Stop Turning Challenges Into Catastrophes

We live in a culture where people sit on the sidelines and pass a lot of strong judgements. We look at people we don’t know and decide whether they’re good or bad people. We look at complicated situations and difficult projects and cleanly label them successes or failures—despite having little understanding of what went on behind the scenes. We take an instance of behavior or a tiny interaction—the way someone talked to us at the grocery store or a decision that they made—and extrapolate out who that person is and what motivates them.As we’ve talked about before, the result of these snap judgements is not just misery for us, but an overwhelmingly negative view of humanity and of the world. It’s no way to live. Which is why when you feel that urge to decide—as an outsider or an observer—that you know who someone is or what it means, you should stop yourself. Stop yourself and consider this prompt from Epictetus:“Until you know their reasons, how do you know whether they have acted wrongly?”What Epictetus is not saying is that you should sit there and try to think about why Hitler and Stalin murdered so many people. He’s not saying that right and wrong are relative and that truly awful things can be excused. He’s saying, in the vein of Socrates, that we need to take a minute and really think about what we don’t know in a situation. We need to consider that, with the exception of mental illness, (which is its own kind of reason), most people have a logic for their actions—and that logic is usually not to try to hurt you or anyone else. They are just doing the best they can.David Foster Wallace speaks about this in his famous “This is Water” speech, after several allusions to his frustration with bad drivers:It's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am—it is actually I who am in his way. And so on.You don’t know that someone acted wrongly or is an asshole or that they totally screwed a situation up, because you don’t know the full story. You don’t know their reasons or their side of things. And what do the Stoics tell us to do when we don’t have all the facts about something?They tell us to suspend judgement.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

25 Huhti 20193min

Look, nobody wants to go through hard times. We’d prefer that things go according to plan, that what could go wrong doesn’t, so that we might enjoy our lives without being challenged or tested beyond our limits. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to happen. Which leaves us then with the question of what good there is in such difficulty and how we might—either in the moment or after the fact—come to understand what it is that we’re going through...today, tomorrow, and always. This passage from Sonia Purnell’s wonderful biography of Clementine Churchill, wife of Winston Churchill, is worth thinking about this morning:“Clementine was not cut out from birth for the part history handed her. Adversity, combined with sheer willpower, burnished a timorous, self-doubting bundle of nerves and emotion into a wartime consort of unparalleled composure, wisdom, and courage. The flames of many hardships in early life forged the inner core of steel she needed for her biggest test of all. By the Second World War the young child terrified of her father...had transmogrified into a woman cowed by no one.” The Stoics believed that adversity was inevitable. They knew that Fortune was capricious and that it often subjected us to things we were not remotely prepared to handle. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. Because it teaches us. It strengthens us. It gives us a chance to prove ourselves. “Disaster,” Seneca wrote, “is Virtue’s opportunity.”As he writes in On Providence:“Familiarity with exposure to danger will give contempt for danger. So the bodies of sailors are hardy from buffeting the sea, the hands of farmers are callous, the soldier’s muscles have the strength to hurl weapons, and the legs of a runner are nimble. In each, his staunchest member is the one that he has exercised. By enduring ills the mind attains contempt for the endurance of them; you will know what this can accomplish in our own case, if you will observe how much the peoples that are destitute and, by reason of their want, more sturdy, secure by toil.”Basically, he was describing the same phenomenon that transformed Clementine Churchill from a timid young girl into the brave woman who inspired millions of Britons and Europeans through one of the darkest ordeals in the history of the modern world. The difficulty she went through early in life forged for her a backbone upon which she and countless others came to depend.And so the same can be true for you and whatever it is that you’re going through right now. Yes, it would probably be preferable if everything went your way and if you could count on smooth sailing for the rest of your life. But you can’t. You’re stuck with this present moment instead. So use it. Be hardened and improved by it. Be transformed by it. The world needs more Clementines. And you can be one of them. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

24 Huhti 20193min

Yesterday was the 49th year we celebrated Earth Day...in the 4.5 billionth year of the Earth’s existence. In 1970, at the height of counterculture in the United States, the protest movement, and rising dissatisfaction with the environmental abuses of the modern world, U.S. senator and governor of Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson conceived the idea of Earth Day. In a speech during that inaugural day in 1970, Nelson said:Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.Some people talk about protecting the environment as if it only involves clean air and clean water. The environment, Nelson urged, “involves the whole broad spectrum of man's relationship to all other living creatures, including other human beings.”Basically: We live on earth. We come from the earth. We will become earth when we die. So we should probably treat it with some respect.The Stoics spoke of this at length. In fact, they had a word for it: sympatheia—“a connectedness with the cosmos.” It is one of the lesser known Stoic concepts, in part because it’s so incredibly easy to focus on the self and lose sight of the whole. As Marcus Aurelius wrote:Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. For in a sense, all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other—for one thing follows after another according to their tension of movement, their sympathetic stirrings, and the unity of all substance.No one is saying you have to stop driving a car or go off the grid. But it is your duty to care and to care for this place you call home. You can find the little places where you can make small differences. You can try to limit yourself and your appetites. You can be good to your fellow human beings.We are all connected and unified and made for one another and this should never be far from our minds. We should be humane to the Earth we inhabit and to each other—yesterday, today, and every day. Let’s take care of each other.Happy Earth Day.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

23 Huhti 20193min

Theodore Roosevelt famously said that comparison is the thief of joy. Using what other people have or what they’ve done to chart your progress, holding your life or your work up to some outside vague standard of greatness, paying attention to your perception of how good someone else has it is rarely the way to happiness. We’re on our own journey with our own unique circumstances. Therefore comparison, as the quote implies, is something mostly to be avoided.But, can comparison ever spur joy or relieve feelings of despair? In our interview with the famous DJ, entrepreneur, and practicing Stoic Mick Batyske, we asked if he could share with the Daily Stoic community one message or piece of advice to journal on, to try in practice, or just to think about today,Always remember that there are people who would love to have your bad days. It’s kind of cliché and sort of an Instagram meme, but it’s so true. Acknowledging this puts you in a position of gratitude and astonishment, rather than greed and disappointment.  I have more going on in my life than ever, and with that, more problems than ever.  New opportunities create lots of challenges. But I would never want to go backwards. I choose to welcome it and embrace it. I suppose that’s why The Obstacle Is The Way and Stoic philosophy has been so valuable to me.The Stoics would not have been opposed to this kind of comparison—nor would Theodore Roosevelt have been—not if it made us better or more grateful. “Convince yourself that everything is the gift of the gods,” Marcus Aurelius said, “that things are good and always will be.” On those bad days, sometimes that gift, that thing to be grateful for, is seeing how it could be worse—how it is in fact worse and has been worse for so many other people. Always remember, as Mick says, that someone out there would love to have your “bad” day.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

22 Huhti 20192min

It can be deceiving to hear the Stoics talk about an indifference to external recognition or rewards. Marcus says that fame is meaningless. Seneca talks about how success or wealth is out of our control and therefore not to be prized. Don’t want what other people want, they say, don’t get sucked into meaningless competition.So does this mean that the Stoic doesn’t try? That the Stoic is resigned to whatever happens to them in life, caring about nothing, uninterested in improving or growing? No, of course not. The Stoic is still incredibly ambitious—only they focus on an internal scorecard versus an external one.A similar sentiment was well-expressed by the entrepreneur Sam Altman, who has helped thousands of startups over the years with his work at Y Combinator, when he was interviewed by Tyler Cowen for the Conversations with Tyler podcast:“I think one thing that is a really important thing to strive for is being internally driven, being driven to compete with yourself, not with other people. If you compete with other people, you end up in this mimetic trap, and you sort of play this tournament, and if you win, you lose. But if you’re competing with yourself, and all you’re trying to do is — for the own self-satisfaction and for also the impact you have on the world and the duty you feel to do that — be the best possible version you can, there is no limit to how far that can drive someone to perform. And I think that is something you see — even though it looks like athletes are competing with each other — when you talk to a really great, absolute top-of-the-field athlete, it’s their own time they’re going against.”Competition, Altman’s friend and mentor Peter Thiel has said, is for losers. When you try to beat other people, you set yourself up to fail. But going against yourself—trying to improve yourself—that’s a competition you have control over. It’s one you can win.A Stoic triumphs over themselves, over their own limitations, and in this—even if the margin is small—is the most important victory of all.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

19 Huhti 20193min

Laura Ingalls Wilder had a hard scrabble existence. From the Kansas prairies to the backwoods of Florida, she and her family eked out a life from some of the most unforgiving environments on the planet. That’s what being a pioneer was really like. It wasn’t glamorous, it was hard.Yet, what comes through in her work is the joy and happiness and beauty she managed to see despite all that hardship. “There is good in everything,” she later wrote, “if only we look for it.”That’s what many of the best Stoic exercises are about—looking for the good. Or at least realizing that we have some choice in seeing things one way or the other. As Epictetus said, ultimately it’s not things that upset us, it’s our judgment and opinions about things that do. So, conversely, we choose not only to not be upset, but to be happy, to be grateful, to see life as an adventure that we can make the most of. The task before you today is to look for that good, in anything and everything that you do. Because it’s there. If Laura Ingalls Wilder could find it in a one room cabin, amidst tragedy and terror and pain and pestilence, then you can find it at the office, in traffic and in the confines of modern life. We all can. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

18 Huhti 20192min

In a conversation on “You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes” about Martin Luther King Jr., the screenwriter and director Adam McKay talked about the distinction between two words (and concepts) that we commonly conflate: Have you noticed the difference between dignity and respect is a big one? People that fly off the handle and get angry too much always talk about, ‘I’m not being respected.’ But respect is something you can’t control, right? Dignity is inside you, dignity is yours.This is a brilliantly made point, and it aligns perfectly with Stoicism. Remember, to the Stoics the two big categories that everything had to be sorted into were the things that were up to us and the things that are not up to us. Although it is nice to be respected, that really isn’t something that is up to us. But acting with dignity? Maintaining our own standards—our self-respect? That’s ours. Always. Even when we are under duress, facing adversity, or someone is attempting to humiliate us—dignity remains firmly in our control, provided we don’t give it up. This is what made Cato such a towering figure to Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and generations of Stoics. He didn’t care what other people thought about him, what they said to him, what they did to him. Sometimes public opinion lined up with his moral compass, sometimes it didn’t, but he never let that sway him from following what really mattered. Even when they showered him with curses or tried to kill him, he stuck fast. As McKay would go on to say in the interview, while we “can’t really control what they’re doing...we can control how we react.” It’s hard to describe Stoicism better than that phrase. Because that’s what dignity is about. That’s why it’s much more important than “respect.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

17 Huhti 20192min

“They” hold up very poorly in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that Marcus holds up very poorly when “they” come up. Who is “they?” They are the people the Romans referred to as barbarians—the people who lived outside the bounds of the empire. It’s when Marcus speaks (and acts) derogatorily about them—the Christians or the slaves or even the opposite sex—that we are reminded just how long ago he lived.In Marcus’s time, the world was a strict hierarchy, almost a system of castes, and Marcus never really questioned this. In fact, his own identity was strongly tied up in the notion that he was above these lesser beings, these savages, these slaves, these women.Thankfully, society has made incredible progress since then. We’ve granted religious freedom, equal rights, and civil rights...for the most part. But still, tribalism tempts us. Especially lately. We are suspicious of and think less of people who are not like us, who live differently than us, who come from somewhere different than us.In Senator Ben Sasse’s new book, Them: Why We Hate Each Other—And How to Heal, he talks about how the massive technological and sociological changes we are going through on this planet encourage those toxic impulses. We feel threatened, we feel insecure, so we retreat into (or descend into) tribalism. We want to blame other people for our problems, we want to create enemies, we want to focus on what they are doing wrong, and not the urgent (and resolvable) issues in our own lives. And of course, what this blame-shifting tribalism keeps us blind to is how much we all have in common, how 99% of us are just doing the best we can, and how in the end, most everyone wants the same things.To the Stoics, the idea of sympatheia was a bulwark against this temptation to make someone an other. We all come from the same place, Marcus writes (even if he didn’t always live up to it), we are all part of the same larger project. Forget tribes, he says, we are one big hive—we are citizens of the world as much as we are citizens of Rome or America. Do good for your fellow man, he said, or put up with him. There’s no room, or time, for hating or scapegoating.The idea of “they” or “them”—that’s driven by fear. Not reason. It’s not rational, it’s emotional and it’s destructive. Each of us needs to work on rising above it. For the sake of ourselves, our countries, and our world.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

16 Huhti 20193min