Stoicism in 2020
“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know,” – Albert Einstein.
I’d expand on the above to say the more I find my voice, the more terrified I am to say anything that matters. The first ~7.5 months of 2020 have been the most tumultuous, rewarding and challenging months of my life, with some of the highest highs and lowest lows I’ve ever experienced. This personal and professional rollercoaster of emotions was driven by many of the same events most of us have encountered in 2020 as well as for a number of deeply personal reasons. Hopefully one day I’ll find the strength to write about these experiences, but for today I’ll instead focus on the Stoic philosophy which has helped me to deal with them all.
I first came across Stoic philosophy when reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in one of my political science classes at Indiana University. I reflected and retained about as much from that book as you’d expect of a first semester undergraduate at a ‘party school’ (i.e. none), but through a combination of good fortune (from thought leaders like Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday) and necessity, I was reintroduced to the philosophy this year. Stoic philosophy, founded around 3rd century BC in ancient Greece, advocates accepting the moment as it presents itself, by not allowing oneself to be controlled by the desire for pleasure or fear of pain, by using one's mind to understand the world, and by working together and treating others fairly and justly.
As we approach arguably the most important presidential election since World War II, witness increasing internal domestic conflict, external geopolitical/economic conflict with China, and are forced to issue unprecedented levels of debt to combat the effects of COVID-19, it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which the need for Stoicism decreases in the near term. In particular, if the USD loses its status as the world’s reserve currency, that $3tn of debt the US Treasury has issued since March and the $26tn of total aggregate debt on the balance sheet quickly becomes a serious problem.
Source: Ray Dalio, The Changing World Order (Bridgewater Daily Observations, 2020). https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-cycles-over-last-500-years-ray-dalio/.
To quote Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, “I’m an optimist who worries a lot”.
However, as Stoic philosophy teaches, it’s of no use worrying over things that have yet to pass and ultimately may never pass. Instead, as Seneca teaches, “I look for the best and am prepared for the opposite.”
To start my path on this journey, I recently read Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. In addition to rereading Meditations, I also plan to read Epictetus’ Enchiridion and Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life. I’ve also found the Instagram handles @dailystoic, @benlionelscott and @principles to be helpful daily reminders of the importance of mental fortitude.
The below quotes were some of the most impactful ones I pulled from Robin Campbell’s translation of Letter’s from a Stoic, and I hope they’ll prove beneficial to you as well (bolded emphasis are mine):
1. Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man’s ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
2. To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
3. Trusting everyone is as much a fault as trusting no one.
4. The active man should be able to take things easily, while the man who is inclined towards repose should be capable of action.
5. Refrain from following the example of those whose craving is for attention, not their own improvement.
6. We must watch that the means by which we hope to gain admiration do not earn ridicule and hostility.
7. People should admire our way of life but they should at the same time find it understandable.
8. Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come.
9. There is no enjoying the possession of anything valuable unless one has someone to share it with.
10. ‘What progress have I made? I am beginning to be my own friend’. That is progress indeed. Such a person will never be alone, and you may be sure he is a friend of all.
11. You must inevitably either hate or imitate the world. But the right thing to do is to shun both courses: you should neither become like the bad because they are many, nor be an enemy of the many because they are unlike you. Retire into yourself as much as you can. Associate with people who are likely to improve you. Welcome those whom you are capable of improving. The process is a mutual one: men learn as they teach.
12. Lay these up in your heart… that you may scorn the pleasure that comes from the majority’s approval.
13. Our wise man feels his troubles but overcomes them… Nevertheless, self-sufficient though he is, he still desires a friend, a neighbor, a companion… He is so in the sense that he is able to do without friends, not that he desires to do without them.
14. If you wish to be loved, love.
15. This explains the crowd of friends that clusters about successful men and the lonely atmosphere about the ruined… a person who starts being friends with you because it pays him will similarly cease to be friends because it pays him to do so.
16. There can be no doubt that the desire lovers have for each other is not so very different from friendship – you might say it was friendship gone mad.
17. Any man who does not think that what he has is more than ample is an unhappy man, even if he is the master of the whole world… What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life if you dislike it yourself?
18. Only the wise man is content with what is his.
19. Happy the man who improves other people not merely when he is in their presence but even when he is in their thoughts!
20. Firstly, that death ought to be right there before the eyes of a young man just as much as an old one - the order in which we receive our summons is not determined by our precedence in the register – and secondly, that no one is so very old that it could be quite unnatural for him to hope for one more day.
21. Without wisdom, the mind is sick, and the body itself, however physically powerful, can only have the kind of strength that is found in persons in a demented or delirious state.
22. Cultivate an asset which the passing of time itself improves.
23. The life of folly is empty of gratitude, full of anxiety: it is focused wholly on the future.
24. How pleasant it is to ask for nothing, how splendid it is to be complete and be independent of fortune.
25. Why be concerned about others, come to that, when you’ve outdone your own self?
26. No one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom.
27. If you shape your life according to nature, you will never be poor; if according to people’s opinions, you will never be rich.
28. Remaining dry and sober requires a good deal more strength of will when everyone about one is puking drunk.
29. We shall be easier in our minds when rich if we have come to realize how far from burdensome it is to be poor.
30. The outcome of violent anger is a mental raving, and therefore anger is to be avoided not for the sake of moderation but for the sake of sanity.
31. Just where death is expecting you is something we cannot know: so, for your part, expect him everywhere.
32. There is but one chain holding us in fetters, and that is our love of life.
33. Of this one thing make sure against your dying day – that your faults die before you do.
34. A sound mind can neither be bought nor borrowed.
35. Something that can never be learnt too thoroughly can never be said too often.
36. Instead of travelling you are rambling and drifting, exchanging one place for another when the thing you are looking for, the good life, is available everywhere.
37. For a person who is not aware that he is doing anything wrong has no desire to be put right… can you imagine someone who counts his faults as merits ever giving thought to their cure?
38. Demonstrate your own guilt, conduct inquiries of your own into all the evidence against yourself. Play the part first of prosecutor, then of judge and finally of pleader in mitigation. Be harsh with yourself at times.
39. The poor man ‘tis that counts his flock.
40. But no new findings will ever be made if we rest content with the findings of the past.
41. I shall use the old road, but if I find a shorter and easier one I shall open it up. The men who pioneered the old routes are leaders, not our masters. Truth lies open to everyone.
42. No matter how tiny a seed may be, when it lands in the right sort of ground it unfolds its strength and from being minute expands and grows to a massive size.
43. You will be doing the right thing, therefore, if you do not go to listen to people who are more concerned about the quantity than the quality of what they say.
44. You are doing the finest possible thing and acting in your best interests if… you are persevering in your efforts to acquire a sound understanding.
45. No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own… Praise in him what can be neither given nor snatched away. You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of reason in that spirit…Man’s ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born… that he live in accordance with his own nature.
46. Treat your inferiors in the way in which you would like to be treated by your superiors.
47. Show me a man who isn’t a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear… And there’s no state of slavery more disgraceful than one which is self-imposed.
48. To be really respected is to be loved; and fear and love will not mix.
49. Friendship creates a community of interest between us in everything.
50. No one can lead a happy life if he thinks only of himself and turns everything to his own purpose.
51. Straightforwardness and simplicity are in keeping with goodness.
52. [Like a lamp] we, too, are lit and put out. We suffer somewhat in the intervening period, but at either end of it there is a deep tranquility… [Death] in fact precedes as well as succeeds.
53. [The philosopher] alone knows how to live for himself: he is the one, in fact, who knows the fundamental thing, how to live. The person who has run away from the world and his fellow-man, whose exile is due to the unsuccessful outcome of his own desires, who is unable to endure the sight of others more fortunate, who has taken to some place of hiding in his alarm like a timid, inert animal, he is not ‘living for himself’, but for his belly and his sleep and his passions – in utter degradation, in other words. The fact that a person is living for nobody does not automatically mean he is living for himself.
54. The place one’s in, though, doesn’t make any contribution to peace of mind. It’s the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself.
55. One good reason why we should endure the absence [of friends] patiently is the fact that every one of us is absent to a great extent from his friends even when they are around… Possession of a friend should be with the spirit: the spirit’s never absent: it sees daily whoever it likes.
56. I force my mind to become self-absorbed and not let other things distract it.
57. Night does not remove our worries; it brings them to the surface. All it gives us is a change of anxieties… Rest is sometimes far from restful.
58. The only true serenity is one the one which represents the free development of a sound mind.
59. People who are really busy never have enough time to become skittish. And there is nothing so certain as the fact that the harmful consequences of inactivity are dissipated by activity.
60. When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation…In our tears we are trying to find means of proving that we feel the loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it.
61. You are not proposing to keep him very long in your memory if his memory is to last just as long as your grief. At any moment something or other will happen that will turn that long face of yours into a smiling one… Your face will cease to be its present picture of sadness as soon as you take your eyes off yourself.
62. [Fortune] has given as well as taken away. Let us therefore go all out to make the most of friends, since no one can tell how long we shall have the opportunity.
63. Can you stand people who treat their friends with complete neglect then mourn them to distraction, never caring about anyone unless they have lost him?
64. A person, moreover, who has not been able to care about more than one friend cannot have cared even about that one too much.
65. You have buried someone you loved. Now look for someone to love. It is better to make good the loss of a friend than to cry over him.
66. I should prefer to see you abandoning grief than it abandoning you… Nothing makes itself unpopular quite so quickly as a person’s grief.
67. Whatever can happen at any time can happen today.
68. There are two elements in the universe from which all things are derived, namely cause and matter. Matter lies inert and inactive, a substance with unlimited potential, but destined to remain idle if no one sets it in motion; and it is cause (this meaning the same as reason) which turns matter to whatever end it wishes and fashions it into a variety of different products.
69. All art is an imitation of nature.
70. Let the worse, then, serve the better. Let us meet with bravery whatever may befall us.
71. What is death? Either a transition or an end… You didn’t exist and you won’t exist – you’ve no concern with either period.
72. You want to live, but do you know how to live?
73. As it is with a play, so it is with life – what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will – only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.
74. There are times when even to live is an act of bravery.
75. Refuse to let the fear of death bother you: nothing is grim when we have escaped that fear.
76. Illness has actually given many people a new lease on life; the experience of being near to death has been their preservation.
77. Everything hangs on one’s thinking… A man is as unhappy as he has convinced himself he is.
78. What’s the good of dragging up sufferings which are over, of being unhappy now just because you were then?
79. War and the battle-front are not the only spheres in which proof is to be had of a spirited and fearless character.
80. In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes.
81. What really ruins our characters is the fact that none of us looks back over his life. We think about what we are going to do, and only rarely of that, and fail to think about what we have done, yet any plans for the future are dependent on the past.
82. Drunkenness is nothing but a state of self-induced insanity… Drunkenness inflames and lays bare every vice, removing the reserve that acts as a check on impulses to wrong behavior.
83. Why ‘liberal studies’ are soc called is obvious: it is because they are the ones considered worthy of a free man. But there is only one liberal study that deserves the name – because it makes a person free – and that is the pursuit of wisdom.
84. The geometrician teaches me how I may avoid losing any fraction of my estates, but what I really want to learn is how to lose the lot and still keep smiling.
85. Just as I know that anything is capable of happening so also do I know that it’s not bound to happen. So I look for the best and am prepared for the opposite.
86. What’s the use, after all, of mastering a horse and controlling him with the reins at full gallop if you’re carried away yourself by totally unbridled emotions? What’s the use of overcoming opponent after opponent in the wrestling or boxing rings if you can be overcome by your temper?
87. Bravery is the one which treats with contempt things ordinarily inspiring fear, despising and defying and demolishing all the things that terrify us and set chains on human freedom.
88. Superfluous knowledge would be preferable to no knowledge. One side offers no guiding light to direct my vision towards the truth, while the other just gouges my eyes out.
89. There is nothing dangerous in a man’s having as much power as he likes if he takes the view that he has power to do only what is his duty to do.
90. To govern was to serve, not to rule.
91. Avarice brought in poverty, by coveting a lot of possessions losing all that it had.
92. Nature does not give a man virtue: the process of becoming a good man is an art.
93. There is a world of difference between, on the one hand, choosing not do what is wrong and, on the other hand, not knowing how to do it in the first place.
94. Virtue only comes to a character which has been thoroughly schooled and trained and brought to a pitch of perfection by unremitting practice. We are born for it, but not with it. And even in the best of people, until you cultivate it there is only the material for virtue, not virtue itself.
95. We should project our thoughts ahead of us at every turn and have in mind every possible eventuality instead of only the usual course of events.
96. Misfortune has a way of choosing some unprecedented means or other of impressing its power on those who might be said to have forgotten it.
97. The growth of things is a tardy process and their undoing is a rapid manner.
98. Let us face up to the blows of circumstance and be aware that whatever happens is never as serious as rumor makes it out to be.
99. All the works of mortal man lie under sentence of mortality; we live among things that are destined to perish.
100. A setback has often cleared the way for greater prosperity. Many things have fallen only to rise to more exalted heights.
101. In the ashes all men are levelled. We’re born unequal, we die equal.
102. The man who does not value his wife or a friend highly enough to stay on a little longer in life, who persists in dying in spite of them, is a thoroughly self-indulgent character… To return to life for another’s sake is a sign of a noble spirit; it is something that great men have done on a number of occasions.
103. Death you’ll think of as the worst of all bad things, though in fact there’s nothing bad about it at all except the thing which comes before it – the fear of it.
104. If your mind has once experienced the shocks of fright you’ll no longer have any confidence even in things which are perfectly safe; once it has acquired the habit of unthinking panic, it is incapable even of attending to its own self-preservation. For it runs away from dangers instead of taking steps to avert them, and we’re far more exposed to them once our backs are turned.
105. So long, in fact, as you remain in ignorance of what to aim at and what to avoid, what is essential and what is superfluous, what is upright or honorable conduct and what is not, it will not be travelling but drifting. All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re travelling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.
106. Scour every trace of evil from your personality. If you want to enjoy travel, you must make your travelling companion a healthy one. So long as you associate with a person who’s mean and grasping you will remain a money-minded individual yourself. So long as you keep arrogant company, just so long will conceit stick to you… If you wish to be stripped of your vices you must get right away from the examples others set of them. The miser, the swindler, the bully, the cheat, who would do you a lot of harm by simply being near you, are actually inside you.
107. Freedom cannot be won without sacrifice.
108. Things will get thrown at you and things will hit you. Life’s no soft affair.
109. Everyone faces up more bravely to a thing for which he has long prepared himself, sufferings, even, being withstood if they have been trained for in advance. Those who are unprepared, on the other hand, are panic-stricken by the most insignificant happenings. We must see to it that nothing takes us by surprise.
110. What we can do is adopt a noble spirit, such a spirit as befits a good man, so that we may bear up bravely under all that fortune sends us and bring our wills into tune with nature’s; reversals, after all, are the means by which nature regulates the visible realm of hers: clear skies follow cloudy; after the calm comes the storm; winds take turns to blow; day succeeds night; while part of the heavens is in the ascendant, another is sinking. It is by means of opposites that eternity endures.
111. The power of philosophy is such that she helps not only those who devote themselves to her but also those who come into contact with her.
112. What we hear the philosophers saying and what we find in their writings should be applied in our pursuit of the happy life. We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application – not far-fetched or archaic expressions or extravagant metaphors and figures of speech – and learn them so well that words become works.
113. People’s speech matches their lives. And just as the way in which each individual expresses himself resembles the way he acts, so in the case of a nation of declining morals and given over to luxury forms of expression at any given time mirror the general behavior of that society.
114. If the spirit is sound and healthy our style will be firm and forceful and virile, but if the spirit tumbles all the rest of our personality comes down in ruins with it.
115. Devotion to what is right is simple, devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations. It is the same with people’s characters; in those who follow nature they are straightforward and uncomplicated, and differ only in minor degree, while those that are warped are hopelessly at odds with the rest and equally at odds with themselves.
116. For those who follow nature everything is easy and straightforward, whereas for those who fight against her life is just like rowing against the stream.
117. It is no man’s power to have whatever he wants; but he has it in his power not to wish for what he hasn’t got, and cheerfully make the most of the things that do come his way.
118. Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we need them but because we had them… One of the causes of the troubles that beset us is the way our lives are guided by the example of others; instead of being set to rights by reason we’re seduced by convention.
119. How much better to pursue a straight course and eventually reach that destination where the things are pleasant and the things that are honorable finally become, for you, the same.