Letters From a Stoic

"It’s important to stress that I take a completely mercenary attitude towards Stoicism , picking and choosing the bits that seem to me to be useful techniques for the present day. There are aspects of Stoicism that are very hard to stomach today. For example, the underlying principle that the universe as a whole is in some sense God, with a will or agency of its own, and that rational behaviour consists of aligning yourself with the will of the universe. I personally take from Seneca and the other Stoics a very interesting attitude towards negative emotions and situations. They had the insight, which later recurs in cognitive behavioural psychology, that it is your beliefs about your circumstances that determine the distress you feel about them, not the circumstances themselves. As Hamlet says: “There’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Positive thinkers take that and say: You must have very positive beliefs about everything. But the Stoics argue that if you rationally analyse those negative beliefs, rather than fight to replace them with positive ones, you will find that there is a lot of solace and consolation to be had. Dr Keith Seddon is a great Stoic scholar and translator who is very much not part of the academic mainstream. As he puts it, the question that a Stoic would ask in any given situation is: How is this bad for me, and why? There’s a wonderful Stoic technique called “the premeditation of evils”, which involves deliberately visualising the worst-case scenario, instead of the best one. One benefit of that is that you replace limitless panic and fear – which is how we often respond to problems – with a sober analysis of exactly how badly things could go wrong. The answer might still be “really bad” – but not infinitely bad, as the Stoic-influenced psychotherapist Albert Ellis would say. That’s something I put into practice every day, and find helpful. I found very useful the basic insight that underlines Buddhist psychology: That your emotions and your thoughts are in some way not “you”. That the whole concept of what you are is in fact quite problematic, and needs to be called into question. A slightly corny but nonetheless useful way of explaining this is to see your thoughts and emotions as like the weather – they arise and they pass. I did a silent meditation for a week as part of the research for my book. One of the things that you swiftly learn is that it’s really hard to force your inner world to be calm and tranquil. But then, the point isn’t to try and force it. Not bad situations, necessarily. It’s important not to interpret this as an exhortation to put up with your lot in life. Rather, you don’t have to be completely attached to and led by your emotions. Take procrastination as a mundane example. When you’re writing a book, if you tell yourself that you have to get into the right frame of mind in order to write, you’re making life even harder for yourself. Not only do you have to write the book, but you also need to be in the right frame of mind to do it! It just adds an obstacle. This originates with John Keats. He suggested that Shakespeare was the genius he was because of his willingness to rest in uncertainties and doubts and mysteries, without “an irritable reaching after facts and reason”. I blatantly steal that thought, not to assess literary genius but as an attitude of mind towards happiness. We should try to rest in uncertainties and doubts, accepting that they’re a part of us, rather than trying to stamp them out so as not to have to think about them."