rather, we actively catastrophize it, turning it into a catastrophe by imposing a value judgment upon it that blows things out of proportion.
• value judgments that distress us. Modern cognitive therapists advise their clients to describe events in more down-to-earth language, like the Stoics before them. They call it “decatastrophizing” when they help clients downgrade their perception of a situation from provoking anxiety to something more mundane and less frightening. For instance, Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, advised that clients suffering from anxiety should write “decatastrophizing scripts” in which they describe distressing events factually, without strong value judgments or emotive language: “I lost my job and now I’m looking for a new one” rather than “I lost my job and there’s nothing I can do about it—it’s just a total disaster!” Think about it: when you’re distressed, don’t you tend to exaggerate and use vivid, emotional language to describe things, both to yourself and other people? Decatastrophizing involves reevaluating the probability and severity of something bad happening and framing it in more realistic terms. Beck asks his clients, “Would it really be as terrible as you think?” Catastrophizing often seems to involve thinking, “What if?” What if the worst-case scenario happens? That would be unbearable. Decatastrophizing, on the other hand, has been described as going from “What if?” to “So what?”: So what if such-and-such happens? It’s not the end of the world; I can deal with it.
• Another common method of decatastrophizing is for cognitive therapists to ask clients, What’s next? 
• Marcus’s favorite strategies,  ask yourself, “What, realistically, will most likely happen next? And then what? 
• Imagine a seesaw, with your appraisal of the severity of a situation—how threatening or dangerous it is—on one side. On the other side is your appraisal of your own ability to cope, your self-confidence if you like. If you believe that the threat outweighs your ability to cope and the seesaw tips toward danger, then you’ll probably feel extremely stressed or anxious. On the other hand, if you reckon that the severity of the threat is low and your ability to cope is high, then the seesaw will tip toward you, and you should feel calm and self confident. 
• Normally, therefore, once you’ve arrived at a more realistic description of a feared situation, you will consider ways that you could potentially cope and get through it. Sometimes this involves creative problem-solving—brainstorming alternative solutions and weighing the consequences. The Stoics liked to ask themselves, “What virtues has Nature given me that might help me deal with the situation better?” You might also consider how other people cope so that you can try to model their attitudes and behavior. What would a role model like Socrates, Diogenes, or Zeno do? We can also ask “What would Marcus do?” if faced with the same situation. In modern therapy, clients model the behavior of others and developing “coping plans”, which describe how they would deal with the feared situation if it actually happened. 
• That means going from thinking of events as “totally unbearable” to picturing realistic ways you can bear them and deal with them. The more clearly formulated your coping plan is and the more confident you are about putting it into practice, the less anxious you will tend to feel. 

He would reframe every hardship as an opportunity to cope by exercising wisdom and strength of character.

How to train Objective Representation 

• You can start training yourself in this Stoic practice of objective representation right now by writing down a description of an upsetting or problematic event in plain language. Phrase things as accurately as possible and view them from a more philosophical perspective, with studied indifference. Once you’ve mastered this art, take it a step further by following the example of Paconius Agrippinus and look for positive opportunities. Write how you could exercise strength of character and cope wisely with the situation. Ask yourself how someone you admire might cope with the same situation or what that person might advise you to do. Treat the event like a sparring partner in the gym, giving you an opportunity to strengthen your emotional resilience and coping skills.
• Many other cognitive distancing techniques used in modern CBT, such as these: 
  • Writing down your thoughts concisely when they occur and viewing them on paper 
  •  Writing them on a whiteboard and looking at them “over there”—literally from a distance 
  • Prefixing them with a phrase like “Right now, I notice that I am thinking…” 
  • Referring to them in the third person, for example, “Donald is thinking…,” as if you’re studying the thoughts and beliefs of someone else 
  • Evaluating in a detached manner the pros and cons of holding a certain opinion 
  • Using a counter or a tally to monitor with detached curiosity the frequency of certain thoughts 
  • Shifting perspective and imagining a range of alternative ways of looking at the same situation so that your initial viewpoint becomes less fixed and rigid. For example, “How might I feel about crashing my car if I were like Marcus Aurelius?” “If this happened to my daughter, how would I advise her to cope?” “How will I think about this, looking back on events, ten or twenty years from now?”

• The Handbook actually opens with a technique to remind ourselves that some things are “up to us,” or directly under our control, and other things are not. Modern Stoics sometimes call this the “Dichotomy of Control” or the “Stoic Fork.” Just recalling this distinction can help you recover a sense of indifference toward external things. Think of it this way. When you strongly judge something to be good or bad, you also commit yourself to saying that you want to obtain or avoid it. But if something is outside your control, then it’s simply irrational to demand that you should obtain or avoid it. It’s a contradiction to believe both that you must do something and also that it’s not within your power to do so. The Stoics viewed this confusion as the root cause of most emotional suffering. They pointed out that only our own acts of volition, our own intentions and judgments if you like, are directly under our control. Sure, I can open the door, but that’s always a consequence of my actions. Only my own voluntary actions themselves are truly under my control. When we judge external things to be good or bad, it’s as though we forget what’s under our control and try to overextend our sphere of responsibility. The Stoics view only their own actions as good or bad, virtuous or vicious, and therefore classify all external things as indifferent, because they’re not entirely “up to us” in this sense.

Value Judgements 

• They argue, however, that we deceive ourselves when we invest too much value in external things. They also trained themselves to gain cognitive distance by understanding that events don’t seem the same to everyone: our own perspective is just one of many.
• By realizing that our value judgments are projections, Marcus says, we separate them from external events. He refers to this cognitive process as the “purification” (katharsis) of the mind.
• Epictetus’s famous saying—“It’s not things that upset us but our judgments about things”—will serve you well as a guide.
• The Stoics had many specific techniques for anger management. One of them is to wait until our feelings have naturally abated and then calmly consider what someone wise would do in a similar situation.

 

Teachers

• The Meditations that when learning to read and write you cannot be a teacher without having first been a student, and that this is even truer for the art of living.
• Students of Stoicism benefited from the wisdom of their teachers by treating them both as models, whose behavior they sought to emulate, and mentors, to whose advice they could listen.
• Galen’s solution to this problem is for us to find a suitable mentor in whose wisdom and experience we can genuinely trust. Anyone can tell when a singer is truly dreadful, but it takes an expert to notice very subtle flaws in a performance. Likewise, it takes a person of moral wisdom to discern slight defects in another person’s character. We all know that someone is angry when their face turns red and they start yelling, but a true expert on human nature would be able to tell when someone is just on the verge of getting angry, perhaps before they even realize it themselves. We should therefore make the effort to acquire an older and wiser friend: one renowned for honesty and plain speaking, who has mastered the same passions with which we need help, who can properly identify our vices and tell us frankly where we’re going astray in
• Marcus wrote that anyone who truly wants to achieve wisdom through Stoicism will make it his priority in life to cultivate his own character and seek help from others who share similar values.

Communicating 

• The Stoics, by contrast, placed supreme value on grasping and communicating the truth by appealing to reason. This meant avoiding the use of emotive rhetoric or strong value judgments. We usually think of rhetoric as something used to manipulate other people. We tend to forget we’re doing it to ourselves as well, not only when we speak but also when we use language to think. The Stoics were certainly interested in how our words affect others. However, their priority was to change the way we affect ourselves, our own thoughts and feelings, through our choice of language. We exaggerate, overgeneralize, omit information, and use strong language and colorful metaphors: “She’s always being a bitch!” “That bastard shot me down in flames!” “This job is complete bullshit!” People tend to think that exclamations like these are a natural consequence of strong emotions like anger. But what if they’re also causing or perpetuating our emotions? If you think about it, rhetoric like this is designed to evoke strong feelings. By contrast, undoing the effects of emotional rhetoric by describing the same events more objectively forms the basis of the ancient Stoic therapy of the passions.
• Stoics made a point of consciously describing events in plain and simple terms. Cutting through misleading language and value judgments and stripping away any embellishments or emotive language, they tried to articulate the facts more calmly and soberly. Marcus likewise told himself to speak plainly rather than dressing up his thoughts in fancy language.
• Indeed, nothing is so conducive to greatness of mind, as the ability to examine events rationally and view them realistically by stripping them down to their essential characteristics in this way.
• They were concerned that their speech should not only be honest and simple but also appropriate to the needs of the hearer. There’s no point in speaking plainly to people if it doesn’t benefit them. Throughout The Meditations, Marcus makes many references to the value he places on speaking the truth, but he also consistently recognizes the importance of communicating it appropriately.
• If someone used a word incorrectly, Alexander would not overtly criticize the speaker. He never interrupted them or challenged them on the spot. Instead, the grammarian had a more artful and indirect way of steering them in the right direction. Marcus noticed that Alexander would subtly drop in the correct expression while replying or discussing some other topic. If the real goal for Stoics is wisdom, then sometimes just blurting out the truth isn’t enough. We have to put more effort into communicating with others effectively.
• According to Epictetus, the most striking characteristic of Socrates was that he never became irritated during an argument. He was always polite and refrained from speaking harshly even when others insulted him. He patiently endured much abuse and yet was able to put an end to most quarrels in a calm and rational manner.
• So instead of resenting it, we should welcome criticism from others as one of life’s inevitabilities and turn it to our advantage by making all men into our teachers. Galen therefore says that if we desire to learn wisdom, we must be ready to listen to anyone we encounter and show gratitude “not to those who flatter us but to those who rebuke us.”
• This doesn’t mean we should trust all opinions equally, of course. Marcus makes it clear that we must train ourselves to discriminate good advice from bad and learn not to preoccupy ourselves with the opinions of foolish people. It’s prudent to listen carefully to most of the people we meet in life but not to give equal weight to all opinions.

“Being Observed”

• Being observed can help us develop greater self-awareness and correct our behavior, especially if we’re in the presence of someone we admire, such as a trusted mentor.
• Just imagining that you’re being observed by someone wise and benevolent can potentially have similar benefits, especially if you pretend that your innermost thoughts and feelings are somehow visible to them.
• That’s a rather clever mind trick that turns Stoic mentoring into a kind of mindfulness practice. Imagining that we’re being observed helps us to pay more attention to our own character and behavior. A Stoic-in-training, like the young Marcus, would have been advised always to exercise self-awareness by monitoring his own thoughts, actions, and feelings, perhaps as if his mentor, Rusticus, were continually observing him. Epictetus told his students that, just as someone who walks barefoot is cautious not to step on a nail or twist his ankle, they should be careful throughout the day not to harm their own character by lapsing into errors of moral judgment.
• Galen suggested that imitating a role model is more appropriate in our youth. Later in life, as we take more responsibility for our own character, it becomes important to follow specific philosophical principles and practice living by them. Over the years, with more experience, we should develop more self-awareness and become able to spot our own errors without needing the help of a mentor. Moreover, we gradually learn to weaken passions such as anger through disciplined practice and checking their expression at an early stage. Even if you don’t have a real-life mentor following you around, you can still benefit from the concept by using your imagination. Marcus, like other ancient philosophers, conjured the images of various advisors and role models in his mind.
• Marcus tells himself to focus his attention on the minds of wise men, particularly their underlying principles, and carefully consider what these men avoid and what they pursue in life.
  • Your first step is to write down the virtues exhibited by someone you respect. Listing the qualities you most admire in another person, just as Marcus does in the first book of The Meditations, is a simple and powerful exercise. He explains in a later chapter that he contemplates the virtues of those who lived with him in order to raise his spirits: the energy of one, the modesty of another, the generosity of a third, and so on. Nothing cheers our soul, he says, like the people close to us exhibiting virtue in their lives, and for that very reason we should treasure these examples and keep the memory of them fresh. Writing things down will often make the image more vivid and memorable. Stoics considered this a healthy source of joy. Writing down your ideas about what makes another person admirable, mulling them over, and revising them gives you an opportunity to process them. With practice, you will be able to visualize the character traits you’re describing more easily.

• In addition to the virtues of real people, the Stoics were also known for contemplating the hypothetical character of an ideal Sage, or wise person.

Daily “Learning Cycle/ Routine” 

• When teaching people to employ Stoic practices, I’ve found it helpful to have a simple framework for daily Stoic practices. It involves a “learning cycle” with a beginning, middle, and end, which then repeats each day. 
  • In the morning you prepare for the day ahead; 
  • throughout the day you try to live consistently in accord with your values; 
  • in the evening you review your progress and prepare to repeat the cycle again the next day. I’ll refer to the Stoic exercises used at the beginning and end of each day as the morning and evening meditations. Having a daily routine like this makes it much easier to be consistent in your practice.

• During your morning meditation, consider what tasks you have to complete and what challenges you must overcome. Ask yourself, “What would my role model do?” and try to imagine them dealing with the same situations you’re about to face. Mentally rehearse the virtues you want to exhibit. 
• Throughout the day, try continually to be self-aware, as if a wise mentor or teacher is observing you. We call this “Stoic mindfulness” today, but the Stoics meant something similar by prosoche or paying attention to yourself. Keep an eye on how you use your mind and body, particularly the value judgments you make in different situations, and watch out for subtle feelings of anger, fear, sadness, or unhealthy desires, as well as bad habits.
• During your evening meditation, review how things actually went, perhaps going over the key events of the day two or three times in your mind’s eye. What would your imaginary mentors say? What advice might they give you about doing things differently next time? This is your opportunity to learn from experience and prepare for the morning when you’ll plan your behavior and rehearse things again in an ongoing cycle of self-improvement. You might ask yourself, for example, “What would Marcus Aurelius say about how I fared today?”
• Regarding the morning meditation, Galen says that as soon as you rise from bed and begin considering each of the tasks ahead, you should ask yourself two questions: 
  • 1. What would the consequences be if you acted as a slave to your passions? 
  • 2. How would your day differ if you acted more rationally, exhibiting wisdom and self-discipline?

• Marcus discusses how to prepare for the day ahead at least four times in The Meditations. He mentions that the Pythagoreans used to contemplate the stars each morning, thinking of their consistency, purity, and nakedness as symbolic of man living with wisdom, virtue, and simplicity. He likewise tells himself on awakening that he is rising to fulfill his potential for wisdom and not just to be a puppet of bodily sensations, swayed by pleasant feelings or turned aside by discomfort. He tells himself to love his nature and his capacity for reason and to do his best to live accordingly. 

 

End of Day Review

• You can ask yourself these three very simple questions: 
  • 1. What did you do badly? Did you allow yourself to be ruled by irrational fears or unhealthy desires? Did you act badly or allow yourself to indulge in irrational thoughts? 
  • 2. What did you do well? Did you make progress by acting wisely? Praise yourself and reinforce what you want to repeat. 
  • 3. What could you do differently? Did you omit any opportunities to exercise virtue or strength of character? How could you have handled things better?

• He probed his own mind, scrutinizing the fundamental values he was taking for granted. “Whose soul do I now have?” he would ask. “Am I behaving like a child, a tyrant, a sheep, a wolf, or am I fulfilling my true potential as a rational being? For what purpose am I currently using my mind? Am I being foolish? Am I alienated from other people? Am I letting myself be dragged off course by fear and desire? What passions are there right now in my mind?” You might also ask yourself, “How’s this actually working out?” Sometimes it’s necessary to interrupt the things you’re doing out of habit so that you can ask yourself whether they’re actually healthy or unhealthy for you in the long run.

Socratic Method 

• The Stoics employed the Socratic method of questioning, the elenchus, which exposes contradictions in the beliefs of the person being questioned—a bit like the cross-examination of a witness in a court of law. They believed above all that the wise man is consistent in both his thoughts and actions.
• This sort of Socratic questioning forms part of an approach called “values clarification,” which has been around since the 1970s but has recently gone through a resurgence of popularity among therapists and researchers. By deeply reflecting on our values each day and attempting to describe them concisely, we can develop a clearer sense of direction in life. You might do this by posing questions to yourself such as: 
  • What’s ultimately the most important thing in life to you? 
  • What do you really want your life to stand for or represent? 
  • What do you want to be remembered for after you’re dead? 
  • What sort of person do you most want to be in life? 
  • What sort of character do you want to have? 
  • What would you want to be written on your tombstone? 

• The most important aspect of this values clarification exercise for Stoics would be to grasp the true nature of man’s highest good, to elucidate our most fundamental goal, and live accordingly. Everything in Stoicism ultimately refers back to the goal of grasping the true nature of the good and living accordingly.

Eudaimonia

• Chasing empty, transient pleasures can never lead to true happiness in the long run. However, pleasure can be tricky—it can lure us in by posing as something it’s not. What we’re all really seeking in life is the sense of authentic happiness or fulfillment the Stoics called eudaimonia.
• By contrast, the Stoics taught Marcus that we all seek a deeper and more lasting sense of fulfillment. They taught him that this could only be obtained by realizing our inner potential and living in accord with our core values, not being led astray by superficial feelings.

 

One day, as a young man, Hercules was walking along an unfamiliar path when he came upon a fork in the road, at which he sat down and began to contemplate his future. Unsure which path to take, he found himself suddenly confronted by two mysterious goddesses. The first appeared as a beautiful and alluring woman dressed in fine clothing. She was called Kakia, although she (falsely) claimed that her friends called her Eudaimonia, meaning happiness and fulfillment. She barged in front of her companion and pleaded very insistently with Hercules to follow her path. It led, she promised, to by far the easiest and most pleasant way of life, a shortcut to true happiness. She told him that he could live like a king, avoiding hardship and enjoying luxury beyond most men’s wildest dreams, all delivered to him through the labor of others. After listening to her for a while, Hercules was approached by the second goddess, Arete, a less boastful and more modest woman, who nonetheless shone with natural beauty. To his surprise, she wore a grave expression. She warned him that her path led in a very different direction: it would be long and difficult and would require a great deal of hard work. Speaking plainly, she told Hercules that he would suffer. He would be doomed to walk the earth in rags, reviled and persecuted by his enemies. “Nothing that is really good and admirable,” cautioned Arete, “is granted by the gods to men without some effort and application.” Hercules would be called upon to exercise wisdom and justice and to face mounting adversity with bravery and self-discipline. Overcoming great obstacles through courageous and honorable deeds, the goddess said, was the only true path to fulfillment in life.

• For Stoics, in other words, the tale of Hercules symbolizes the epic challenge of deciding who we really want to be in life, the promise of philosophy, and the temptation of giving in to pleasure and vice. The moral is that it often requires a Herculean effort to keep to the right path. But wasn’t Hercules’s life unpleasant? As we’ll see, from the Stoic perspective Hercules remained cheerful, despite the terrible things he endured. He enjoyed a profound sense of inner satisfaction knowing that he was fulfilling his destiny and expressing his true nature. His life had something far more satisfying than pleasure: it had a purpose.

A man’s worth can be measured by the things upon which he sets his heart.

• He admits in The Meditations that he craves the simpler but idyllic family life at his peaceful villas in the Italian countryside. serenity” throughout the whole of his life. Having glimpsed this inner peace, Marcus was convinced that it was possible to live consistently in that state of mind, even if he was criticized by those around him or was gored by wild beasts.
• Modern English isn’t well equipped to capture some of the distinctions made in ancient Greek philosophy, especially when it comes to describing emotions and sensations. We use the word “pleasure” very broadly to encompass almost any positive feeling. However, the Stoics distinguished between the sort of pleasure (hedone) we get from “external” things like food or sex or flattery and the deeper sense of inner joy (chara) that Marcus is talking about. Stoic joy is profound. It comes from achieving your fundamental goal in life and experiencing genuine fulfillment, which makes ordinary pleasures seem trivial by comparison. Ordinary pleasures often ruffle our minds, especially when indulged in too much. Stoic joy never does this—it’s synonymous with inner peace and knows no excess. The Stoics refer to it as the pure form of “joy” that someone experiences who is living a truly great life and has attained genuine personal fulfillment (eudaimonia). Of course, none of us are there yet, but all of us may, potentially, glimpse the goal as long as we’re heading in the right direction.

There are two more key points about Stoic joy worth emphasizing: 

• 1. The Stoics tended to view joy not as the goal of life, which is wisdom, but as a by-product of it, so they believed that trying to pursue it directly might lead us down the wrong path if it’s sought at the expense of wisdom. 
• 2. Joy in the Stoic sense is fundamentally active rather than passive; it comes from perceiving the virtuous quality of our own deeds, the things we do, whereas bodily pleasures arise from experiences that happen to us, even if they’re a consequence of actions like eating, drinking, or having sex.
• Marcus therefore says that it’s not in feelings but in actions that your supreme good resides. The wise man’s sense of delight comes from one thing alone: acting consistently in accord with virtue.11 Nevertheless, Marcus does elsewhere mention two additional sources of joy. Together these correspond with the three core relationships that stoic ethics encompassed: our self, other people, and the world as a whole. 
  • 1. Contemplating virtue in yourself. As we’ve just seen, Marcus says that the most important source of both “serenity” and “joy” for a Stoic comes from letting go of attachment to external things and focusing on living wisely, particularly by exercising virtue (justice) in our relations with others. 
  • 2. Contemplating virtue in others. Marcus also tells himself that when he wants to gladden his heart, he should meditate on the good qualities of those close to him, such as energy, modesty, or generosity. That’s essentially what he’s doing in book 1 of The Meditations when he lists the virtues of his family members and teachers at length, and it helps to explain the important role of these friendships in his life. 
  • 3. Welcoming your fate. Marcus also tells himself that rather than desiring things that are absent, as many do, he should reflect on the pleasant aspect of things he already has before him and contemplate how he would miss them if they were not there. 

• The Greek word for joy (chara) is closely related to that for gratitude (charis). Indeed, the Stoics encourage you to appreciate the external things Fortune has given you. Marcus cautions, however, that you must exercise moderation in this regard. You should not fall into the habit of overvaluing external things and becoming overly attached to them. You can check this, he says, by asking yourself whether you would be upset if the things you value were ever taken away. The Stoics wanted to develop a healthy sense of gratitude in life, unspoiled by attachment. So they practiced calmly imagining change and loss, like a river gently flowing past, carrying things away. The wise man loves life and is grateful for the opportunities it gives him, but he accepts that everything changes and nothing lasts forever. Marcus, therefore, wrote that it is a characteristic of the Stoic Sage “to love and welcome all that happens to him and is spun for him as his fate.” People today often feel that this is similar to a famous Latin phrase coined by Jietzche: Amor fati or love of one’s fate.
• In other words, the Stoics weren’t killjoys. Marcus was convinced he could obtain as much healthy enjoyment from the simple things that befell him in life as pleasure-seekers like his brother did from ravenously indulging their unhealthy desires. Socrates had likewise claimed, paradoxically, that those who practice self-control actually obtain more pleasure from things like food and drink than those who indulge in them to excess. Hunger is the best relish, he said, whereas if we overeat we spoil our appetites. Hedonists might accuse Stoics of missing out on life’s pleasures, but Stoics would respond with this paradox: the life of someone like Marcus, who exercises moderation, is surely more pleasant and involves less self-inflicted suffering than the life of someone like Lucius who lacks self-control. 
• More accurately, exercising moderation may become a source of personal satisfaction and inner fulfillment that outweighs the ordinary pleasures it seeks to overcome. It’s important to remember, though, that we’re talking about self-discipline that’s exercised wisely, not any sort of self-denial that might actually be foolish or unhealthy. For Stoics, the intrinsic value of wisdom, as an end in itself, always surpasses everything else, including the pleasure and other external benefits that may accrue as the result of living wisely. 

 

I’m going to recommend a simple framework for evaluating and changing your behavior based on a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and ancient Stoic practices. It consists of the following steps: 

• 1. Evaluate the consequences of your habits or desires in order to select which ones to change. 
• 2. Spot early warning signs so that you can nip problematic desires in the bud. 
• 3. Gain cognitive distance by separating your impressions from external reality. 
• 4. Do something else instead of engaging in the habit. In addition, consider how you might introduce other sources of healthy positive feelings by: 
  • 1. Planning new activities that are consistent with your core values. 
  • 2. Contemplating the qualities you admire in other people. 
  • 3. Practicing gratitude for the things you already have in life.

What would happen if you spent more time exercising the virtues you admire, doing things that you find inherently valuable and fulfilling, and less time indulging in the sort of habits that may feel pleasurable but aren’t actually good for you? In fact, really thinking through the consequences of behaviors and picturing them vividly in your mind may be enough in some cases to eliminate the behavior.

 

2. SPOT EARLY WARNING SIGNS 

• Now that you’ve considered what sort of habits or desires might conflict with your values and be worth changing, your next step is to “catch them in the wild” by noticing when they’re actually happening. The key is to spot them early so that you can nip them in the bud. This requires patient self-monitoring, especially looking out for the early warning signs of the feelings or behavior you want to change. When done properly, this sort of self-monitoring is effectively a form of training in Stoic mindfulness. Keep a written daily record of the situations in which you notice the desire emerging. This can be as simple as tallying each time you sense even the slightest inclination to engage in the habit, the first inkling of the desire. It could also be a more detailed record sheet, including rows with columns for the date/time, the external situation (“Where were you?”), the early warning signs you notice, and/or a rating from zero to ten of the strength of the urge and possibly also the level of actual pleasure you experienced if you gave in to.
• Gratitude, on the other hand, comes from imagining the absence of things that are currently present: What would it be like if you didn’t have this? If we don’t occasionally picture loss, reminding ourselves what life might be like without the things and people we love, we would take them for granted. Keep a journal of people and things that you’re grateful for, perhaps also focusing on what you can learn from them. As Marcus says, though, it’s important to do this in such a way that you don’t end up becoming overly attached to external
• Epictetus told his Stoic students to imagine their guests at a banquet being handed a sharing plate, not greedily holding on to it and scoffing the lot but politely taking an appropriate share and then handing the rest along. That’s how Stoics think about life in general: they aim to be grateful for external things without becoming overly attached to them.
• Evaluate certain habits or desires rationally in terms of their consequences. Write down the long-term pros and cons of indulging in the habit versus overcoming it. Close your eyes and visualize a fork in the road representing two paths, picturing as vividly as you can first the future with unhealthy passions, then the future with wise actions in accord with reason. You can adapt the daily routine mentioned earlier to look like this:
  • 1. Morning Meditation. Think of the rising sun, the stars, and your small space within the whole cosmos. Mentally rehearse the key events of the day, imagining how Socrates, Zeno, Marcus Aurelius, or your own role model would cope with habits or desires. Picture how you plan to cope with any challenges and what inner resources or virtues you can employ. 
  • 2. During the Day. Practice Stoic mindfulness by looking for early warning signs of the habits or desires you want to overcome. Try to catch them early and nip them in the bud. Pause and practice accepting any feelings of unease with Stoic indifference. Gain cognitive distance from your thoughts and refrain from acting on your feelings. Engage in healthy substitute behaviors instead, which contribute to a genuine sense of fulfillment. You could also keep a written log or tally of certain habits, as described in this chapter. 
  • 3. Evening Meditation. At the end of the day, review how well you fared in terms of acting in accordance with your values—that is, virtues. In relation to desires, consider what you did well, what you did badly, and what you could do differently tomorrow. If it helps, imagine answering these questions before a wise Stoic mentor or even a panel of Sages, and consider what advice they might give you. Use what you learn to help prepare for the next day’s morning meditation.

 

5. GRASPING THE NETTLE 

• Marcus Aurelius was known for his physical frailty, due to chronic health problems, but he was also known for his exceptional resilience. For instance, the historian Cassius Dio wrote: To be sure, he could not display many feats of physical prowess; yet he had developed his body from a very weak one to one capable of the greatest endurance.
• He’d been preparing himself to face this inner battle for most of his life, though. Over the years, Marcus had gradually learned to endure pain and illness by utilizing the psychological strategies of ancient Stoicism. During the war, in writing The Meditations, he reflected on these techniques as part of his ongoing practice. These notes reflect a state of mind attained from more than three decades of rigorous Stoic training. In other words, his attitude toward pain and illness during the northern campaign didn’t come naturally to him; he had to learn it.
• The Epicureans believed that the goal of life was a pleasure (hedone). They described pleasure, though, in a notoriously paradoxical manner, as consisting mainly of a state of freedom from pain and suffering (ataraxia). Minimizing the emotional distress caused by pain and illness was therefore extremely important to them. 
• Epicurus did: remain focused on the pursuit of wisdom even in the face of illness, pain, or any other hardship. We should remind ourselves, Epicurus said, that pain is always bearable because it is either acute or chronic but never both.

“a little pain is contemptible, and a great one is not lasting.” “On pain: if it is unbearable, it carries us off, if it persists, it can be endured.”

• Pain wants to dominate your mind and become the whole story. However, people who handle pain well usually view it objectively, as something more limited in nature, which makes it easier for them to see themselves coping with it in various ways.
• “Pain is neither unendurable nor everlasting if you keep its limits in mind and do not add to it through your own imagination.”
• Marcus meant that pain is tolerable if we remember that our attitude toward it is what really determines how upset we become. It’s not our pains or illnesses that upset us but our judgments about them

• Marcus would simply warn himself, “You are giving way to pain.” Pain, discomfort, fatigue—they’re all just unpleasant sensations.

Stress Inoculation

• Everyday tolerance of minor physical discomforts can help us build lasting psychological resilience, in other words. You could call this a form of stress inoculation: you learn to build up resistance to a bigger problem by voluntarily exposing yourself repeatedly to something similar, albeit in smaller doses or a milder form.
• Pain and discomfort can become advantages in life if they provide opportunities for us to develop our strengths. It’s also true that many ordinary people, at certain times, exhibit indifference to pain—such as when they’re injured while saving their own life. Some people, of course, such as masochists, even enjoy the sensation of pain. Pain is just a sensation, in other words; what matters is how we choose to respond to it.
• Modern cognitive therapists likewise find that distress escalates when people tell themselves “I can’t cope!”
• Stoics can still “prefer” to avoid pain and illness when possible. Once it’s already happening, though, they try to accept the fact with indifference.

 

Discourses of Epictetus 

• 1. Separate your mind from the sensation, which I call “cognitive distancing,” by reminding yourself that it is not things, or sensations, that upset us but our judgments about them. 
• 2. Remember that the fear of pain does more harm than the pain itself, or use other forms of functional analysis to weigh up the consequences for you of fearing versus accepting pain.
• 3. View bodily sensations objectively (objective representation, or phantasia kataleptike) instead of describing them in emotive terms. (“There’s a feeling of pressure around my forehead” versus “It feels like I’m dying—an elephant might as well be stamping over and over on my head!”)
• 4. Analyze the sensations into their elements and limit them as precisely as possible to their specific site on the body, thereby using the same depreciation by analysis that we used in the previous chapter to neutralize unhealthy desires and cravings. (“There’s a sharp throbbing sensation in my ear that comes and goes,” not “I’m in total agony.”)
• 5. View the sensation as limited in time, changeable, and transient, or “contemplate impermanence.” (“This sensation only peaks for a few seconds at a time and then fades away; it will probably be gone in a couple of days.”) If you have an acute problem like toothache, you’ll have forgotten what it felt like years from now. If you have a long-term problem such as chronic sciatica, you’ll know it sometimes gets worse and so at other times it must be less severe. It makes a difference if you can focus on the notion that this shall pass.
• 6. Let go of your struggle against the sensation and accept it as natural and indifferent, what is called “Stoic acceptance.” That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take practical steps to deal with it, such as using medication to reduce pain, but you must learn to live with the pain without resentment or an emotional struggle. 7. Remind yourself that Nature has given you both the capacity to exercise courage and the endurance to rise above pain and that we admire these virtues in other people, which we discussed in relation to contemplating and modeling virtue.

 

All things change, and before long they are gone. You cannot step into the same river twice, Heraclitus once said, because new waters are constantly flowing through it. Change is both life and death. We can try to stall the inevitable, but we never escape it. It’s a fool’s game.

 

Looking back, it seems more obvious to me now than ever before that the lives of most men are tragedies of their own making. Men let themselves either get puffed up with pride or tormented by grievances. Everything they concern themselves with is fragile, trivial, and fleeting. We’re left with nowhere to stand firm. Amid the torrent of things rushing past, there’s nothing secure in which we can invest our hopes. The wise man accepts his pain, endures it, but does not add to it.  Yet the heart that cries “Oh let my child be safe!” is like an eye wanting only to gaze on pleasant sights, refusing to accept that all things change, whether we like it or not. Death comes knocking at the king’s palace and the beggar’s shack alike. Augustus, the founder of the empire, his family, ancestors, priests, advisors, and his whole entourage—where are they now? Nowhere to be seen. Alexander the Great and his mule driver both reduced to dust, made equals at last by death.