The Art of Manliness - #316： An Introduction to Stoicism

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well interest

00:00:18.800 in stoicism has experienced a renaissance in recent years yet despite the increasing

00:00:23.040 popularity of this ancient philosophy misconceptions still abound about it for example many people

00:00:27.780 assume that to be stoic means to not feel or express any emotion including happiness and that

00:00:32.220 stoicism requires one to live a bland and spartan lifestyle my guest on the show today debunks these

00:00:37.100 myths and shows that stoicism can actually enrich our lives and allow us to experience real happiness

00:00:41.160 his name is bill irvine and he's a professor of philosophy and the author of a guide to the good

00:00:44.940 life the ancient art of stoic joy and in our discussion bill shares the origins of stoicism

00:00:49.400 and how the romans modified greek stoicism to fit their culture we then get into the specific stoic

00:00:53.940 practices you can implement today to start improving your life for example bill shares

00:00:58.280 the power of negative visualization how to approach things you have some but not complete control over

00:01:02.760 and how to purposely inject discomfort in your life to increase your grit bill then explains the stoic

00:01:08.060 duty of socializing and how to maintain your stoic serenity even with the most difficult of people

00:01:12.280 we then discuss what the stoics would have thought about political correctness and microaggressions and

00:01:16.380 some of the critiques against stoicism if you've been wanting to understand stoicism more but haven't

00:01:20.720 known how to get started this podcast is a great introduction and it is packed with not just

00:01:24.440 background information but actionable advice make sure to check out the show notes at aom.is

00:01:28.600 slash stoic where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic

00:01:32.280 all right bill irvin welcome to the show it's a pleasure to be here thank you for asking me to be

00:01:39.960 a guest so i'm a big fan of your work you've written a book about insults and how to handle them which i

00:01:44.760 i enjoyed quite a bit and it segues nicely with this book that we're going to talk about today it's

00:01:49.820 the stoic art of joy and what i love about the book it's such a it's such a great introductory

00:01:54.400 book to the topic of stoicism you get into the history of it and also just details about stoic

00:01:59.580 specific stoic practices but let's talk about your history with stoicism before we get into stoicism

00:02:05.100 you're a philosopher you teach philosophy but you came to stoicism later in life before you

00:02:11.600 discovered stoicism what sort of philosophy did you focus on in your career well i got into philosophy

00:02:17.540 because i in high school late high school i developed an interest in henry david thoreau

00:02:23.040 and he was referred to as a philosopher so i thought that by taking philosophy courses in college

00:02:30.580 i could go deeper into what he was doing and what other like-minded people have been doing

00:02:37.220 only to discover that modern philosophy at least in the united states has pretty much lost its interest

00:02:44.340 in coming up with stuff that's applicable to life as we live it the exception to that would be the

00:02:51.820 branch known as ethics which is trying to tell you what's morally obligatory and what's morally forbidden

00:02:57.940 but most of the choices and some of the most significant choices we make in daily living

00:03:03.960 aren't ethical choices but there there's uh just questions about what should i be trying to accomplish

00:03:10.260 right now and what's the best means for me to accomplish it and what do i need to do in order

00:03:17.300 to have what on balance will be a good life and i found the classes i was taking were oblivious to such

00:03:25.780 questions i stuck on with it though and and knew that if i wanted to get a job teaching philosophy i had to

00:03:33.300 had to master that portion of the philosophical discussion so i did but then it was much later

00:03:42.260 that it dawned on me that that i was becoming an old man and still hadn't found a philosophy by by

00:03:50.100 which to live and wasn't that a a sad state of affairs and then i kind of did the next step so i i had

00:03:58.340 fiddled with buddhism for a while i decided i was going to write a book in which i explored buddhism

00:04:05.860 and so as an aging uh human being i decided i needed to adopt a philosophy for living and the one that

00:04:16.580 attracted me initially was buddhism i decided that what i would do is do research for a book on buddhism

00:04:24.580 and i had two goals and doing that number one is it would count as a publication which would be good

00:04:30.420 for my career and number two i thought that by doing the research into buddhism i could convert

00:04:35.460 myself into a functioning practicing buddhist so i would get a double return on this investment of

00:04:41.860 research time but a funny thing happened uh along the way and that is that in order to be complete in

00:04:49.780 my research i had to have a section on the philosophical views in the ancient world at least

00:04:56.340 to philosophy for living and started looking into stoicism very quickly realized i had a

00:05:03.780 misconception about who the stoics were and what they were after and before i knew it i was practicing

00:05:09.940 stoicism in a low-grade experimental kind of way and i was surprised by the impact it was having on my

00:05:19.380 life so by the time the book was done i no longer had an interest in being a buddhist i decided i was

00:05:25.620 going to be a practicing stoic so what were those misconceptions you had about stoicism that made you

00:05:32.420 to you know write it off for so long well it was the standard misconception that stoics the capital s

00:05:39.780 stoics uppercase s stoics were also lowercase s stoical and that is that their goal was to suppress

00:05:48.260 all emotions and simply bottle themselves up so they became oblivious to the kinds of disasters that

00:05:55.940 that the world would present and what i discovered is that they weren't anti-emotion they can better be

00:06:02.100 described as anti-negative emotion so they drew the conclusion from their observation of humanity that

00:06:09.540 we human beings experience all sorts of negative emotions and it's it's our own fault that we do so

00:06:16.420 negative emotions like like anger like grief like envy and you can fill out that that list

00:06:23.460 considerably those are things that disrupt our days and disrupt our lives and yet it dawned on

00:06:31.860 the stoics that to a considerable extent if we're experiencing those emotions it's self-inflicted

00:06:37.940 it's because of certain values we've adopted it's because of certain strategies for living that we've

00:06:45.220 chosen to use and so we have it in our power to change our goal in living and to change the strategies

00:06:52.180 we use and we can thereby make those negative emotions they never disappear from your life but you can

00:07:00.980 diminish their impact on you at the same time the stoics had no no problem at all with uh

00:07:07.700 experiencing positive emotions for instance one of my favorite positive emotions is the feeling of

00:07:15.060 delight and as a stoic you're delighted by any number of things that normal people will take utterly for

00:07:24.260 granted and then you have perhaps the ultimate positive emotion and that is a feeling of joy this

00:07:31.700 disembodied feeling of of just gratitude that you get to be part of this universe populated by these

00:07:40.580 people so it's a wonderful thing to have wonderful thing to experience and the stoics said there's

00:07:47.380 nothing wrong with that so for me that worked wonderfully well now before i go any further if there are

00:07:55.140 practicing buddhists in your audience there they shouldn't take this as a put down of buddhism i'd be

00:08:01.940 the first to say that what works for some people might not work for other people and given my own uh

00:08:08.740 intellectual frame of mind stoicism just works a lot better for me than buddhism does so let's talk

00:08:15.860 about the history of stoicism it's often associated with the romans seneca and cato and marcus aurelius but

00:08:22.980 it got its start in greece what what is stoicism's pedigree did it have any connection to the other

00:08:29.060 schools of philosophy that were in ancient greece like the academy or you know plato's school yes

00:08:35.780 back then a school of philosophy would literally be a school you know now we say school of philosophy

00:08:41.700 it's it's just kind of a system of thinking or something like that but it would be literally

00:08:45.780 a school if you wanted to make your living doing philosophy you started a school now if you had

00:08:52.820 a school that taught purely theoretical things probably who wouldn't get very many students

00:08:58.900 because the people of that time this would be 400 bc you know in greece and other things on their mind

00:09:05.780 you know they had things that they needed to worry about but if you had a school that promised them

00:09:12.180 or that offered them advice on how to have a good life and maybe brought in other kinds of theoretical

00:09:19.460 material at the same time then you could get students and so what they had at that time

00:09:25.700 was multiple a competing schools you know and the analogy i use in the book is it's like schools of

00:09:32.420 martial arts today you know if you tell me that you want to want to develop your ability to do street

00:09:38.820 fighting you know then i'd say well take a look at go online and you'll find there's any number of rival

00:09:44.580 schools and some will tell you how to fight with your hands and some will say no you need to bring

00:09:49.700 in your feet as well and and then the question is which of those is going to work best for you

00:09:56.100 same when true was true in the ancient world with respect to schools of philosophy you would have had

00:10:02.100 many different schools to choose from the schools would have offered different advice on what your

00:10:07.700 goal should be in living and the schools also would have given you different strategies for

00:10:13.300 attaining whatever they took to be the thing of value so you had some schools that said party hard

00:10:21.140 you had other schools that said and this would be the stoics if you want to have a good life what

00:10:26.180 you need to do is first realize that the thing of greatest value in life is tranquility and then

00:10:33.220 secondly they said and if what you seek is tranquility here's the way to attain it so it's an

00:10:40.340 interestingly different approach to philosophy than what you find in modern colleges for instance

00:10:48.740 another thing to realize is that with respect to ancient stoicism it started out with the greeks

00:10:57.220 and the problem is most of their writings have been lost so we have only but by report we know of most

00:11:05.380 the things they had to say and then the second thing is when the romans acquired stoicism when

00:11:10.980 they decided they were going to start their own stoic schools they put a different spin on it

00:11:17.140 and the whole notion about tranquility as the goal is really more closely associated with the romans

00:11:23.540 than with the greeks right so i mean i think in the a lot of people don't realize i think when people

00:11:28.980 hear stoicism they think about the ethics part right these sort of stoic practices to maintain

00:11:32.500 tranquility i think that's because of the greeks but a lot of people don't realize that the stoics

00:11:36.580 also thought about sort of the theoretical they had schools of logic and ideas about physics how

00:11:42.980 did though their idea of physics and logic influence their ethics i guess is the question i'm trying to

00:11:49.700 get at um the physics it's harder to see why that would would tie in and you know if you were a

00:11:56.980 a parent choosing a school of philosophy for your for your kid you want your kid to come out a

00:12:03.620 well-rounded person and so you want him to acquire ability at reasoning for instance you want him to

00:12:09.700 acquire at some level of knowledge of the world you want to him to acquire if he was going to be a lawyer

00:12:15.300 or a politician the ability to put together a cogent argument which required logical skills and also

00:12:23.300 the ability to spot the mistakes in the arguments of others and claim if you really cared about your

00:12:30.900 kid one of the principal takeaways from uh education would be an understanding of what what in life was

00:12:38.820 most important and how to get the thing that was most important and of course uh colleges you know in the

00:12:45.620 world today will teach a career but they have very very little interest in in saying to you well and

00:12:54.260 here's what's worth having and here's the strategy for getting the thing worth having so if you go to

00:13:00.420 college now to become a lawyer you're you're going to get a lot of uh advice on how to be a lawyer but

00:13:06.740 you know unless you win out of your way the advice on how to live is is very much in the background

00:13:12.020 why do you think we're so tepid to teach students about you know acquiring a philosophy of life

00:13:18.900 that's like i mean you make the case in the book that's probably the most important thing you can

00:13:22.260 have because it will guide all other decisions you make in life i think it's because we aren't

00:13:28.340 confident that we possess such a a philosophy and and as you've heard me already suggest uh i i don't

00:13:35.780 claim to have the answer but i have an answer that works really well for a lot of people and an answer

00:13:43.380 that works better by far than what the default answer would be i mean so most people what do they

00:13:50.660 do if you ask them what is it you want in life they will now maybe not in the direct way i'm going to

00:13:57.460 state it but they will suggest that what they're pursuing in life is wealth and fame that if you're really

00:14:04.820 famous and you have a ton of money that means you've had a good life and there are any number

00:14:10.820 of counter examples to that claim but that seems to be what people are working on that's the kind of

00:14:18.180 the default so first thing you can do with a philosophy of life is to try to talk people out of that default

00:14:25.060 setting that they're on and then increase their chances of coming up with a better answer so one

00:14:32.340 thing modern colleges could do is expose students to a wide range of philosophies of life and then

00:14:37.940 let the students choose and they if nothing else by doing that what they could accomplish is to show

00:14:44.580 people that it's possible to live in a thoughtful manner in pursuit of some ultimate goal rather than

00:14:52.180 just following the crowd and assuming that every other person around you has done their homework on this

00:14:57.860 issue because most of them haven't they they've simply gotten into default mode where what they're

00:15:03.700 interested in is fame and fortune so let's dig into some of these specific stoic practices you highlight

00:15:10.420 in the book the first one is negative visualization so this is basically thinking about you know the worst

00:15:17.380 possible outcome how can thinking about what could everything that could go wrong how how can that actually

00:15:22.500 lead to more happiness okay well if the advice were to dwell on negative outcomes then it would be

00:15:30.020 terrible advice because you're going to be become a quickly a horribly depressed individual and you're

00:15:34.980 just going to go around moping about how sad everything is but that isn't their advice their advice is

00:15:41.940 that you should allow yourself to have flickering thoughts so a flickering thought is the key phrase

00:15:48.740 about how things could be worse and it is amazing number one whatever life you are living things

00:15:56.820 could be worse things could be very dramatically worse than they are i mean if you're telling me

00:16:04.420 about how bad your life is hey guess what you've got the ability to speak there are people who don't

00:16:10.340 you know there are these interesting cases of people who not only lose the ability to speak but lose the

00:16:16.020 ability to communicate in any way you know they have what's called locked in syndrome and they might

00:16:21.460 be able to blink one eye well if you can tell me how miserable you are you're not in that situation

00:16:29.460 and so guess what things could be worse and people have that thought and then they realize you know

00:16:36.740 it's true things could be worse so yeah you don't dwell on that because that'll just turn you into

00:16:41.780 a neurotic worry wart what do you do like i mean if i mean i think this would work well for folks who

00:16:48.340 okay they're living a comfortable life and you're like okay i i my car is totaled it could be worse

00:16:54.660 i still i could take care of this like what if like i mean you're destitute uh does this is this

00:16:59.860 still effective i mean i mean you're like hey uh at least you're still alive it's like i'm alive but

00:17:05.460 things are terrible do you think that the negative visualization works even if like your life is actually really

00:17:10.580 really it's like rock bottom you know we have the stories of ancient hardships so there was

00:17:15.700 musonius rufus who was exiled to the greek island of hieros and it was a desolate rock now there were

00:17:25.220 some fishermen who lived there but otherwise it was nothing so from the the roman's point of view

00:17:31.540 well we aren't going to kill him we're going to let him live but we're going to put him on this rock

00:17:34.980 and then the interesting thing was that he was able to find things to be thankful about even under

00:17:42.260 those circumstances you know what if if you have that ability in you you are pretty much bulletproof

00:17:51.300 to an incredible extent so life can can really abuse you in a number of ways which is unfortunate but

00:17:59.700 the key thing is you don't become a broken human being as the result of it now seneca the roman stoic

00:18:07.380 was at the other end of the spectrum and he got in trouble with emperor nero and was eventually

00:18:14.180 sentenced not just to death but to death by suicide and the accounts are that despite that particular

00:18:21.780 fate he remained uh an upbeat complete human being until the last uh moment which is startling to

00:18:30.820 think about okay so another stoic practice you talk about in the book is the stoic trichotomy of

00:18:37.380 control this is actually you modified an original stoic idea what was the original stoic idea and how did

00:18:43.780 you modify it um the original idea might be called the dichotomy of control so it's a dichotomy it's

00:18:51.140 either one or the other so when it comes to the issues in your life the stoic said there are those 0.52

00:18:57.300 that you can control and those that you can't control and you're foolish to spend your time

00:19:03.540 thinking and worrying about things you can't control because after all you have no control over them and

00:19:10.660 i kind of tampered with that a little bit i think i clarified it because if you think about it carefully

00:19:15.780 there's actually three different possibilities there's things you have absolute control over

00:19:22.500 and that might in in include your your beliefs it might include your desires although maybe that's

00:19:29.060 arguable there are things you have absolutely no control over such as whether the sun's going to rise

00:19:36.180 tomorrow you obviously shouldn't concern yourself with those things but and the stoics didn't make this 0.86

00:19:42.660 clear it seems like there's this middle class of things where you have some but not absolute

00:19:48.100 control for instance how people treat you and how they relate to you if you treat everybody terribly

00:19:54.820 they're going to be mean to you probably and if you're nice to everybody there's a good chance but

00:19:59.860 it's not a sure thing that they're going to be nice back to you so but again the stoic advice would be

00:20:06.660 you should really concern yourself with things you have complete control over one of them would be

00:20:11.860 your character you should work very hard to develop your character since you have complete control

00:20:17.460 over that you should care very much about it you should not allow yourself to think for even a

00:20:22.180 microsecond about things you have no control over because you don't have control over them and then

00:20:28.260 there's an intermediate amount of thought to those things that you're going to have some but not

00:20:34.900 complete control over you know and then there's all sorts of qualifications that come in although

00:20:40.820 you you may have zero control over whether an event happens or doesn't happen you might have

00:20:46.260 considerable control over how the event affects you so you can take preventative measures you can take

00:20:53.220 measures to make things not as bad as the other wise might be and the stoics were absolutely fine

00:20:59.380 with that but if you look at the people around you and maybe even think about yourself and you realize

00:21:06.900 there's a whole bunch of just time wasted thinking worrying dreading things that you don't have any

00:21:13.540 control over and you know life is precious and to spend it on that is a pity and then also not to spend

00:21:21.620 the time the investment of time on things you do have control over like your personality that's also

00:21:29.700 tragic because that can have a huge influence on your life and you do have complete control

00:21:35.780 and so if you're ignoring it shame on you so where do emotions play in this trichotomy because i think

00:21:41.780 there's a perception out there that stoics believe like you have complete control over your emotions did

00:21:47.460 they think that or was it something different now uh stoics realize that emotions are a real

00:21:55.140 issue for human beings and so when it came to emotions first thing they did is they

00:21:59.860 distinguished between negative emotions and positive emotions so negative emotions include anger they

00:22:07.140 include envy envy is a really terrible negative emotion underrated in the damage that it does positive

00:22:14.260 negative emotions are feelings of joy are feelings of delight and the stoics had nothing against the

00:22:20.740 positive emotions in fact they thought we should live our life in a way that would increase the number

00:22:26.020 of positive emotions we experienced but they also thought we should go out of our way to reduce the

00:22:32.180 number of negative emotions we experience they also realized that it was impossible for us ever to get

00:22:39.540 the number down to zero but we could reduce the number dramatically for for instance in their

00:22:45.540 discussion of of grief they said that if someone you know and love dies suddenly that that grief is is the

00:22:53.780 natural emotion and so you you will feel it and and in some sense you should feel it but you should you

00:23:01.620 should keep it within its proper confines and he describes people who you know the a decade after the death of a

00:23:09.460 spouse we're still mourning the death of a spouse well that's just that's just too much so they

00:23:15.540 acknowledge the existence of emotions they welcome some emotions and they thought we needed to to work

00:23:21.620 on techniques for limiting the damage that the negative emotions could do to us and they have

00:23:27.700 some ideas on how how we could do that yeah i guess one of them was i guess sineka was like you know

00:23:33.300 imagine your son's already dead was one of them you should not imagine that he's dead but you

00:23:39.060 should have a flickering thought that the realization and acknowledgement of the fact that he he will

00:23:45.460 die and first when people hear that actually that was epictetus who kind of most famously said that but

00:23:52.740 when people first hear that they think well what a terrible terrible thing to to think but the stoics 1.00

00:24:00.020 would say just the opposite i will just allow myself to have the flickering thought that this might be the

00:24:06.020 last time i see that friend it really is remarkable because then the next time i see them it's it's

00:24:12.340 this delightful event you know because it didn't have to be that way so it's curious you know they were

00:24:19.860 they were some of the preeminent psychologists of their time and they have these insights that to our

00:24:25.700 modern ears sound just crazy but if you you know like the idea that by thinking about people dying

00:24:32.020 we can actually improve our relationships with them but i encourage your listeners to to give it a try

00:24:38.500 again don't dwell on the deaths of other people that's that's a recipe for a miserable miserable

00:24:44.340 existence but this whole notion of a fleeting thought that you allow yourself to have about bad

00:24:51.300 things that can happen it's wonderfully easy to do and it's wonderfully effective at least that's that's

00:24:57.300 what i found in my own life so with this part of the trichotomy where there's things you have

00:25:03.540 control over but not complete control over what's the stoic approach to those things so that you you put

00:25:10.500 some effort into it but you don't vex yourself too much how should you go about those items yeah the

00:25:16.340 example i give of that in in uh my book i did the good life is i talk about tennis match so it's in that

00:25:23.460 middle ground there's some things you can control some things you can't control so how do you prepare

00:25:28.900 for a tennis match well you do the best you can to prepare for it and that might mean getting coaching

00:25:35.460 that might mean practice that might mean you know how much you sleep the night before that that'll mean

00:25:39.780 a whole variety of things so that's the part you can control so you exercise the control you can but

00:25:47.780 here's the thing suppose that despite that that you lose the match then a stoic approach would be

00:25:54.020 well so what i did the best i could and if that wasn't good enough that means the other person is

00:26:00.660 is simply a better player than i am and i'm i can live with that but that whole notion of in life

00:26:07.380 you know pick your challenges and then do the best you can on those challenges and then win lose or draw

00:26:13.460 you know that's it uh you you uh you aren't don't allow yourself to get upset over it because

00:26:20.180 that is the best you can do and to ask yourself or to blame yourself for not doing better than the

00:26:26.100 best you could do again that would be another recipe for a miserable life now there there are people who

00:26:32.500 do that and they do seem to have miserable lives and it's avoidable and isn't that tragic right that

00:26:39.220 sounds awful awful lot like uh warren buffett's inner scorecard he has this idea of he keeps an

00:26:44.820 inner scorecard doesn't really worry about the externals just as long as i'm doing what i know

00:26:48.820 to be doing everything's fine sure and i'm a competitive rower and so you know i'm out there

00:26:55.140 racing against other boats i don't win very often i do come in last place some of the time but

00:27:01.700 internally what am i actually doing i'm racing against myself i'm causing myself a degree of needless

00:27:08.900 discomfort how come to build character so what counts as success in a race with doing the best

00:27:15.540 i could well what if i'm last place well the question is did i do the best i could and did i

00:27:20.820 get the value out of the training that i hope to get out of the training you know it teaches you

00:27:25.780 other things one of them that teaches you is self-discipline it's a chance to practice a kind of

00:27:31.860 courage a very valuable thing it's a chance to practice the strategy of uh when things look

00:27:39.460 hopeless just keep trying and you know there are a lot of people that when things look not

00:27:45.460 not even hopeless but just they don't look like sure things they stop trying and that's a that's a bad

00:27:51.060 thing because there's so much of life where you know really just a bit more effort on your part

00:27:56.260 can make a huge difference in the outcome so let's talk about fate fate's a big part of the stoic

00:28:01.300 philosophy it's because fate is a part of nature and you have to just accept fate but being a fatalist

00:28:06.500 seems very passive and you're just like well you can't do anything about it because that's what

00:28:10.820 fate had in store for you so how did the stoics approach fate where they accepted it but still 0.95

00:28:16.180 try to be active in their life stoics again would do a kind of division here they would say

00:28:23.700 you should be fatalistic with regard to things that have happened in the past and you should be

00:28:30.340 fatalistic with regard to whatever is happening to you at this very instant because you can't change

00:28:36.900 those things so you can either accept them the way they are or or you can make yourself miserable

00:28:43.060 but they weren't fatalist about fatalistic about the future so you can have an impact on what happens

00:28:49.220 in the future so we're kind of back to the dichotomy of control so it makes yours it makes it sensible

00:28:55.380 for you to invest time energy intellectual processes into trying to shape the future but then when that

00:29:03.300 future arrives you can't change it it's there so what do you do you make the best of it and then you

00:29:09.940 you go on to whatever is going to happen the next day you look forward to tomorrow but there are people who

00:29:17.220 who it's a strange thing but they're perpetually hoping for a better future and they're perpetually

00:29:24.820 disturbed disgusted dismayed by whatever life they happen to be experiencing at at that very moment

00:29:33.060 downside is that means they get to spend their entire life dismayed disturbed disgusted so you know what

00:29:42.340 embrace the life you find yourself living while simultaneously trying to improve that life

00:29:50.580 in in various sorts of of measures i mean when you're stoic and you look around at at how people

00:29:57.380 are living and you know the same is probably true of other philosophies of life if you're a buddhist and

00:30:02.420 you look around at how people are living and you're struck by how needlessly miserable so many people

00:30:09.140 are it's the choices they've made and it's the kind of techniques they use for dealing with life

00:30:16.020 that seem like they should work but there's just massive amounts of evidence that they they simply

00:30:22.420 don't work and and that's that's too bad that's just too bad right you also mentioned throughout the

00:30:28.740 book different practices stoics did to toughen themselves not only psychologically but physically do you

00:30:37.220 have any favorites from the stoics of these sort of daily practices to toughen the mental hide well

00:30:42.420 i call it uh exercises in voluntary discomfort right where you're going out of your way to do

00:30:49.540 something that you know is going to be difficult and uncomfortable to do and so i give some examples one

00:30:55.220 is underdressing slightly for for winter weather you know what uh underdress too much and you can get 0.53

00:31:01.780 frostbite and that's no fun at all but to kind of go around thinking you know what uh i'm gonna allow

00:31:08.900 myself to get a little bit cooler than i normally would or in summer i'm not going to turn on the air

00:31:14.740 conditioning quite as much as i normally would what happens is you expand what what you might refer to as

00:31:20.980 your comfort zone so there will be people that you encounter who have obsessed over keeping the

00:31:26.900 temperature to within two degrees you know fahrenheit and their goal and it's one of these

00:31:31.780 paradoxes their goal is is personal comfort but because they've got it so narrow the range which

00:31:38.580 they they can operate they're inevitably going to experience discomfort because they'll move around

00:31:45.300 things will change they'll go places and it won't be their ideal temperature whereas if you're used to a

00:31:51.300 wide range of temperature you'll be comfortable in a huge range of of temperatures and it's it's really

00:31:57.780 interesting because you know in uh in rowing i'm rowing in short sleeves and in shorts you know well into the

00:32:05.700 fall early in the spring there are days that are exceptions and i'm out there when it's hot as well so as a result i i come

00:32:14.820 away with very wide range of comfortable temperatures i accomplished that you know similar thing about

00:32:22.180 food if you're a gourmet you're probably going to get less pleasure out of food than if you simply take

00:32:29.060 whatever food has been placed in front of you and you try to extract the maximal amount of delight from

00:32:35.780 that food you got it made if you can experience delight over a glass of water ordinary water too you

00:32:44.180 know not bottled stuff that you paid extra money for but if you can be happy drinking a glass of

00:32:50.020 water you're you're uh you're in a in great situation as far as being able to be pleased by

00:32:57.140 what life has to offer you so this is interesting too i uh you highlight in the book is you know most

00:33:04.180 most of our vexations i feel like in life are caused by other human beings family members just an

00:33:10.020 annoying co-worker but instead of i thought was interesting about the stoics instead of becoming

00:33:14.500 hermits and avoiding these people in order to maintain stoic serenity the stoics felt duty-bound

00:33:20.420 to be out there and interact with other people why did the stoics feel like they had a duty to interact

00:33:25.620 with these these people that causes most of our problems in life what was going on there okay the

00:33:32.820 stoics thought we have a social duty you know to to be with and to try to help and relate to our

00:33:38.740 fellow human beings but that didn't go as far as saying we had to go out of our way to find the

00:33:44.180 most miserable company that we could and for one thing it's going to be a very depressing time for

00:33:50.900 us for another there's a good chance that we won't be able to help those people you know there are

00:33:56.260 people whose idea of a relationship is simply to stand there and complain about everything and that

00:34:02.660 person's what that person needs is major change in kind of their approach to life so what what do you

00:34:10.580 do you you try to be helpful to other people and you know i i never go around preaching stoicism because

00:34:17.460 i found it's it's a great way to to lose people's attention but you know what you can throw these little

00:34:24.260 bits of stoic advice and you don't even necessarily attribute them to stoics and you can thereby make a

00:34:30.260 difference in people's lives so somebody's worried about something and you know just to throw out uh

00:34:36.180 you know a suggestion like well is there anything that you can do to change this we'll know okay then

00:34:43.300 don't worry and you know it's interesting how that can have a profound impact how somebody can

00:34:50.500 sort of realize you know what he's he's got a point there well one other thing about adults is they have

00:34:56.820 to be ready for for whatever advice comes along like you know another thing is you can lead

00:35:04.500 by example in in a way if people can sense that in your own life you're you're thriving then they

00:35:12.020 get curious and they wonder well what what's he doing that i'm not doing and if you're miserable

00:35:17.300 people learn from that too same kind of same kind of thing the opposite lesson what's he doing

00:35:23.220 that i should avoid doing yeah but it's it's a strangely paradoxical philosophy and goes against

00:35:31.700 what most people think is common sense but then again lots of people are pretty miserable right so

00:35:38.180 maybe we shouldn't maybe we shouldn't pay attention to what most people go by so there's a lot of talk

00:35:43.060 these days about like trigger warnings and microaggressions and insults and slights and political correctness

00:35:48.900 what would the stoics say about these ideas um stoics thought that we should become insult pacifists

00:35:56.580 that we should simply refuse to play the insult game that when insulted we should simply carry on

00:36:02.820 as if nothing had happened and they can take criticism i mean as a stoic i'm i'm always on the

00:36:11.380 lookout for people who can teach me something important about something i don't know so i'm perfectly open

00:36:17.380 to that and seek that out and so i i grant people what i i think of internally as mentor status so i i

00:36:26.900 don't go around telling people they've been granted this but there'll be somebody i realize knows a whole

00:36:31.780 lot about something and then the plan is uh what you do is you you listen very carefully you take mental

00:36:39.220 notes uh and if that person says something critical about what you're doing then you you take that

00:36:44.980 seriously that's what you're looking for you're looking for feedback so that isn't that isn't an

00:36:50.660 insult that's a useful suggestion now there are other people though who being usual people are used

00:36:58.660 to playing the insult game and so there'll be all these put downs and everything else and then

00:37:04.420 so stoics point of view is you shrug it off because look at the source look at the source do you get

00:37:09.620 angry when dogs bark at you hope not right and if you do uh that's silly because dogs you know don't

00:37:18.660 bark for good reasons i don't know i'm not a dog maybe they do but dogs bark because that's just kind

00:37:25.540 of their reflexive way of responding and that's how how humans are and then the other deeper stoic

00:37:31.620 insight with insults is that if you ignore insults it's deeply disturbing to the person who insulted you

00:37:38.180 because he's out to hit you he's out to hurt you and he realizes he hasn't accomplished his goal

00:37:46.180 so we've talked a lot about some of these stoic practices and i and i think it's fantastic but

00:37:49.940 you know stoicism has gotten a lot of criticism by in the world of philosophy i know bernard russell

00:37:57.540 20th century philosopher said that there's an element of sour grapes in stoicism because you know it's

00:38:03.860 like well i can't get that thing so i just don't care i'm indifferent to it how would you respond to

00:38:09.620 that that criticism towards stoicism a lot of philosophers professional philosophers who have

00:38:15.940 an interest in stoicism have an academic interest in in stoicism and so to play the academic game well

00:38:23.540 and i have played the game because it's what you want to do it's what you have to do if you want to have

00:38:28.260 a career in philosophy what you do is you uh you look at ancient texts that have been already looked

00:38:35.540 at thousands of times you write a paper about what the text says so some other academic somewhere else

00:38:41.220 can write another paper that challenges your paper and back and forth so there are academics who don't

00:38:49.700 understand what stoicism is for them it's just an intellectual game that they play as as part of

00:38:57.300 making their living and those same individuals would reject the idea of a philosophy of life so it's a

00:39:06.580 curious thing because that's precisely what the ancient stoics intended it to be they said it isn't

00:39:12.820 something you should just think about or write about it's a way of living and so i would suggest

00:39:18.820 that the person you just described doesn't really comprehend what stoicism is about they've picked

00:39:25.940 one aspect of stoicism and then focused their attention on that and said that's that's not an

00:39:32.100 appropriate thing another thing to keep in mind about the ancient stoics is there's a great divide

00:39:37.780 first came the greek stoics and then came the roman stoics and with the roman stoics there seems to have

00:39:43.700 been a real change in the focus of stoicism and that's where this whole notion of tranquility

00:39:51.380 comes in the greeks took took a different line that was all about virtue and so you can actually

00:39:58.260 say in the ancient world there are probably like two stoicisms not not a single document but again if you

00:40:05.620 look at the roman stoics they didn't have the reputation as being these these soured individuals 1.00

00:40:12.580 in fact they had a reputation for being friendly and in many cases they did have friends they did

00:40:21.140 take delight in life so it's a kind of a criticism that rings hollow if you actually look at the ancient

00:40:28.420 stoics well bill this has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about your book and the rest

00:40:33.940 of your work well they can take a look at the guide to the good life the ancient art of stoic joy which

00:40:39.220 was published about 10 years ago by oxford university press and has gone on to have an incredible life

00:40:48.820 in terms of uh you know sales longevity however else you wanna you wanna measure it and i'm absolutely

00:40:56.100 flabbergasted that it has because when i wrote it i wrote it with the assumption that probably nobody in

00:41:02.740 the world is ever going to read this book but i have a social duty to write it so that that that says

00:41:08.900 it as well as as i can say the sorts of things i've we've been talking about and also it's not a book

00:41:16.420 written for academics it's a book written for uh for ordinary people who feel that their lives aren't

00:41:22.100 going as well as could be the case and who who want to straighten their lives out in some sense and

00:41:29.700 also the advice it offers it isn't like buddhism where you might have to practice it for several

00:41:36.420 decades before it starts working for you you will know within a matter of days whether you're cut out to

00:41:44.020 be a stoic or not and since i wrote that book there's been a a number of other stoic books that

00:41:50.900 have come out and you know you can look on amazon to to um to find out some of the other titles i've

00:41:57.940 also written a book on insults that is highly stoic dependent and so people who had a particular

00:42:04.100 interest in that that book's also published by oxford university press so that's where you can find out

00:42:12.100 more i also had a for a while there i had a stoic a stoic blog going the title of of it was 21st

00:42:19.700 century stoic dot org and the postings are still out there i've i've gotten busy doing other things

00:42:26.740 so that's actually a way you can you can get on top of stoicism at least as seen by me without

00:42:32.740 having even to invest in a book fantastic well bill irvine thank you so much for your time it's been

00:42:37.460 an absolute pleasure oh thank you for having me as uh as a guest my guest today was bill irvine

00:42:43.300 he's the author of the book a guide to the good life the ancient art of stoic joy it's available

00:42:46.820 on amazon.com and really go out there and get it it's a great book a really easy read and a great

00:42:51.540 introduction to stoicism plus i just love how bill makes everything very actionable and helps you try

00:42:56.420 to implement this stuff in your life today also check out your show it's at awim.is

00:43:00.180 slash stoic where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic

00:43:15.300 well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice

00:43:19.380 make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy this

00:43:23.380 show i've got something out of it i'd appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher

00:43:26.980 that helps us out a lot as always thank you for your continued support until next time this is

00:43:30.820 brett mckay telling you to stay manly

The Art of Manliness - June 27, 2017

#316： An Introduction to Stoicism

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