You 2.0: The Wisdom of Stoicism  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hidden Brain]] - Full Title: You 2.0: The Wisdom of Stoicism - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/ac47d8b4-b342-4b7e-b715-336663cf51cf ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Focus on What You Control** - Complaining about the world’s unfairness worsens our inner frustration. - Wise action focuses on controlling our judgments and responses, not externals like wealth or fame. Transcript: Massimo Pigliucci Book was The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which is a Stoic book. And that's interesting in itself because the first time that I came across Marcus Aurelius, I thought, Stoic is, oh, come on, who wants to live a life like a Stoic? I mean, aren't these the kind of people that go around with a stiff upper lip and suppressing emotions, right? So kind of like Mr. Spock from Star Trek. So when I came across Marcus, again, I thought, hmm, I don't know about this thing. And then I opened the meditations. And one of the first phrases, so the meditation is not the kind of book that you necessarily read cover to cover. Because it was a personal philosophical diary or journal of the emperor. So, it was not, in fact, meant for publication. So when I opened it up at random, one of the first few sentences that I found is in one of the later books. And it said something like, you don't like the cucumber because it's bitter. Well, don't eat it. Why do you have to go on and complain about the fact that there are bitter cucumbers in the world? That struck me as very powerful and very insightful. We tend to complain all the time about the fact that things don't go our way, that the world is not the way we would like it to be. And those complaints don't do anything practical. They're not actionable. So complaining about it becomes the same thing, a way to wallow in your self-pity or to fuel your own dissatisfaction with the world, which makes the thing worse. So now you have both an external situation, some aspect of the world that you don't like, and you are making yourself inwardly worse by complaining about it in a way that it gets frustrating Because you can't do anything about it. So I went back to that phrase. It says, okay, there are bitter cucumbers in the world. That's a fact, right? I do not have the power to eliminate bitter cucumbers from the world. I do have the power to refuse to eat them. And that's it. Marcus is absolutely right. I don't need the additional step of complaining and involving in this fact that the world is so unfair because there's a bit of cucumbers. That was the beginning or one of the beginnings because I also got pretty much at the same time another stunning phrase from Epictetus, who was one of the inspirations, to Marcus. So the two are very closely related. Epictetus was another interesting guy. You know, Marcus Aurelius was an emperor, so literally the most powerful person in the Mediterranean world at the time. Epictetus was at the opposite extreme. He was a slave. He started out life as a slave. He was actually eventually freed and he became actually one of the most well-known and respected teachers in the Mediterranean area at the beginning of the second century. So he was a very, you know, had a completely different sort of life trajectory. And yet the ideas, the stoic ideas resonated apparently with both of these people, and both of them became major conduits for later generations. And one of the things that Epictetus says at the beginning of the discourses is, so you want to make money? He's talking to some of his friends. You want to make money or you want me to make money so that I can help you? Well, that's all fine. But what am I going to do with that money? The money itself isn't going to tell me. What's going to tell me is my faculty of judgment. And Epictetus uses this to make the general stoic point that so-called externals, things like money or health even, or reputation, are not the fundamental thing. They're not crucial because it all depends on how you use them. You can be very rich and do a lot of damage. Or you may be very poor and actually use your resources very wisely. To Epictetus and Marcus, it's not fame or money or wealth or whatever it is per se. It's how you use them that makes a difference. And that struck me as another fundamental insight from Stoicism that why are you now focusing on improving your decision-making ability and you keep focusing instead on more or less Mindlessly follow what society at large tells you. You're trying to become more wealthy, more famous, and so on and so forth. ([Time 0:08:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39815843-36a8-46bc-b47a-f56d0f25c4ee)) - **Use Evening Meditation Practice** - Practice evening meditation by reflecting on your daily actions and how to improve. - Use role models and friends for honest self-examination and emotional detachment. Transcript: Massimo Pigliucci And how is it conducted? You can think of the entire meditations as a series of evening meditations, but the exercise is also described briefly in Epictetus and more length in Seneca. It basically consists in this. Before you go to bed, you take a little bit of time, not a lot, five, ten minutes maybe. You get into a quiet corner, both your house and your mind, and then you go and reflect on salient events that happen during the day, asking yourself how you reacted, how you handled those Things. Seneca specifically, for instance, says, you know, you should go over and say, what have I learned today? How am I improved myself? In what way am I better? Epictetus is even more specific. It says that we need to ask ourselves three questions. What did I do wrong? What did I do right? And what could I do better the next time that something like that happens? It has very good empirical backing from modern science. It really does work. It is a kind of self-analysis. Now, there is a limitation in doing self-analysis, which is, as especially modern psychologists have demonstrated, you know, human beings are very good at rationalizing. So you can write down things and then you can make up all sorts of excuses about why you did certain things or you didn't do other things. But the Stoics were aware of that, which is why they said, well, you need to do the self-analysis. You need to do the self-examination. But you also need some help. And there are two major sources of help for the Stoics. One is to imagine a role model. So imagine that you're actually talking to somebody. If you notice, the meditation is written in the second person. It's not, I did this, but you did this. As if Marcus were writing to a friend or to somebody else who was listening, and he was giving advice to that person. Shankar Vendantam Even though he was talking about himself. Massimo Pigliucci Even though he was talking about himself. And again, that is very good. I was just reading an article the other day in psychological literature. There's pretty good evidence that this technique helps achieving an emotional detachment to some extent from your own actions and therefore engaging more analytically, more critically With what you've done. ([Time 0:15:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bad6085e-f1ec-4c26-9ff6-7f0efddee025)) - **Understanding Dichotomy of Control** - The dichotomy of control teaches some things depend on us, others don’t. - Focusing on what we can control improves efficacy and emotional well-being. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam What is this idea, Massimo? This is a fundamental stoic idea. Massimo Pigliucci In fact, the phrase dichotomy of control is actually modern. The ancients themselves, Epictetus, who was Marcus Aurelius' influence, one of the major influences on Marcus, he calls it the fundamental rule, which right there tells you, you Know, it's important. So the fundamental rule says that some things are up to us and other things are not up to us. And then it gives you the advice of, look, if there is in fact this distinction, you need to focus on the stuff that is up to you because that's where your agency is actually efficacious. That's where you can make a difference. And you need to develop a mindful, purposeful attitude of acceptance and equanimity toward the kinds of things that are not up to you. This is a notion that comes up in a number of other cultures. It's not just Stoic. It comes out in Judaism, ancient Judaism, ancient Buddhism, modern Christianity, the serenity prayer, for instance, that it's an early 20th century Christian prayer used in meetings Of 12-step organizations like Alcoholic Anonymous, essentially does the same thing. It asks God, in this case, to give you the wisdom to figure out what it is that you can change, what you cannot, the courage to change what you can, and the serenity to accept what you cannot. Now, Epictetus and Marcus say that what is up to us are essentially your judgments, your assessment of a situation and how to deal with it. That's all. Your response to the world, in other words. Your response to the world. What is not up to us is pretty much everything else, which is counterintuitive, right? Because you say, wait a minute. So Epititos and Marcus both list a series of these things that are not up to us, and they start with health. So, say, health, wealth, reputation, career, relationships, and all that. It's like, health? What do you mean health is not up to me? Of course. Now, we were talking about my body image problems. What do you mean my health is not up to me? Of course it is. I can do all certain things about my health, right? I can eat a good diet. You know, I can go and exercise. I can go to the doctor on a regular basis and practice preventive medicine. I mean, I can do all those. But then you think about it and say, ah, but wait a minute, those are all judgments or decisions to act or not to act. What I don't control, what is not up to me is the outcomes. Sure, I can eat healthy. I can go to the gym, which I do, largely. And I go regularly to the doctor. Nevertheless, there are a lot of other factors that contribute to the outcome, to the actual health, that are not under my control. I can make all the efforts I want, but to some extent, I am limited by my own genetics and my own early upbringing. We know that both the genetics and early development, even intrauterine development before you're born, and certainly the first few months of development, Those are crucial to determine, You know, how you're going to respond long-term to certain things. And I had no control over those. I can't rearrange my genes. I didn't pick my genes and so on and so forth. So the general idea then becomes that, look, on the one hand, you accept from the get-go the notion that you do not have full control over anything, anything that is external, none of Those things. And you need to be okay with it because what are your choices? There's only two choices. You're either okay with it or you throw a tantrum. Throwing a tantrum doesn't help. It's the kind of thing that children do because they're not emotionally mature. An adult is not supposed to do that sort of stuff. Also, throwing a tantrum not only doesn't help, but actually gets in the way because now you're adding the actual injury from the external to an internal imposed injury. The fact that now you feel bad because you've lost control, you are anxious, and so on and so forth. So you need to focus on what actually you can do, which is empowering because the idea is not that you can't do anything about anything. You can do quite a bit. It's just that you need to be very clear on the limits and what exactly it is that you can and cannot do. And once you are clear on that, your interventions become much more efficacious and therefore you feel better. ([Time 0:20:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/944bb5eb-7364-4a6d-a39b-80568913f414)) - **Embrace Life's Finitude** - Stoics urge embracing life’s finitude to make every moment meaningful. - Recognize your unknown remaining time to focus efforts on what truly matters. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Talk about this idea, Massimo. That's right. Massimo Pigliucci When I was young, as a lot of young people, you kind of think that you're immortal. And that's, of course, not true, right? I mean, I have looked up my actual statistics, to speak, sometime recently, and it turns out that for somebody my age and my ethnic background living in New York, there is a certain life Expectancy. And I looked it up and said, oh, okay. So statistically speaking, I have a couple more decades. But that's only statistically speaking. Of course I could die today. I could cross the street and a car could hit me and that's the end of it. Or again, I could contract a lethal disease and I could die. So there is all sorts of stuff that can happen in any time in somebody's life, right? Whether you're young, middle-aged, late, et cetera, et cetera. And what the Stoics do is they bring that to the forefront of their way of looking at life. Seneca and then Marcus constantly say to themselves, act as if this was the last day of your life. Or, if you want to put it more positively, you get up in the morning and you realize that you have one more day. Yay, celebrate that day. Because you don't know if you're going to have a second one and so on and so forth. Now, this may sound kind of depressing and morbid and all that sort of stuff. But in fact, they're getting at something fundamental here. The notion that what makes our life meaningful is precisely the fact that it's finite. If we actually live forever, if you got to do the same things over and over and over ad infinitum, nothing will matter because you always have a remote control that you can rewind and redo It over. And so it will lose meaning. The reality is by focusing, by reminding yourself that time is in fact finite, and not only that, but that you don't know how much you have left, then you need to redouble your efforts To spend the time that you have in a way that it's meaningful, joyous. You know, it's the way you really want to spend your life. Think about it this way. So you go on a trip somewhere, let's say, near the national parks out west, and you have a car where the gauge for the gas is broken. You don't know how much gas you have. You can estimate. You can say, well, I started out with a full tank, you know, three days ago. So perhaps it's around here, but you don't know for sure. Now, at that point, you need to make very careful decisions about where you're going. You can't just take all sorts of detours for all sorts of reasons or for no reason at all, because you might get stuck in the middle of nowhere. ([Time 0:29:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1d53e095-b523-45d1-a8b0-c1d822335a16)) - **Stoicism During Health Crisis** - During a brain fog episode, Massimo turned to Stoic texts for calm and guidance. - He mentally prepared for worst scenarios by reflecting on how to respond pragmatically. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam There with this thing of brain fog. What happened in the hospital and when and how did you start to think about the stoics and what was happening to you at that time? So they put me in an emergency room, which means it was somewhat crowded. Massimo Pigliucci You know, there was no privacy on it. But I did have my iPad and I did have a charger. And the first thing I did was to open meditations and discourses and the letters of Seneca and remind myself of, you know, what is it that these people are telling me that is so important To me, that is so meaningful to me. Right now, I'm going through a crisis where I clearly have that little control. There's not much I can do here, right? I'm in an emergency room at the mercy of both whatever is happening to my body and, you know, whatever the doctors and the nurses decide. There was the anxiety, of course, of not knowing what had happened. And maybe a doctor might show up either the same day or a week later and tell me, you know what, you got a, I don't know, brain tumor or something like that, right? That was certainly a life possibility. But I decided to do two things about it. Number one, mostly cast that thought aside because, well, I don't know. And until I know, there is nothing I can do about it. And secondly, from time to time, I again, pick up my tablet and open my journal. And I started doing what the Stoics refer to as a premeditatio malorum, which means it's Latin for thinking about bad stuff happening in the future. The notion is to do it in the way in which Marcus was doing the meditations, analytically, detaching yourself, writing to yourself in the second person. And so I wrote to myself in the second person, okay, so there is a chance that there is something wrong here, either with your heart or your brain. So what are you going to do about it? How are you going to deal with this situation? If the situation, assuming that the situation is one of the worst case scenarios, are you ready to handle it? And what are you going to do in terms of handling it? Well, one of the first things you're going to do is to figure out as bad as possible what in fact it is. So listen to your doctors and what they're saying. Then get a good reasonable estimate of what might happen in the near future, how long that future might be, and then you redirect, you reorganize your life accordingly. ([Time 0:33:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ca54dbf1-4c74-4482-88d5-4921f48d3d55)) - **Handle Others’ Bad Behavior** - Address inconsiderate people by teaching them or patiently bearing with their behavior. - Avoid becoming a doormat by actively trying to improve situations but accept what cannot change. Transcript: Massimo Pigliucci Why do you expect people to be different from what they are? That's insane. That's just crazy. You know that people are in a certain way. There is a place in the meditation where it says, you know, remember, when you get up in the morning and you get out of the door, remind yourself that you will encounter all sorts of inconsiderate People who will do all sorts of things that you don't like. This is just a fact of life. Now, you can deal with the situation. In some cases, you can correct them. I don't want to give the impression that stoicism is about just lay back and taking it, right? This is called the danger of doormatism, of turning yourself into a doormat so that everybody walks all over you. That's not the point. Marcus says explicitly, there are two things you can do when somebody's behaving in a way that you disapprove of. One is to teach them, to explain to them, you know, look, this is problematic because. And then failing that, you can bear with them. You can use your ability to, you know, your patience, your ability to withstand things as a result. Because what else are you going to do, right? Those are pretty much your two options. So you just have to, it's not that the two are incompatible. Of course, you're going to argue and you're going to try to do things in order to improve the situation. But if that fails, then you have to accept that, okay, this time reality didn't go my way. ([Time 0:40:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8bfeba43-71d7-4f44-8702-3930b04735ee)) - **Stoic Response to Pickpocketing** - Massimo Pigliucci was pickpocketed in Rome subway but quickly acted to minimize damage. - He blocked credit cards, replaced ID, and accepted the loss calmly, showing Stoic practice in action. Transcript: Shankar Vendantam Oh, yeah. Massimo Pigliucci So the situation was I was supposed to meet my brother in Rome. And, you know, Rome is the city where I grew up. So I'm very comfortable navigating everything, including the subway system. So I get on the subway, and suddenly I feel this guy right in front of me near the entrance. It's kind of pushing back very, very hard as if the subway were overcrowded. And, you know, it was like, but it wasn't overcrowded. I mean, there was a little bit of, you know, people, but not. It wasn't enough to justify that kind of behavior. So the first thought was, what is this guy doing? And before I realized what, in fact, he was doing, it had already happened. This guy had a friend, an associate behind me who, while I was distracted with the physical pressure of the other one pushing back on me, picked my pocket, right? So the wallet was gone. And by the time I realized that that's what was going to happen, it took a fraction of a second, but it was too late. Already the two were out of the subway, the doors were closing, and that's it. I was all of a sudden without a wallet. Now, if this happened years ago, I would have been really upset. I would have been, you know, angry. I would, both and myself, for being so stupid. It's like, you know, I grew up in this city. I know that these things happen. This is a, I was in a particularly touristy area of Rome. So, of course, these things happen. You know, again, briars and cucumbers, right? Why would you expect that not to happen? I was angry and myself, I was angry at those two people. It's like, how dare they violate my person and my property and so on and so forth. So it would have been a normal reaction. Be upset, to be angry, to be dejected afterwards once you realize what the consequences of that action, etc., etc. And to my surprise, instead, the first thing that came up to my mind was, what here is up to you and what is not up to you? I was like, ah, thank you, Marcus. So here's the thing. I sat down. I put out my phone. Fortunately, they did not get my phone, my smartphone. And fortunately, the Rome subway has Wi-Fi everywhere, including in tunnels. So the phone was working perfectly. So what did I do? I thought about it for a second. It's like, okay, let's make a list here. I immediately contacted via app the credit card companies, blocked the credit cards. I contacted the DMV and immediately asked for a replacement driver license, which, by the way, they sent immediately. Like a few days later, it was in the mail. And they immediately allowed me to download a PDF that functioned as a temporary driver license. I'm saying this because Americans often complain so much about the DMV. It's like it's just the quintessential example of everything that is wrong with bureaucracy. I don't know what they're talking about. It was very good. So I did that. Then I thought, okay, how much cash did I have there? Well, less than $100. Okay. Fortunately for me, I can absorb that kind of loss without really much of an impact. Is there anything else that is left to be done? No. So I sat down, I opened, I switched to a different app, I started reading a book. And a few stops later, I got off and I met my brother. Now, I told him what happened. And my brother, of course, said, well, I don't see you upset. What's going on here? You don't seem to be particularly, you know, bothered by this thing. And I said, would it help? I solved what I could. ([Time 0:44:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a2260708-3d14-4fba-b42b-474bfe4f19df))