September 28, 2020 • 29 mins
Epictetus was born into slavery and beaten until he was lame... but he became one of Ancient Rome's greatest thinkers by accepting every setback as an opportunity to learn and grow.
Philosophy professor Bill Irvine joins Dr Laurie Santos to delve into Stoicism - an ancient school of thought which urges us to reframe how we view the problems we all face and defuse the negative emotions of anger and envy that can be so harmful to our happiness.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. We all have bad days. Our laptops die, our
relationships fail, our bosses let us go. I'll freely admit
that I sometimes get weighed down by it all, that
all those bad events can make me feel like I'm
(00:36):
a long way from my goal of being happier. And
that's when I try to think of James Stockdale and
a particularly bad day in his military career. It was
September ninth, nineteen sixty five. James was flying his jet
low over North Vietnam. Stockdale was hit by Enemy five
(00:56):
and had to reject. As he parachuted down to earth,
he recognized that he was enjoying probably his final seconds
of freedom and that the next five years minimum would
be hell. He was looking at beatings, torture, and a
long imprisonment. But as enemy soldiers on the ground took
shots at the pilot, ripping his parachute, Stockdale gave himself
(01:18):
a bit of a pep talk. He whispered, I'm entering
the world of Epictetus. Epictetus was born into slavery two
thousand years ago. His Roman master permitted him to study
an ancient philosophy called Stoicism. Eventually, Epictetus gained his freedom
and became one of the most important stoic philosophers in history.
(01:40):
His ideas about how to live a happier life have
continued helping people long after his death. In fact, his
lessons on how to deal with challenges and how to
put setbacks into perspective helped James Stockdale survive more than
seven years as a prisoner of war. They've also helped
me through some difficult times and more than two thousand
years later. I bet they'll help you too, So welcome
(02:02):
to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients with me, Doctor Larry Santos. Okay,
this is Bill Irvine, testing professor of philosophy at Right
State University. Yes, I'm recording his latest book, The Stoic Challenge,
is probably my book of the year. It's just curious.
But it was a great time to launch a book
(02:22):
on dealing with setbacks because we had COVID come along,
which was for a lot of people a major setback.
I talked to Bill for one of our bonus episodes
on the coronavirus, but we were only able to scratch
the surface of what stoicism can really teach us today.
So I invited Bill back to school us on Stoicism
in general and on my favorite Stoic of all, Epictetus.
(02:43):
So Stoicism was cobbled together from other philosophies that existed
in three hundred BC by Zeno of Sidium. This was
in Athens, it got to Rome in the first century BC.
There are the four greatest Roman Stoics, and those would
be Seneca, Musonius, Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Seneca, besides
(03:09):
being a Stoic philosopher, he was also an investment banker,
a playwright, counselor to an emperor. People get this idea
that Stoics were just interested in preserving comme at all costs,
but when you look at actual Stoic history, you realize
that a lot of them were very busy individuals where
there was that external success going on, but that wasn't
(03:31):
the key thing to them. After Seneca was Musonius Rufus.
Musonius had his own school. That was what you did.
There were no colleges, so you couldn't get a job
teaching in a college. So what you did is you
started a school. For you to have a successful school,
you needed to have an intellectual product that would draw
students someplace where they would get the skills they would
(03:54):
need in life, skills like how to be a success
in politics, how to be a success in law, but
how to have a good life was also a component.
One of the students was Epictetus. We don't know a
lot about Epictetus. He was born in about fifty CE
(04:14):
and started out life as a slave. You know, he
wasn't out laboring in the fields, but he was acquiring
basic skills of writing. Remember, they didn't have xerox machines,
they didn't have typewriters. And apparently at one point he
got a beating severe enough to make him a lame slave.
So he was spent his life lame. Finally succeeded in
(04:38):
getting his freedom and used it to start his own
philosophy school. What made him special he came up with
a lot of catchy sayings that became what was known
as the Handbook or in Caridian. And it's this short
little thing. You can read it in an hour, and
then you can spend the next decade pondering its contents.
(05:01):
Still as some continued to rumble along until the twentieth century,
when as far as I can tell it went into
a decline. I mean, so I was a college student
starting in nineteen seventy philosophy major and was not exposed
to Stoicism because we weren't exposed to philosophies of life,
because that didn't really matter. And the beautiful thing is,
(05:25):
right now we're in the midst of a Stoic renaissance.
So that's that's kind of the backstory on Stoicism, and
that's the kind of the place that Epictetis has in
that story. One of the like maybe twentieth century adopters
of Stoicism is Admiral James Stockdale, And you know, when
his plane was shot down, he self reports saying that,
(05:46):
you know, he knew that he was going to be
stuck there for five years at least, and he was
entering the world of Epictetus. So was the quote that
he had. Yeah, Now this was the Vietnam War. So
he became a prisoner, not at all a very pleasant existence,
you know, not enough to eat, cruelty, being beaten, and
for him it would have been a complete turnaround, you know,
(06:07):
just one hundred and eighty return in the course of
his life, because he went from being an airplane pilot.
Presumably I must have been a college graduate, went from
this life of being a star in some sense, a
rock star, and now suddenly you're the low man on
the totem poll, and then you wake up and then
the question is what will I find to eat today?
(06:30):
And will I live till tomorrow? So he was an
early adopter of stoicism. But you know, think how fortunate
he was to have been exposed to it before being
shot down, because it gave him a way of dealing
with the things he was about to experience. And you know,
this is a line from Epictetus. It isn't what happens
(06:51):
to us that has the effect. It's how we frame
what happens to us. It's how we interpret what happens
to us. And so we may not have a lot
of power over what happens to us, but we have
considerable power over what we do with what happens to it,
with the psychological frame we put it in. And that
was one of the fantastic things about Epictetis is that
(07:13):
he was kind of incredibly practical. I mean, I think
it's one of the reasons that Stockdale brought up Epictetis
in particular and not just Stoics in general, which it
seems like he'd read, which is the Epictetis was really
trying to give us almost like early self help it
but it's you know, I think the handbook almost sounds
like a self help book in some ways. But one
of the things I noticed in the discourses is he
(07:33):
talks about this idea that turning to stoicism is sort
of like going to the hospital, and like what a
stoics job, a stoic philosopher's job is is to kind
of be like a doctor in a hospital. And he
notes that like students ought not to walk out in
pleasure but in pain, right, And I think this is
sort of kind of coming to terms with the Stoic
philosophy and what it means. It's like, you kin'd have
to accept that there are certain things that you can't control.
(07:55):
And so the Stoic view is that you can achieve
harmony in life, you can achieve happiness, but it kind
of takes a little bit of work. Yeah, So a
Stoicism had several different aspects. So if you're a Stoic philosopher,
you're interested in science, you might be interested in logic,
because you know your students are going to have to
learn how to reason if they want to be lawyers,
if they want to be a politicians. But beside that,
(08:18):
you're interested in a philosophy of life, and most people
lack that. They just go from day to day, or
they look around at the goals other people are forming
and assume that the other people have done their homework.
Usually they have and they've just been copying their neighbors.
The Stoics, though, were very careful to add that on
as a component in their philosophy, and they didn't just
(08:40):
talk about grand theories and principles and everything else. The
question was is their practical advice that they had to offer.
It should have takeaways. There should be lectures that people
can come to and then go away from thinking hard,
not about oh, some wonderful principle, but about woe. The
(09:02):
way I'm living my life. I seem to be making
some basic mistakes because I kind of want to dig
into some of the Epictetus insights. Specifically, one of the
ideas that comes out is this Greek term. I'm going
to mess up the Greek term, but it's this term epihenum,
something that in our power. It's great. It's great to me,
great to you too. But this is this idea of
(09:25):
things that are sort of up to us, right, And
that classically is how Epictetus started his book, Give me
a sense of how the Handbook starts. And this huge
insight that Epictetius brought to people in English, what I
call it, and a lot of people do this too,
They call it the dichotomy of control. So a dichotomy
is an either or, it's one or the other, and
the dichotomy of control is, well, there are some things
(09:47):
you can control and there are some things you can't control.
And if you spend your day thinking about, anxious about,
dwelling upon the things you can't control, you are the
biggest fool on the planet. How come because you can't
control it, You're wasting your time, You're wasting your energy,
(10:07):
You're causing yourself. You know, when you get up in
the morning, you should realize that today a number of
things are going to happen that simply go against me.
And if I expect to get up and go through
today without anything bad happening, I'm a fool and I
have a choice. I can't control that, but I do
have control over something else, and it is my response
(10:29):
to those things that happen. You can control your goals.
Can you control whether you achieve those goals? No? No,
But you can control what the goals are. You can
control your values. What do you value in life? Do
you value fame and fortune? Do you value tranquility? That's
completely in your control. And the Stoic insight was, if
(10:51):
you want to have a good life, number one, you
need to focus your attention on things you can control.
Number two is when it comes to choosing your values.
When it comes to choosing your goals, you want to
choose values that are going to lead me in the
right direction, and its goals that I'm going to be
able to achieve. I know so many people, and I
used to be one of them, and I still am,
(11:12):
to some extent one of them. But I know this
one person I've known for a long time, and he
routinely says to me, if only I made X thousand
dollars per year, then finally I would be happy. And
then I'll encounter him a few years later and I'll say,
how's that X thing going for you? He says, if
(11:32):
only I had Why? So, this is this hedonic treadmill
that we're on. Don't get yourself on the hedonic treadmill
because you will never be satisfied. You will always want more.
But back to the dichotomy of control. So there's things
you can control things you can't control. But I have
(11:53):
fiddled with it, and so I've come up with what
I call the trichotomy of control. When you say there
are things you can control and things you can't control,
the phrase the things you can't control is actually ambiguous
because there's two different sorts of things you can't control.
One of them is things that you have absolutely no
(12:15):
control over, and that would be like whether the sunrise
is tomorrow. I have absolutely no control over that. But
there are also things you can't control in the sense
that you don't have complete control over them, but you
have partial control over them. What would that be, Well,
my weight, for instance, Can I suddenly wish that I
(12:36):
became one hundred and sixty pounds? Nope? Can I try
to do that? Yep? Do I have some control over that? Yeah?
Because every day I sit down and eat, and I
have control over what I do eat and what I
don't eat. It's this third intermediate category. It's things I
have some but not complete control over, So I would
argue that that's where as a practicing Stoic you should
(12:58):
be spending most of your time. And I think one
way that focusing on what you can control is really
powerful is it means that if you get that right,
you're never really a victim, right Like, you can't be
a victim of your circumstances if you're really tracking the
things that just don't matter to you right right. The
notion of being a victim, by the way, that touches
on a second stoic theme, and that is framing. Sometimes
(13:21):
you do have a say whether bad things happen to you.
If you never check the gas gage in your car,
bad things are going to happen, and you're to blame
and shame on you. But there are other things where
a bad thing happens that you couldn't have foreseen, but
you do have control over the frame you put around it.
You've got a very interesting choice of whether you're going
(13:41):
to play the role of victim or play the role
of target. And it's a huge psychological difference because if
you choose to play the role of victim, then you're
going to feel sorry for yourself. You're going to be
asking for people's sympathy, You're going to be probably depressed.
If you play the role of target, then you can
(14:02):
rise to that challenge. As a result of doing that,
you can gain character and you can change the world.
That difference between feeling like a victim versus feeling like
a target was an important distinction for James Stockdale. When
Stockdale came crashing down to Earth, he badly injured his
leg and was left lame, just like his hero Epictetus.
(14:23):
But throughout all the pain and cruelty, Stockdale decided that
he was game for the challenge and he was ready
to take it on. After the break, we'll look at
the path that Epictetus has laid out to help us
all gain control even in the worst of times, the happiness, laugh,
or turn in a moment when trying to take control
(14:54):
of our own lives, Epictetus suggested adopting a state of
mind that he called apathea. We need to become less
bothered by the powerful emotions that often cloud our judgment.
Apathea sounds a lot like our modern word apathy, but
that's actually a miss perception of stoicism that it's about
turning off our emotions and not caring what's going on
(15:14):
around us. So I asked Bill to explain how apathea
really works. The Stoics weren't anti emotion, they were anti
negative emotion. They embraced positive emotions, they embraced feelings of delight,
they embraced joy. Those are all positive emotions. But they thought,
what makes us miserable is the negative emotions we experienced,
(15:37):
like anger, like regret, like feelings of insecurity. They realized
that we are essentially at war with ourselves. And I
use the roommate analogy. So suppose the only place you
could live was an apartment and you realize that moving in,
you had two apartment mates. One was this utterly reflexive
(16:00):
guy who was either panicking or reacting in dramatic ways
to whatever the circumstances were. The other one was just
an emotional basket case. You know, whatever happened, you'd be saying,
this is the worst thing ever, or this is the
best thing ever. And then there was rational you, okay,
And the problem is you couldn't escape them, you couldn't
(16:21):
leave them. You had to deal with them. How do
you accomplish that and here's where stoic insight comes. You
manipulate them, you use your brain power. I mean, you
can simply try, as an act of self control to
ignore what they're doing, ignore what they're saying. Good luck
with that, because self control requires considerable energy on your part.
(16:44):
If you've ever tried to do meditation, you realize one
of the very first things you learn is how difficult
it is to just quiet your mind. Sit there for
five minutes in a common environment and don't have thoughts,
and within thirty seconds outside, maybe before that, you'll realize, Oops,
a thought just came into my mind, and a lot
(17:06):
of them are crazy ideas. Because of that, we find
ourselves living not in the present moment, and you know
that's kind of been the ideal is live in them now.
It's rather things like so and so said something to
me yesterday. Is he upset with me? Is he angry
at me? Is he going to do something to make
me even more upset? And oh, the electrical bill has
(17:29):
to be paid and it's due this evening. Suppose you
had a neighbor who every five minutes was showing up
at your door, banging on the door and saying you
should be angry. Now there's something you should worry about. Now,
you know, you would get a restraining order, except it
isn't a neighbor and you can't go to a court
of law. It's inside your head. So the Stoics, the
(17:52):
beautiful thing was they figured out a way not only
to kind of shut down those thoughts in those emotions,
but to harness them and use them on their behalf.
And so in their goal to control negative emotions, is
this notion that we talk a lot about today in
modern effect science, which is this idea of emotion regulation,
this idea that emotions really are in our control and
(18:14):
that we can take ownership to kind of downregulate the
negative ones. And one of the ways that modern science
has figured out that we can downregulate negative emotions has
to do with our judgments, right, is to realize that
we're in control of how we experience an emotion. And
this seems to fit a lot with what Epictetus talked
about when he talked about these impressions. And so what
was Epictetus talking about about? When you see something, realize
(18:36):
that it's an impression that you can control. Yeah, when
somebody insults us, there are two ways we can respond.
One is to get angry and upset and maybe a
seek revenge, and another is to simply shrug it off.
It's just noise. If you're out on a walk and
a dog barks at you, you know if you respond
to that by saying, oh, that dog, let's not approve
(18:58):
of me. That dog is so mean. Nah, it's just barking. Well,
you can treat the things other people say in exactly
the same frame of mind, because some of them are
not fully rational, coherent people. That's why they're going around
saying insulting things. When you're insulted, you should just shrug
it off, or better still, make a joke out of it.
(19:19):
And you haven't your power to do that. And if
you make a joke out of it, you not only
will prevent the insult from hurting you, but it's just
almost the worst thing you can do to the person
who insulted you. He wants to hurt you, and if
you laugh it off, it's proof that he hasn't hurt you.
So one thing I do in class when we're up
to this point is I tell the assembled group, and
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it might be thirty people, might be fifty people. I
say Okay, I want you to come up with the
worst insult of me that you can think of, and
then I'm going to do a countdown, and when we
get to three, I want you all to shout out
your insult at the same moment. So I do one, two, three,
and then the room erupts in this giant insult, and
(20:06):
then I just smile and I say, it's just noise. Now.
Sometimes I'm too clever by half, because one of the
times when I tried this, there's one student who waited
until the noise had subsided and then said in a
low voice, old man. And it's interesting because here I
am a practicing stoic, and yeah, yeah, that does mean
(20:27):
you're perfect. It means you've you've developed your skills. And
yet you know, you start thinking, oh that hurt. Also
that and this really fits nicely with what we're learning
about these different emotion regulation strategies. I think at first,
when people think about emotion regulation, they think about what
you might call like suppression, right, like I just don't
want to feel this emotion. But what we're learning now
(20:48):
from the neuroscience is the suppression is really bad. It
might shut off emotion in the moment. But if you
look physiologically, you hook somebody up to a skin response,
you find that that emotion's coming out anyway. Turns out
a better strategy is exactly what a fictidius was talking about,
which is what neuroscientists are now calling reappraisal. Right, you know,
you reappraise that frustrating thing. As a test in one study,
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you get folks to reappraise something bad happening to you
as like, you know, you think about it how a
doctor might think about it, or I think about it,
how you might think about it. If you're designing a game,
this is just a game in life. And the research
really shows that people who are high on that ability
to reappraise naturally, because there's individual difference in this, people
who are high on that ability to reappraise naturally, they
(21:30):
tend to experience less depression and they self report that
their lives are less stressful. The cool thing is if
you teach people how to reappraise in the laboratory. This
is some work by James Gross where he shows people
these really nasty videos like an amputation or Hiroshima victims,
and he says, you know, try to watch this documentary
in a way, in a very metaway right, like you're
a doctor watching this or you're a historian kind of
(21:52):
looking at it from afar, And what he finds is
that people naturally experience less emotion there, but again not
in a like suppression way where you're trying to run
from the emotions. You just take that new frame and
then everything looks differently. Yeah, the frame makes all the difference.
One of the things you can do is simply get frustrated.
I was set back. There's something I wanted to do.
I was prevented from doing it, so I'm upset as
(22:13):
a result. Or a different way, you can frame it
as a test by imaginary stoic gods, in which case
then instead of focusing on the setback, you think about
how you're going to overcome that setback, and you're going
to show those stoic gods who's in charge. Ha, you
cannot defeat me. So it's an interesting way. So we
(22:36):
aren't just trying to prevent the emotions. We're harnessing them,
making them work on our behalf. Pay particular attention to anger.
It's an insidious emotion. An event that happened to you
years before, can poke itself into your head at three
in the morning, and then you find that the person
(22:57):
is long gone, not part of your life, and yet
you find the anger returning. So one bit of advice
that I offer based on stoics is doing your best
to nip them in the bug. And so I describe
the three second rule, or maybe it's a five second rule,
you know how I when food falls on the floor,
and this is an urban myth that turns out but
(23:17):
if you pick it up within three or five seconds
that it's going to be fine. But anger works that
way too. So something happens and then you've got this
beautiful interval a matter of seconds, but a beautiful interval
where you get to very quickly frame it. And then
how you do that. But you've got to be quick
because once the anger arises, it's going to have a
(23:40):
life of its own. But then what you do is
you say, oh, it's a setback. Ah, you stow it. Gods,
you're shaking your fist at them. They're using this person
as part of their mechanism to test me, and I
should throw this in the stoic gods are actually good
guys and gals, because why are they doing this? To you.
(24:01):
They're doing it to you to strengthen you. Like a
good coach, you take it as a compliment that they
think you're worth the attention, so that it's one of
these cases where you regard the person just as this fool,
this cog in this machine that's being used as part
of the test of you. That gets to the final
thing I wanted to mention about Epictetus, which is that
(24:22):
he realized that this was going to be work. You know,
he realized that this was going to be a path,
and in that sense he was embodying this wonderful psychological
principle of a growth mindset. You know, you're not going
to be a perfect Stoic right now, but you're working
towards it in this right way. And so talk about
how Epictetis and the other Stoics kind of embodied this
idea like, you know, we're not there yet, but we're
kind of working towards this goal over time. Yes, So
(24:44):
when life sets you back and I describe these stoic tests,
how do you pass the Stoic test? First of all,
the stoics do not stoke. Gods, do not grade you.
You don't get an email saying that was a B plus.
But here's what you need to work on. So it's
all self graded. But you graded according to two standards. First,
did you find a workaround? Doesn't have to be a
(25:04):
perfect work around, but did you find the best work
around reasonably could? Did you use your cortex to try
to think through the possibilities and come up with the workaround.
Second and more important component of the grade, did you
keep your cool while you did it. That's the most
important part of the grade because when you think about
(25:25):
most of life setbacks, it isn't the setback itself that
causes you the harm. It's your response to the setback.
It's allowing yourself to get angry, to get up set
that's what causes the damage. So for the stoics, it
could look to the entire world that the stoic just
failed big time in doing something. So, for instance, there
(25:47):
was a tennis match and that the stoic lost. Ah,
he lost, and that's failure. But if you ask the stoic,
the stoic could say, ah, I can see how someone
on the outside would look at it that way, But
my goal was not to win this game. My goal
was to train for this game to the best of
(26:08):
my ability, come up with the best strategy for playing
this game. As I could play the game to the
best of my ability, and I did those things. I
did not win the game, but it was not a failure.
Here's the interesting wrinkle on that, and that is if
you approach life thinking in those terms, you're more likely
(26:29):
to have external successes because if you did the best
you could, that's all you can ever do. If you
did the best you could and routinely do that, you're
going to get better and better, and so you'll actually
have not only the internal successes, which is what the
Stoics were primarily interested in, but the external successes as well. Yeah,
(26:51):
even though it's an old strategy, it's one that still works.
I mean, I know again, we started this episode with Stockdale,
and you know, he had to go through some pretty
hardcore Stoic god challenges but made it through in part
because he had this tool. Yep. And you know what,
So there's a lot that's changed in the last two
thousand years, but human psychology has changed barely an iota.
(27:13):
So what would be surprising if something that worked two
thousand years ago in psychological terms didn't continue to work today.
I love talking to Bill. He always has a helpful
way of reminding me the stoic challenge never ends. We're
constantly being tested, constantly being offered chances to gain wisdom
and to react with good humor. In fact, you might
(27:34):
have noticed that my side of the interview sounded a
bit crappier than usual, and that was because my recorder
died right in the middle of the interview. But did
I get angry or frustrated. No, because when you think
about it, this is a wonderful stoic challenge. Plus we
had a backup, so we were good. But just to
complete James Stockdale's story, he was eventually released from captivity
(27:57):
in nineteen seventy three. Throughout his entire imprisonment, he was
guided by his understanding of stoicism. His conduct as a
prisoner was so virtuous that he was awarded the Medal
of Honor. Upon his return, Stockdale went on to lecture
about his life behind bars. He urged other people to
implement the lessons of Epictetus in their own daily lives. Stoicism,
Stockdale said, is a noble philosophy that proved more practicable
(28:21):
than a modern cynic would expect, But there's still one
more episode in this current season of Happiness Lessons of
the Ancients, So join me next time when we travel
way way back in time to meet the Buddha. The
Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
The show was mastered by Evandiola, and our original music
(28:43):
was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the entire
Pushkin crew, including mil LaBelle, Carli Migliori, Heather Fine, Sophie Crane, mckibbon,
Eric Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The
Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and
meet doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. We all have bad days. Our laptops die, our
relationships fail, our bosses let us go. I'll freely admit
that I sometimes get weighed down by it all, that
all those bad events can make me feel like I'm
(00:36):
a long way from my goal of being happier. And
that's when I try to think of James Stockdale and
a particularly bad day in his military career. It was
September ninth, nineteen sixty five. James was flying his jet
low over North Vietnam. Stockdale was hit by Enemy five
(00:56):
and had to reject. As he parachuted down to earth,
he recognized that he was enjoying probably his final seconds
of freedom and that the next five years minimum would
be hell. He was looking at beatings, torture, and a
long imprisonment. But as enemy soldiers on the ground took
shots at the pilot, ripping his parachute, Stockdale gave himself
(01:18):
a bit of a pep talk. He whispered, I'm entering
the world of Epictetus. Epictetus was born into slavery two
thousand years ago. His Roman master permitted him to study
an ancient philosophy called Stoicism. Eventually, Epictetus gained his freedom
and became one of the most important stoic philosophers in history.
(01:40):
His ideas about how to live a happier life have
continued helping people long after his death. In fact, his
lessons on how to deal with challenges and how to
put setbacks into perspective helped James Stockdale survive more than
seven years as a prisoner of war. They've also helped
me through some difficult times and more than two thousand
years later. I bet they'll help you too, So welcome
(02:02):
to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients with me, Doctor Larry Santos. Okay,
this is Bill Irvine, testing professor of philosophy at Right
State University. Yes, I'm recording his latest book, The Stoic Challenge,
is probably my book of the year. It's just curious.
But it was a great time to launch a book
(02:22):
on dealing with setbacks because we had COVID come along,
which was for a lot of people a major setback.
I talked to Bill for one of our bonus episodes
on the coronavirus, but we were only able to scratch
the surface of what stoicism can really teach us today.
So I invited Bill back to school us on Stoicism
in general and on my favorite Stoic of all, Epictetus.
(02:43):
So Stoicism was cobbled together from other philosophies that existed
in three hundred BC by Zeno of Sidium. This was
in Athens, it got to Rome in the first century BC.
There are the four greatest Roman Stoics, and those would
be Seneca, Musonius, Rufus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Seneca, besides
(03:09):
being a Stoic philosopher, he was also an investment banker,
a playwright, counselor to an emperor. People get this idea
that Stoics were just interested in preserving comme at all costs,
but when you look at actual Stoic history, you realize
that a lot of them were very busy individuals where
there was that external success going on, but that wasn't
(03:31):
the key thing to them. After Seneca was Musonius Rufus.
Musonius had his own school. That was what you did.
There were no colleges, so you couldn't get a job
teaching in a college. So what you did is you
started a school. For you to have a successful school,
you needed to have an intellectual product that would draw
students someplace where they would get the skills they would
(03:54):
need in life, skills like how to be a success
in politics, how to be a success in law, but
how to have a good life was also a component.
One of the students was Epictetus. We don't know a
lot about Epictetus. He was born in about fifty CE
(04:14):
and started out life as a slave. You know, he
wasn't out laboring in the fields, but he was acquiring
basic skills of writing. Remember, they didn't have xerox machines,
they didn't have typewriters. And apparently at one point he
got a beating severe enough to make him a lame slave.
So he was spent his life lame. Finally succeeded in
(04:38):
getting his freedom and used it to start his own
philosophy school. What made him special he came up with
a lot of catchy sayings that became what was known
as the Handbook or in Caridian. And it's this short
little thing. You can read it in an hour, and
then you can spend the next decade pondering its contents.
(05:01):
Still as some continued to rumble along until the twentieth century,
when as far as I can tell it went into
a decline. I mean, so I was a college student
starting in nineteen seventy philosophy major and was not exposed
to Stoicism because we weren't exposed to philosophies of life,
because that didn't really matter. And the beautiful thing is,
(05:25):
right now we're in the midst of a Stoic renaissance.
So that's that's kind of the backstory on Stoicism, and
that's the kind of the place that Epictetis has in
that story. One of the like maybe twentieth century adopters
of Stoicism is Admiral James Stockdale, And you know, when
his plane was shot down, he self reports saying that,
(05:46):
you know, he knew that he was going to be
stuck there for five years at least, and he was
entering the world of Epictetus. So was the quote that
he had. Yeah, Now this was the Vietnam War. So
he became a prisoner, not at all a very pleasant existence,
you know, not enough to eat, cruelty, being beaten, and
for him it would have been a complete turnaround, you know,
(06:07):
just one hundred and eighty return in the course of
his life, because he went from being an airplane pilot.
Presumably I must have been a college graduate, went from
this life of being a star in some sense, a
rock star, and now suddenly you're the low man on
the totem poll, and then you wake up and then
the question is what will I find to eat today?
(06:30):
And will I live till tomorrow? So he was an
early adopter of stoicism. But you know, think how fortunate
he was to have been exposed to it before being
shot down, because it gave him a way of dealing
with the things he was about to experience. And you know,
this is a line from Epictetus. It isn't what happens
(06:51):
to us that has the effect. It's how we frame
what happens to us. It's how we interpret what happens
to us. And so we may not have a lot
of power over what happens to us, but we have
considerable power over what we do with what happens to it,
with the psychological frame we put it in. And that
was one of the fantastic things about Epictetis is that
(07:13):
he was kind of incredibly practical. I mean, I think
it's one of the reasons that Stockdale brought up Epictetis
in particular and not just Stoics in general, which it
seems like he'd read, which is the Epictetis was really
trying to give us almost like early self help it
but it's you know, I think the handbook almost sounds
like a self help book in some ways. But one
of the things I noticed in the discourses is he
(07:33):
talks about this idea that turning to stoicism is sort
of like going to the hospital, and like what a
stoics job, a stoic philosopher's job is is to kind
of be like a doctor in a hospital. And he
notes that like students ought not to walk out in
pleasure but in pain, right, And I think this is
sort of kind of coming to terms with the Stoic
philosophy and what it means. It's like, you kin'd have
to accept that there are certain things that you can't control.
(07:55):
And so the Stoic view is that you can achieve
harmony in life, you can achieve happiness, but it kind
of takes a little bit of work. Yeah, So a
Stoicism had several different aspects. So if you're a Stoic philosopher,
you're interested in science, you might be interested in logic,
because you know your students are going to have to
learn how to reason if they want to be lawyers,
if they want to be a politicians. But beside that,
(08:18):
you're interested in a philosophy of life, and most people
lack that. They just go from day to day, or
they look around at the goals other people are forming
and assume that the other people have done their homework.
Usually they have and they've just been copying their neighbors.
The Stoics, though, were very careful to add that on
as a component in their philosophy, and they didn't just
(08:40):
talk about grand theories and principles and everything else. The
question was is their practical advice that they had to offer.
It should have takeaways. There should be lectures that people
can come to and then go away from thinking hard,
not about oh, some wonderful principle, but about woe. The
(09:02):
way I'm living my life. I seem to be making
some basic mistakes because I kind of want to dig
into some of the Epictetus insights. Specifically, one of the
ideas that comes out is this Greek term. I'm going
to mess up the Greek term, but it's this term epihenum,
something that in our power. It's great. It's great to me,
great to you too. But this is this idea of
(09:25):
things that are sort of up to us, right, And
that classically is how Epictetus started his book, Give me
a sense of how the Handbook starts. And this huge
insight that Epictetius brought to people in English, what I
call it, and a lot of people do this too,
They call it the dichotomy of control. So a dichotomy
is an either or, it's one or the other, and
the dichotomy of control is, well, there are some things
(09:47):
you can control and there are some things you can't control.
And if you spend your day thinking about, anxious about,
dwelling upon the things you can't control, you are the
biggest fool on the planet. How come because you can't
control it, You're wasting your time, You're wasting your energy,
(10:07):
You're causing yourself. You know, when you get up in
the morning, you should realize that today a number of
things are going to happen that simply go against me.
And if I expect to get up and go through
today without anything bad happening, I'm a fool and I
have a choice. I can't control that, but I do
have control over something else, and it is my response
(10:29):
to those things that happen. You can control your goals.
Can you control whether you achieve those goals? No? No,
But you can control what the goals are. You can
control your values. What do you value in life? Do
you value fame and fortune? Do you value tranquility? That's
completely in your control. And the Stoic insight was, if
(10:51):
you want to have a good life, number one, you
need to focus your attention on things you can control.
Number two is when it comes to choosing your values.
When it comes to choosing your goals, you want to
choose values that are going to lead me in the
right direction, and its goals that I'm going to be
able to achieve. I know so many people, and I
used to be one of them, and I still am,
(11:12):
to some extent one of them. But I know this
one person I've known for a long time, and he
routinely says to me, if only I made X thousand
dollars per year, then finally I would be happy. And
then I'll encounter him a few years later and I'll say,
how's that X thing going for you? He says, if
(11:32):
only I had Why? So, this is this hedonic treadmill
that we're on. Don't get yourself on the hedonic treadmill
because you will never be satisfied. You will always want more.
But back to the dichotomy of control. So there's things
you can control things you can't control. But I have
(11:53):
fiddled with it, and so I've come up with what
I call the trichotomy of control. When you say there
are things you can control and things you can't control,
the phrase the things you can't control is actually ambiguous
because there's two different sorts of things you can't control.
One of them is things that you have absolutely no
(12:15):
control over, and that would be like whether the sunrise
is tomorrow. I have absolutely no control over that. But
there are also things you can't control in the sense
that you don't have complete control over them, but you
have partial control over them. What would that be, Well,
my weight, for instance, Can I suddenly wish that I
(12:36):
became one hundred and sixty pounds? Nope? Can I try
to do that? Yep? Do I have some control over that? Yeah?
Because every day I sit down and eat, and I
have control over what I do eat and what I
don't eat. It's this third intermediate category. It's things I
have some but not complete control over, So I would
argue that that's where as a practicing Stoic you should
(12:58):
be spending most of your time. And I think one
way that focusing on what you can control is really
powerful is it means that if you get that right,
you're never really a victim, right Like, you can't be
a victim of your circumstances if you're really tracking the
things that just don't matter to you right right. The
notion of being a victim, by the way, that touches
on a second stoic theme, and that is framing. Sometimes
(13:21):
you do have a say whether bad things happen to you.
If you never check the gas gage in your car,
bad things are going to happen, and you're to blame
and shame on you. But there are other things where
a bad thing happens that you couldn't have foreseen, but
you do have control over the frame you put around it.
You've got a very interesting choice of whether you're going
(13:41):
to play the role of victim or play the role
of target. And it's a huge psychological difference because if
you choose to play the role of victim, then you're
going to feel sorry for yourself. You're going to be
asking for people's sympathy, You're going to be probably depressed.
If you play the role of target, then you can
(14:02):
rise to that challenge. As a result of doing that,
you can gain character and you can change the world.
That difference between feeling like a victim versus feeling like
a target was an important distinction for James Stockdale. When
Stockdale came crashing down to Earth, he badly injured his
leg and was left lame, just like his hero Epictetus.
(14:23):
But throughout all the pain and cruelty, Stockdale decided that
he was game for the challenge and he was ready
to take it on. After the break, we'll look at
the path that Epictetus has laid out to help us
all gain control even in the worst of times, the happiness, laugh,
or turn in a moment when trying to take control
(14:54):
of our own lives, Epictetus suggested adopting a state of
mind that he called apathea. We need to become less
bothered by the powerful emotions that often cloud our judgment.
Apathea sounds a lot like our modern word apathy, but
that's actually a miss perception of stoicism that it's about
turning off our emotions and not caring what's going on
(15:14):
around us. So I asked Bill to explain how apathea
really works. The Stoics weren't anti emotion, they were anti
negative emotion. They embraced positive emotions, they embraced feelings of delight,
they embraced joy. Those are all positive emotions. But they thought,
what makes us miserable is the negative emotions we experienced,
(15:37):
like anger, like regret, like feelings of insecurity. They realized
that we are essentially at war with ourselves. And I
use the roommate analogy. So suppose the only place you
could live was an apartment and you realize that moving in,
you had two apartment mates. One was this utterly reflexive
(16:00):
guy who was either panicking or reacting in dramatic ways
to whatever the circumstances were. The other one was just
an emotional basket case. You know, whatever happened, you'd be saying,
this is the worst thing ever, or this is the
best thing ever. And then there was rational you, okay,
And the problem is you couldn't escape them, you couldn't
(16:21):
leave them. You had to deal with them. How do
you accomplish that and here's where stoic insight comes. You
manipulate them, you use your brain power. I mean, you
can simply try, as an act of self control to
ignore what they're doing, ignore what they're saying. Good luck
with that, because self control requires considerable energy on your part.
(16:44):
If you've ever tried to do meditation, you realize one
of the very first things you learn is how difficult
it is to just quiet your mind. Sit there for
five minutes in a common environment and don't have thoughts,
and within thirty seconds outside, maybe before that, you'll realize, Oops,
a thought just came into my mind, and a lot
(17:06):
of them are crazy ideas. Because of that, we find
ourselves living not in the present moment, and you know
that's kind of been the ideal is live in them now.
It's rather things like so and so said something to
me yesterday. Is he upset with me? Is he angry
at me? Is he going to do something to make
me even more upset? And oh, the electrical bill has
(17:29):
to be paid and it's due this evening. Suppose you
had a neighbor who every five minutes was showing up
at your door, banging on the door and saying you
should be angry. Now there's something you should worry about. Now,
you know, you would get a restraining order, except it
isn't a neighbor and you can't go to a court
of law. It's inside your head. So the Stoics, the
(17:52):
beautiful thing was they figured out a way not only
to kind of shut down those thoughts in those emotions,
but to harness them and use them on their behalf.
And so in their goal to control negative emotions, is
this notion that we talk a lot about today in
modern effect science, which is this idea of emotion regulation,
this idea that emotions really are in our control and
(18:14):
that we can take ownership to kind of downregulate the
negative ones. And one of the ways that modern science
has figured out that we can downregulate negative emotions has
to do with our judgments, right, is to realize that
we're in control of how we experience an emotion. And
this seems to fit a lot with what Epictetus talked
about when he talked about these impressions. And so what
was Epictetus talking about about? When you see something, realize
(18:36):
that it's an impression that you can control. Yeah, when
somebody insults us, there are two ways we can respond.
One is to get angry and upset and maybe a
seek revenge, and another is to simply shrug it off.
It's just noise. If you're out on a walk and
a dog barks at you, you know if you respond
to that by saying, oh, that dog, let's not approve
(18:58):
of me. That dog is so mean. Nah, it's just barking. Well,
you can treat the things other people say in exactly
the same frame of mind, because some of them are
not fully rational, coherent people. That's why they're going around
saying insulting things. When you're insulted, you should just shrug
it off, or better still, make a joke out of it.
(19:19):
And you haven't your power to do that. And if
you make a joke out of it, you not only
will prevent the insult from hurting you, but it's just
almost the worst thing you can do to the person
who insulted you. He wants to hurt you, and if
you laugh it off, it's proof that he hasn't hurt you.
So one thing I do in class when we're up
to this point is I tell the assembled group, and
(19:42):
it might be thirty people, might be fifty people. I
say Okay, I want you to come up with the
worst insult of me that you can think of, and
then I'm going to do a countdown, and when we
get to three, I want you all to shout out
your insult at the same moment. So I do one, two, three,
and then the room erupts in this giant insult, and
(20:06):
then I just smile and I say, it's just noise. Now.
Sometimes I'm too clever by half, because one of the
times when I tried this, there's one student who waited
until the noise had subsided and then said in a
low voice, old man. And it's interesting because here I
am a practicing stoic, and yeah, yeah, that does mean
(20:27):
you're perfect. It means you've you've developed your skills. And
yet you know, you start thinking, oh that hurt. Also
that and this really fits nicely with what we're learning
about these different emotion regulation strategies. I think at first,
when people think about emotion regulation, they think about what
you might call like suppression, right, like I just don't
want to feel this emotion. But what we're learning now
(20:48):
from the neuroscience is the suppression is really bad. It
might shut off emotion in the moment. But if you
look physiologically, you hook somebody up to a skin response,
you find that that emotion's coming out anyway. Turns out
a better strategy is exactly what a fictidius was talking about,
which is what neuroscientists are now calling reappraisal. Right, you know,
you reappraise that frustrating thing. As a test in one study,
(21:09):
you get folks to reappraise something bad happening to you
as like, you know, you think about it how a
doctor might think about it, or I think about it,
how you might think about it. If you're designing a game,
this is just a game in life. And the research
really shows that people who are high on that ability
to reappraise naturally, because there's individual difference in this, people
who are high on that ability to reappraise naturally, they
(21:30):
tend to experience less depression and they self report that
their lives are less stressful. The cool thing is if
you teach people how to reappraise in the laboratory. This
is some work by James Gross where he shows people
these really nasty videos like an amputation or Hiroshima victims,
and he says, you know, try to watch this documentary
in a way, in a very metaway right, like you're
a doctor watching this or you're a historian kind of
(21:52):
looking at it from afar, And what he finds is
that people naturally experience less emotion there, but again not
in a like suppression way where you're trying to run
from the emotions. You just take that new frame and
then everything looks differently. Yeah, the frame makes all the difference.
One of the things you can do is simply get frustrated.
I was set back. There's something I wanted to do.
I was prevented from doing it, so I'm upset as
(22:13):
a result. Or a different way, you can frame it
as a test by imaginary stoic gods, in which case
then instead of focusing on the setback, you think about
how you're going to overcome that setback, and you're going
to show those stoic gods who's in charge. Ha, you
cannot defeat me. So it's an interesting way. So we
(22:36):
aren't just trying to prevent the emotions. We're harnessing them,
making them work on our behalf. Pay particular attention to anger.
It's an insidious emotion. An event that happened to you
years before, can poke itself into your head at three
in the morning, and then you find that the person
(22:57):
is long gone, not part of your life, and yet
you find the anger returning. So one bit of advice
that I offer based on stoics is doing your best
to nip them in the bug. And so I describe
the three second rule, or maybe it's a five second rule,
you know how I when food falls on the floor,
and this is an urban myth that turns out but
(23:17):
if you pick it up within three or five seconds
that it's going to be fine. But anger works that
way too. So something happens and then you've got this
beautiful interval a matter of seconds, but a beautiful interval
where you get to very quickly frame it. And then
how you do that. But you've got to be quick
because once the anger arises, it's going to have a
(23:40):
life of its own. But then what you do is
you say, oh, it's a setback. Ah, you stow it. Gods,
you're shaking your fist at them. They're using this person
as part of their mechanism to test me, and I
should throw this in the stoic gods are actually good
guys and gals, because why are they doing this? To you.
(24:01):
They're doing it to you to strengthen you. Like a
good coach, you take it as a compliment that they
think you're worth the attention, so that it's one of
these cases where you regard the person just as this fool,
this cog in this machine that's being used as part
of the test of you. That gets to the final
thing I wanted to mention about Epictetus, which is that
(24:22):
he realized that this was going to be work. You know,
he realized that this was going to be a path,
and in that sense he was embodying this wonderful psychological
principle of a growth mindset. You know, you're not going
to be a perfect Stoic right now, but you're working
towards it in this right way. And so talk about
how Epictetis and the other Stoics kind of embodied this
idea like, you know, we're not there yet, but we're
kind of working towards this goal over time. Yes, So
(24:44):
when life sets you back and I describe these stoic tests,
how do you pass the Stoic test? First of all,
the stoics do not stoke. Gods, do not grade you.
You don't get an email saying that was a B plus.
But here's what you need to work on. So it's
all self graded. But you graded according to two standards. First,
did you find a workaround? Doesn't have to be a
(25:04):
perfect work around, but did you find the best work
around reasonably could? Did you use your cortex to try
to think through the possibilities and come up with the workaround.
Second and more important component of the grade, did you
keep your cool while you did it. That's the most
important part of the grade because when you think about
(25:25):
most of life setbacks, it isn't the setback itself that
causes you the harm. It's your response to the setback.
It's allowing yourself to get angry, to get up set
that's what causes the damage. So for the stoics, it
could look to the entire world that the stoic just
failed big time in doing something. So, for instance, there
(25:47):
was a tennis match and that the stoic lost. Ah,
he lost, and that's failure. But if you ask the stoic,
the stoic could say, ah, I can see how someone
on the outside would look at it that way, But
my goal was not to win this game. My goal
was to train for this game to the best of
(26:08):
my ability, come up with the best strategy for playing
this game. As I could play the game to the
best of my ability, and I did those things. I
did not win the game, but it was not a failure.
Here's the interesting wrinkle on that, and that is if
you approach life thinking in those terms, you're more likely
(26:29):
to have external successes because if you did the best
you could, that's all you can ever do. If you
did the best you could and routinely do that, you're
going to get better and better, and so you'll actually
have not only the internal successes, which is what the
Stoics were primarily interested in, but the external successes as well. Yeah,
(26:51):
even though it's an old strategy, it's one that still works.
I mean, I know again, we started this episode with Stockdale,
and you know, he had to go through some pretty
hardcore Stoic god challenges but made it through in part
because he had this tool. Yep. And you know what,
So there's a lot that's changed in the last two
thousand years, but human psychology has changed barely an iota.
(27:13):
So what would be surprising if something that worked two
thousand years ago in psychological terms didn't continue to work today.
I love talking to Bill. He always has a helpful
way of reminding me the stoic challenge never ends. We're
constantly being tested, constantly being offered chances to gain wisdom
and to react with good humor. In fact, you might
(27:34):
have noticed that my side of the interview sounded a
bit crappier than usual, and that was because my recorder
died right in the middle of the interview. But did
I get angry or frustrated. No, because when you think
about it, this is a wonderful stoic challenge. Plus we
had a backup, so we were good. But just to
complete James Stockdale's story, he was eventually released from captivity
(27:57):
in nineteen seventy three. Throughout his entire imprisonment, he was
guided by his understanding of stoicism. His conduct as a
prisoner was so virtuous that he was awarded the Medal
of Honor. Upon his return, Stockdale went on to lecture
about his life behind bars. He urged other people to
implement the lessons of Epictetus in their own daily lives. Stoicism,
Stockdale said, is a noble philosophy that proved more practicable
(28:21):
than a modern cynic would expect, But there's still one
more episode in this current season of Happiness Lessons of
the Ancients, So join me next time when we travel
way way back in time to meet the Buddha. The
Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley.
The show was mastered by Evandiola, and our original music
(28:43):
was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to the entire
Pushkin crew, including mil LaBelle, Carli Migliori, Heather Fine, Sophie Crane, mckibbon,
Eric Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my agent, Ben Davis. The
Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and
meet doctor Laurie Santos
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