Why Stoicism fails when treated like self-help

The Stoics are nothing if not realists about life

They accept the world the way it actually is, not the way you would want it to be

The problem is, of course, that life sometimes is complicated. There are multiple choices

We have a tendency to want to simplify things and go for something that is stark, that it's clear, that it's obvious

That's just not the way the world works. And according to the Stoics

it's much better to try to understand how the world works and then act accordingly, rather than trying to impose on the world the way we want to think

or the way we prefer things to be. I am Massimo Piollucci. I am an evolutionary biologist and a philosopher of science

And my latest book is called Beyond Stoicism, co-authored with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz

What is Stoicism? Stoicism is a philosophy of life that suggests that the best way to live a human life is to ask yourself what kind of a living organism human beings are

And the answer that the Stoics give to that question is that fundamentally we are highly social and capable of reason

We're very intelligent. It follows, according to them, that a good human life is one where you use reason in order to solve problems

and you behave in a cooperative, pro-social fashion. One of the crucial insights of the Stoics is that we should focus on what is up to us

as the ancient Stoic Epictetus put it, and try to accept with equanimity what is not up to us

In other words, focus where your agency is active, where you are efficacious in doing things

and then accept whatever comes as it comes because you really don't have a choice

The Stoics are nothing if not realists about life. They try to understand how human life works, and they try to live the best life possible

One of the things that we do understand from biology, psychology, is that we have limited

time and energy to do things, both physical energy and emotional energy

And so if we insist on pursuing approaches that are likely not to work or they're not efficacious, they're not, you know, our agency doesn't really have any effect on it, then we are only making our life miserable

And in fact, we're trading off with other things that we should be doing

One of the interesting aspects of the particular brain dystoicism, so to speak, that Epictetus articulated in the second century is this notion of role ethics

We all play different roles in life, many roles, in fact. And if we reflect on it for a minute, for instance, some of my roles include being somebody's son, being somebody's father, being somebody's husband, being a friend, being a teacher, being a colleague, being a citizen of a particular nation and of a particular city, and so on and so forth

All of these roles need to be handled essentially simultaneously. It's not like I can decide one day I'm going to be just a colleague and nothing else

I am a colleague, perhaps, in this particular moment when I'm at work and I'm interacting with other people

But I'm at the same time also a husband, a father, a friend, et cetera, et cetera

And the idea here is that I need to conserve my both physical and emotional mental energy so that I can do my best in all of these roles whenever it is that I need to do something about it

If I'm going to waste a lot of energy and time on a particular thing, especially something for which my efforts are, in fact, not efficacious, then I'm really trading off with everything else

I am getting depressed, let's say, by just constantly reading the news about things that

are not actionable, about things that I cannot do anything about. Well, the result of that is then

I'm not useful to my family. I'm not useful to my friends. I'm not, in fact, useful to society

in general and even to myself. So it's about conserving energy, setting priorities. This goes

back to the first discipline of Epictetus, the discipline of desire, setting goals. Depending on

our values, we set goals and we set priorities. And doing so is crucial because otherwise we end

up wasting a lot of time and then regretting it. And usually when you get to the point of regret

especially near the end of your life, it's a little too late. Seneca points out in one of his

letters to his friend Lucilius that too many people start reflecting on what they want to do

and why near the end of their lives when it's too late, when they've already done most of

what they were going to do. Stoicism is one of the Greco-Roman philosophies that evolved during the Hellenistic period

And the goal is to live a eudaimonic life. Eudaimonia is a word that in Greek means, roughly speaking, a life worth living

The kind of life that you get to the end of it and you say, yeah, that was not wasted time

Now, different Hellenistic schools, like the Epicureans, for instance, or the Skeptics, had different answers to what constitutes a eudaimonic life

According to the Stoics, living a eudaimonic life means living intelligently, smartly, and socially

Because one of the fundamental aspects of Stoicism is that we should live a pro life that is a life where we interact with other people because we are naturally a social organism then the Stoics put a lot of emphasis on relationships with people on our roles in society What is it that is a good thing

or nothing to do with respect to other people? In fact, they went so far as declaring themselves

cosmopolitan. Being a cosmopolitan means being a member of the human cosmopolies, the human

city, the universal human city. According to the Stoics, every human being on earth is our brother

and sister, and we should treat them accordingly. The ancient Stoic Epictetus, who lived at the

beginning of the second century, laid out three fundamental disciplines for the study and practice

of Stoicism. They're referred to normally as the discipline of desire, the discipline of action

and the discipline of assent, although I should warn you that the English terms are a little bit

misleading compared to the original Greek. Desire, for instance, doesn't mean whatever I fancy at the

moment. It means my values and also my disvalues, that is, the kinds of things that I think are

important and good in life and the kinds of things that are not important or bad in life

The discipline of desire teaches us to reevaluate critically our values, to reorient ourselves according to good values, to make deliberate decisions about what those values are and why

The second discipline, the discipline of action, has to do, as the name implies, with acting

toward other people. We live in a society. We don't just subscribe to certain values

We enact those values every time that we do something or say something, especially to

other people. So the discipline of action is about putting into practice our values when we interact

in society at large with other human beings. Finally, the discipline of assent

Ascent means, of course, agreement. But for Epictetus, that means thinking carefully and rationally about the other two disciplines, about values and how to implement them

So the discipline of ascent, in a sense, is about making all of this flow so nicely and so smoothly that we have, in fact, according to the Stoics, a smooth or a smoothly flowing life

The three disciplines are a way to implement Stoicism in practice. But Stoicism, of course, is a philosophy, so there is also a theory behind it

And in order to understand Stoic theory, we need to refer to the three areas of study

that were typical in any Stoic curriculum. If you went to a Stoic school, let's say the school that was run by Epictetus in northwestern

Greece in the second century, you would actually study, before you get to the disciplines and

how to live your life, you would study the three general areas that are pertinent to

those disciplines. Now, there too, the English names are a little bit misleading

They are physics, ethics, and logic. But what they mean exactly is something a little bit different from modern English

and so we need to be careful here. Physics, for instance, comes from physis, which means nature

So when I say physics, don't think quantum mechanics or general relativity or things like that

Think science in general. So a good understanding of how the world works

That's connected to the discipline of desire, that is, to the discipline that deals with our goals and priorities in life

Why? Because our goals and priorities in life depend on what kind of living organism we are

If we were a different kind, a Martian or a dog or a lion, we would have different priorities

So it's about understanding the world as it works. And the best way to understand the world as it is, is through science

So you study science in order to investigate into your own goals and priorities

These days, ethics means mostly the study of right and wrong actions

But for the Stoics or for the ancient Greco-Romanians in general, ethics had, again, a much broader meaning

It meant literally the study of how to live your life. So it's not just about whether a particular action is right or wrong

It's also about your motivations for carrying out a particular action. Are they good motivations or not good motivations

It's about your priorities in life, your goals, the way you relate to other people, and so on and so forth

The second discipline of action is connected with ethics. Action is about dealing with other people

Ethics is about how to live a life. Since we're a social animal, the two are very closely related

We live a social life. We don't live on deserted islands. We don't do very well when we are on our own

We can survive, perhaps, on our own under certain circumstances, but we only thrive in a society

When I say logic, most people start thinking about logical puzzles and paradoxes and things like that

And that's fine. That is part of it. But logic, according to the Stoics, is in general the study of good thinking

So it includes also what we would today call cognitive science, the understanding of cognitive biases, and the understanding of why people's thinking can go wrong one way or the other

So it's much broader than the technical field of logic. Ascent. Ascent is about refining our understanding and practice of the first two disciplines

In other words, it's about using good judgment, and therefore it's about logic

It about understanding how human reasoning works and also how it can go wrong so that we avoid as much as possible mistakes and we trying to think as much as we can in a rational reasonable way

and then implement that kind of approach into daily life. One of the obvious questions that

come up with stoicism is, does it work? Which, if you think about it, on the one hand, it's a little

bit of a weird question because we're talking about a philosophy. We're not talking about

you know, a scientific approach to life as we understand it today. Very few people, for instance

would ask the question, well, does Christianity work or does Buddhism work? However, they might

ask, do prayers work or does meditation work? In other words, the techniques associated with

certain religions or philosophies. In those cases, it does make sense to ask yourself, well, does it

work? Is it something that quite independently of the theoretical part of the philosophy

does it actually have empirical evidence? So the same question can be asked reasonably

about stoicism. We have a series of lines of evidence that stoic techniques, the stoic

approach to a good life does in fact work. The first one is that stoicism originated what is

now known as cognitive behavioral therapy back in the 1960s. In New York, authors like Aaron

Beck and Albert Ellis started to practice this type of psychotherapy, which today is one of the

best evidence-based type of psychotherapies. And they started from stoicism. They both read

Marcus Aurelius and Pictetus and other Stoics, and they thought, oh, these people were onto

something here. There is something that can work, that is very practical, that can actually help

people. Of course, CBT, as is known today, went then through a series of changes and evolution

over the last several decades. CBT is empirically based. There is lots of studies

empirical studies that show that it does work. So it's not the same as asking

whether stoicism worked, but it's pretty close to asking whether stoic techniques work

because a lot of the techniques that the ancient stoics designed and developed on the basis of their intuition

about human psychology and human nature turns out are actually efficacious. So that's one line of evidence

that stoicism in a sense works. There is also an increasing number of papers out there on cognitive science in general, not just cognitive behavioral therapy, but cognitive science in general, how the brain works, how human decision making is carried out, and so on and so forth

And my understanding is that much of that research is, if not in direct support of Stoic techniques, it certainly is compatible, highly compatible with it

For instance, modern psychologists and cognitive scientists have developed a theory of the relationship between reason and emotions that is very similar to the way in which the Stoics were thinking about the connection between reason and emotion

And then finally, there now begins to be direct studies about the efficacy of stoic techniques

Stoicism is popular enough that psychologists have begun to look into systematically into

whether specifically stoic techniques work or don't. For instance, one of my colleagues, Tim Lebon, who is a psychotherapist, has just published

recently one of the first papers that shows at least preliminary evidence that, yes, indeed

stoic techniques seem to have the kind of effects on behavior and on the way people think that the

stoics thought they should have. Stoicism is a philosophy of life, and that, if you think about

it, it's an interesting concept. What is a philosophy of life in the first place? Do we need a philosophy

of life? I encounter people that tell me that they don't need a philosophy of life, they just live

their life. And I point out that that is a philosophy of life. There is no way to live a life without

of philosophy. That philosophy might not be conscious. It may not be the result of deliberations

that you did with yourself, you know, paying attention to what you're doing and why. But

if I observe your behavior, if I see what your choices are, your priorities, your values

and so on and so forth, I can put them all together and say, okay, this person's philosophy of life

is this. It's the result of, or it's whatever underpins their choices, their values, their

priorities and their behavior. So we all have a philosophy of life. If that's true, well, we might

as well then be conscious of it and be aware of it and possibly even occasionally at least ask

ourselves, well, is this a good philosophy of life or not? Do I need to change something

So one might be tempted then to go to the opposite extreme and say, oh, if I need a philosophy of

life, I'm going to pick one off the shelf. Here's stoicism. I heard that it's a good thing. Let me

big stories, and from now on, I'm a stoic, and that's it, end of the story. But that is also

dangerous in a sense, because now you're blindly following what somebody said 2,000 years ago or

2,300 years ago without necessarily thinking things through, without asking yourself, well

is this thing actually make sense? Does it fit the way I want to live my life? And if not, why not

So there is, on the one hand, a danger of not being aware of one's own philosophy of life

There's also the opposite danger of sort of taking something off the shelf without questioning

without exercising one's own critical judgment about whether that thing actually makes sense

is useful, works, etc. Well, then there is a third option. Some people say oh I going to build my own philosophy of life out of bits and pieces from different sources So I heard that stoicism is useful I going to take something from stoicism I heard that epicureanism is useful I going to take something from that Some of my friends are Buddhists Perhaps I could borrow something

from Buddhists. That is certainly something that can be done. It's usually referred to as eclecticism

but it's also got its own problems because you might end up with a mishmash of things that

make any sense when they're brought together. There is a reason why these philosophies are

internally coherent and people have worked on them for thousands of years in order to make

them internally coherent. For instance, although the Stoics themselves acknowledged that there is

something useful in Epicureanism and they actually incorporated aspects of Epicureanism into their philosophy, at the end of the day, one cannot be simultaneously a Stoic and an Epicurean

Why not? Because the most important value for a Stoic is one's own virtue, meaning one's own

character. Pleasure is secondary. The most important value for an Epicurean is pleasure

One's character, one's virtues are actually only instrumental to a life of pleasure. So at the end

of the day, there may be situations where you have to choose. Is it going to be pleasure or is it going

to be character? And if you choose one way, you're an Epicurean. If you choose another way, you're a

Stoic, whether you're aware of it or not. In my own case, I think of myself as mostly a Stoic

meaning that there are a number of things in Stoic philosophy as a whole that I think are very

valuable. They're very well thought out, and I have adopted them as at least a provisional

way of navigating my own life. But I am also very much attracted by another ancient Greco-Roman

philosophy, skepticism, which has to do with the notion that we're fallible. We don't know the

truth with a capital T. At best, we can make reasonable guesses, probabilistic guesses about

what works or what doesn't work, what is true and what is not true. And we should therefore always

be aware that no matter what we do, we may be mistaken, no matter what we think, we might be

mistaken. So I temper my stoicism with a little bit of skepticism. And in fact, I temper my stoic

skepticism with a little bit of something that it's called philosophical pessimism. This is the

notion that there are probably no grand narratives in the world. There is no universal plan. There is

no end to history. There is no inevitable trajectory that we go either in our lives or

as a society as a whole. It's all about things happening here and now, and there is no rhyme or

reason to them. So I put all these things together into what to me feels like a reasonably coherent

philosophy. It's not my invention. And yet at the same time, it's not exactly anything that you find

specifically in any particular other author. One thing that I would suggest, for instance

is certainly read the original texts. But even that is not that simple

because there are countless translations. And sometimes if you read the same book

in different translations, it almost feels like a different book. There are versions of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

that really feel like a different book from some other translations. So one needs to be careful

The more recent translations, the more modern translations are better. Some of my favorite, for instance, are by a classicist named Robin Waterfield, who has

translated both Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. The University of Chicago Press has made a huge edition of all of the writings of Seneca

Invest a little bit of money. After all, if we're talking about something that you want to pursue as a philosophy of

life, it's worth investing a few bucks to actually get it right or as right as possible

One of the advantages of these modern editions is that they have a lot of notes, and the notes will help you, will guide you through understanding what exactly these people are saying because they're putting those notions in their philosophical as well as historical context

But the other thing is I hear often people say, oh, I'm just going to read the Stoic text, forget all of these modern authors, including yours truly, who are writing about Stoicism

I think that's a mistake. I mean, that may come across as a self-serving mistake, since, as I said, I'm one of those authors

But nevertheless, I think it is a mistake. I myself took advantage of the writings of modern authors because, again, stoicism is ancient

It's 2,300, almost 2,400 years old. It needs interpretation. It needs updates

And that interpretation, those updates need to be done carefully by people who actually

know what they're talking about. So, for instance, I would pick up a book by my friends and colleagues, Donald Robertson

Robertson is a cognitive behavioral therapist. That's his approach to stoicism. Bill Irvine is a classicist, and so is John Sellers

Those are some of the best modern stoic authors that you can trust

These are people who actually know what they're talking about. And all of these authors have written very, very accessible books that can be used to dig deeper into Stoicism as a modern philosophy of life