How Do You Fill The Void?

It was the great Athenian leader, Pericles, who said that there was nothing wrong with poverty. It could be caused by so many things—a business failure, the sudden loss of a family’s breadwinner, theft, even just plain old back luck. Like the Stoics, he knew that Fortune could swoop in, and, in the blink of an eye, undo years of hard work and careful planning. But Pericles would not have said, as religious leaders and populist demagogues have tried to argue for thousands of years, that there was anything special or holy about poverty. While it wasn’t necessarily someone’s fault they were poor, and so they shouldn’t be judged for it, Pericles said, there was “real shame...in not taking steps to escape it.” This too matches with the Stoic attitude, both about poverty and any fate Fortune might throw at us. Stuff is going to happen. We are going to experience setbacks. Some of us are going to experience major setbacks--in terms of where we are born, what our parents were like, how other people see members of our race or gender--and none of that is fair or says anything about who we are as people. How could it? We didn’t have anything to do with it happening.But how we respond to those situations--be it poverty or disability or a bad upbringing--hell, that we respond at all, well, that says everything about who we are. Are there big systemic problems too? That will require coordination and political action? Absolutely. But in the meantime, we can start taking our individual steps right now, right this morning, big or small. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

9 Apr 20192min

Few people have studied the life and writings of Seneca as deeply as James Romm has. Romm is the author of a great biography of Seneca, Dying Every Day, a translation of Seneca’s various thoughts on death, How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life, and his newest work, How To Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management, presenting one of Seneca’s most timely essays, On Anger.Each of us should take a minute to think back, even in just the past week, to the times we’ve been angry or short-tempered and think, "Has this ever served me well?" The answer very very rarely yes. Anger, as Seneca says, always makes things worse: “No plague has cost the human race more dear.” But it’s a hard emotion to combat. It’s natural, often almost instinctual. In our interview with Romm, we wanted some real practical tips about managing our anger, so we asked what he thought was Seneca’s best piece of advice:My own favorite is summed up in the quote: "Do you want to be less angry? Be less aware." Anger often starts from noticing too many subtleties of the way others interact with us. In many cases, we'd do better not to notice the slights and microaggressions that can drive us nuts if we let them. One can will oneself to ignore such things—a practice many long-married couples will instantly recognize!Today, when you feel that anger start to boil up—someone cuts you off in traffic, your computer glitches when you just can’t afford it to, the waitress messes up your order despite very careful instructions—stop, step back, and ask yourself, what if I didn’t pay any attention to that? What if I hadn’t noticed? Would I still be bothered? Would I need to be this angry? It brings to mind what Marcus said, “You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.”Because you don’t have to be aware of it.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

8 Apr 20192min

Each of has been blessed by Fortune. We’re alive right now, instead of 50 or 500 years ago. We were born free, and not into slavery. We’re reading this email on a computer in our office or on our cellphones, because we’re not laying in a hospital in a permanent vegetative state. Some of us are even luckier than all that. You might currently have the career you’ve dreamed of. Or you’re married to a wonderful spouse. Or you’re a world-famous expert or a billionaire. Great.Just remember what Seneca said:“No man has ever been so far advanced by Fortune that she did not threaten him as greatly as she had previously indulged him.” The opposite of good luck is bad luck. What has been given randomly, can be taken away randomly. Indeed, it happens all the time. Look at Seneca: Born healthy. Born rich. Born talented. He achieved so much...and then his pupil turned out to be deranged and he lost all of it, including his life. What goes up, must come down. If not today, then tomorrow or the day after. The point of telling you that is not to prompt anxiety or worry. It’s just a reminder. Take nothing for granted. Don’t waste a moment feeling like you don’t have enough or comparing yourself to other people. Avoid the temptation to conflate your self-worth with your net-worth or your identity with your place in society. Because all of this is temporary. All of this is dependent on Fortune. And Fortune is as fickle and as cruel as she is generous.  P.S. Get all our Daily Stoic medallions in one bundle and save $57! The full collection includes our popular Memento Mori medallion, Amor Fati medallion, Summum Bonum medallion, and 4 others. Learn more here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

5 Apr 20192min

When we look at the lives of a great man like Marcus Aurelius or a great woman like the Catholic activist Dorothy Day, it’s easy to be intimidated. They seemed to always know what to do and seemed to always do it regardless of the stakes. It’s easy to be discouraged when you hold their examples up as inspiration—it seems impossible to live up to their standards (and easy to forget, of course, that they didn’t always live up to their own standards).The same is true for Stoicism as a whole. The philosophy is so aspirational, so idealistic that, given the flaws we each carry, the idea of even coming close to approaching the life of a sage feels ridiculous. But what if that was the wrong way to think about it?What if instead of trying to be some unassailable force of moral good in the world, each of us just tried to be a little bit better whenever we saw an opportunity? What kind of cumulative difference would that end up making?An example: Anyone who has bought one of the coins in our Daily Stoic Store over the last couple years might remember that they came wrapped in a thin plastic sleeve. A few months ago it occurred to us that this was producing a lot of unnecessary plastic in the world for not a lot of benefit—so we asked the mint to stop shipping them that way. Was this some transformational improvement to the world? Was it some shockingly selfless sacrifice? Of course not. But it was an improvement in our operations that reduced our ecological impact a tiny bit. We got better where we could.Everyone has opportunities to do this. Opportunities to put their phone down and really listen to someone who needs to be heard. Opportunities to contribute some spare change to a worthy cause. Opportunities to let their employees go home early from work. Opportunities to pass on an unnecessary cross country flight or to pick up some trash or to hold the door open for someone.These are little actions. They won’t make you a sage or a saint. But they will make a littleimprovement to the world and to yourself. And if we all did them—and if we all did them more often—they would add up to real transformation.P.S. For more ways to keep Stoic principles in mind as you navigate your day, check out the Daily Stoic Store. It features our popular Summum Bonum medallion, Amor Fati pendant, Marcus Aurelius print, and more!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

4 Apr 20192min

The point of memento mori is not to make you sad. It’s not to make you anxious about how few days you may have left. On the contrary, it’s supposed to free you. It’s supposed to inspire you. It’s supposed to give you that empowered, grateful, selfless, bonus-round attitude best captured by Martin Luther King Jr., who said these words on April 3rd, 1968, just hours before he would suddenly and fatally meet an assassin's bullet in Memphis outside his room at the Lorraine Motel:“Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land.”Obviously a strong faith in a higher power was part of what allowed King to feel so secure in his purpose and confident about an afterlife. But that’s not the only way to get there. A person who is simply grateful for every day they have experienced, who is measured and disciplined in their actions—never cutting corners or wasting time—and who has done their best with what they’ve been given, has been to their own kind of mountaintop. Dr. King’s selfless, tireless servant leadership was also what allowed him to be confident and content, deservedly so, even if there was no reward in heaven for it. “When a man has said, ‘I have lived!’,” Seneca wrote, then “every morning he arises is a bonus.” The same goes for the one who has striven to make the world a better place, who has worked to win the Civil War raging within themselves (the war, as Dr. King said, between good and evil), and the person who has helped their fellow human beings. It is an unmistakable tragedy that Martin Luther King was taken from us early (he’d be 90 years old this year, as would Anne Frank coincidentally). But it would have been even more of tragedy had he not lived every minute of the four decades he was given. Just as it would be a tragedy if you were to waste any more of your years. Get working. Make your way to the mountaintop while you still have the time and the energy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

3 Apr 20193min

In his wonderful new book How To Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, historian, and Stoic Donald Robertson charts the fascinating development of Marcus as a person over the course of his life. He artfully weaves in his insight as a working psychotherapist into how we can draw from both the life and writings of Marcus to improve our own lives.In our interview with Robertson, he talked about some of the two-thousand-year-old Stoic concepts that inspired many psychological strategies practiced in the modern world. The central psychological strategy the Stoics employed, Robertson said, was what is now called cognitive distancing—summed up by what Epictetus famously said, “It’s not things that upset us but rather our opinions about things.”In practice, therapists ask clients to imagine that they’re wearing colored spectacles,If you believe the world is actually rose-tinted or dark and gloomy because of the lenses before your eyes that’s like fusing your beliefs with reality. Realizing that the world isn’t really that color – it’s just the glasses ‒ is like cognitive distancing. It’s the difference between telling yourself “Life sucks!” and “I’m just assuming that ‘life sucks.’”The Stoics knew this over two thousand years ago, though...It took therapists decades to really wrap their heads around this idea....Marcus likes to refer to cognitive distancing as the “separation” of our judgements from external events. The goal of Stoicism is to suspend certain value judgments responsible for unhealthy passions in this way.Give this a try today. When you inevitably get frustrated with someone or something today, remember that you have the power to change the lens in which you are looking through. Anytime someone hurts our feelings or something makes us upset, we are complicit in the offense. We choose our reaction. We choose what glasses we see things through. We don’t have to let it frustrate or upset us. It’s just the glasses.P.S. Check out our full interview with Donald Robertson and check out his new book How To Think Like a Roman Emperor—it's a wonderful introduction to one of history’s greatest figures and a clear guide for those facing adversity, seeking tranquility and pursuing excellence.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

2 Apr 20193min

One of the benefits of being an artist is that everything that happens to you—no matter how traumatic or frustrating—has at least one hidden benefit: It can be used in your art. A painful parting can become a powerful breakup anthem. Melancholy mixes in with your oil paints and transforms an ordinary image into something deeply moving. A mistake creates an insight that leads to an innovation, to a new angle on an old idea, to a brilliant passage in a book. The writer Jorge Luis Borges spoke to that last benefit well:A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.Everything is material. We can use it all. And again, not just artists. Issues we had with our parents become lessons that we teach our children. An injury that lays us up in bed becomes a reason to reflect on where our life is going. A problem at work inspires us to invent a new product and strike out on our own. These obstacles become opportunities. The line from Marcus Aurelius about this was that a blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it. That’s how we want to be. We want to be the artist that turns pain and frustration and even humiliation into beauty. We want to be the entrepreneur that turns a sticking point into a money maker. We want to be the person who takes their own experiences and turns them into wisdom that can be learned from and passed on to others. Use it all. Find purpose in all of it. Find opportunity in everything. Be the painter of your own picture, the sculptor of your own life.That’s your task for today and always. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

1 Apr 20193min

By now you may have read the viral story about the unexpected friendship between Charles Barkley and the late Lin Wang, a cat litter scientist from Iowa. It’s a pretty moving example of the power of connection, how one of the greatest basketball players of all time met and befriended a stranger in a hotel bar, and how despite their two very different lives, they became sources of great comfort and companionship to each other (and support too—as Wang attended the funeral of Barkley’s mother and Barkley later gave the eulogy at Wang’s funeral). The Stoics don’t talk enough about friendship, and that’s a shame, because friendship makes life worth living. Marcus speaks a lot about being kind to your fellow man—including all the jerks out there—but we don’t hear much about the pleasures of spending time in the company of people we love. He talks about avoiding false friendship but says less about the benefits of true friendship. From Seneca, we have many letters he wrote to a friend and we can see clearly how therapeutic and deep their relationship was. He writes occasionally on friendship in those letters and in essays, saying at one point that, “no one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself.”It was Cicero, though, who wrote most eloquently on friendship, producing in 44 BC a fictional dialog between Gaius Laelius and his sons-in-law, where Laelius speaks movingly of his multi-decade friendship with the late Scipio Africanus (recently re-published by Princeton University Press as How To Be A Friend). Cicero, a lifelong student of the Stoics, knew the power of friendship, and we are lucky that his many letters to Atticus survive to us. Both are worth reading. Although Stoicism is a philosophy that stresses independence and strength, moral rectitude and inner-life, it’s essential that we don’t mistake this as a justification for isolation or loneliness. We are not islands, we are social animals. We need community, we need friends. We get something out of giving, and we are made better for caring and being cared for. That’s what this idea of sympatheia is really about—the warm, snug feeling of knowing you’re a part of a larger whole. Indeed, that’s been one of the most rewarding parts of creating Daily Stoic Life (which you can join here)—we’ve gotten to see Stoics meet and befriend people they didn’t even know lived near them. We’ve also gotten to see people reach out when they were in need or had problems and found support and acceptance. Friendship makes life worth living. It is key to a good life. Neglect it at your peril. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

29 Mars 20194min