Having learned this from a certain wise man, I used to turn my mind in thought toward misfortunes, setting before myself exile from my homeland, untimely deaths, and other paths of evil, so that if I should ever suffer one of the things I had imagined, it would not bite me more sharply by falling upon me as something new. — Euripides, Theseus fr. 964 Nauck

Many people will already be familiar with the Stoic technique called premeditatio malorum, which I like to call “the premeditation of adversity”. In Letters 24 and 91, Seneca uses the term praemeditatio futurorum malorum, premeditation of future evils, when advising Lucilius to imagine exile, pain, and death repeatedly so that fortune finds him fully armed in advance. Although he doesn’t use this name for it in On Anger, the technique of premeditation plays an important role in the Stoic therapy for anger that Seneca describes.

From other sources, we learn that this technique was known in Greek as proendēmein, which roughly translates as “inhabiting in advance”. Its use in Stoic therapy may go all the way back to the lost Therapeutikon of Chrysippus, and even beyond. Cicero wrote: “I know that Chrysippus too thought that what has not been foreseen beforehand strikes more violently” (Tusculan Disputations, 3.52). Anger, by its very nature, tends to inhibit our foresight. For that reason, premeditatio may be especially relevant to the problem of anger. In this article, therefore, I’ll examine how Seneca uses the method of Stoic premeditation in On Anger.

Prevention is Better than Cure

Following Chrysippus, Seneca argues that it is difficult to apply remedies, in the form of philosophical disputation, during an episode of intense anger. Anger, to a large extent, blinds us to reason. It’s much easier, according to the Stoics, to challenge our anger preemptively.

We won’t dare use soothing speech on the first onset of anger, which is deaf and mindless; we’ll give it room. Remedies work in periods of remission. — On Anger, 3.39.2

He compares this to certain medical conditions where “rest is the cure for the first stages of disease” and active remedies are employed once the symptoms have somewhat abated.

You object: “A lot of good your remedy does, if it calms anger when it’s already stopping of its own accord.” In the first place, it makes it stop more quickly. In the second place, it guards against a relapse. And though the remedy doesn’t dare try to soothe the first onslaught itself, it will deceive and deflect it. It will get all means of vengeance out of the way. […] It will spin out reasons for delay and cause anger to postpone immediate vengeance while it looks for a more substantial sort. It will use every trick to give rage a respite. — On Anger, 3.39.2-4

In other words, when anger is at its peak, we should prevent ourselves from engaging in emotion-driven responses to provocations, such as aggression and insults. The traditional method for doing this is delay, waiting until our temper has cooled sufficiently for us to respond more rationally. The deeper remedy for anger is best administered preventatively, though. Although the Stoics have several methods for doing this, the one we’ll be discussing is premeditation.

Premeditation of First Movements

Seneca gives an explicit theoretical conceptualization of anger, which draws upon the Stoic distinction between two phases of passion (On Anger, 2.2-2.4). Although the concept of an initial “proto-passion” (propatheia) is mainly associated with later Stoicism, during the era of the Roman Empire, traces of this concept may be found in the early Greek Stoics, including the Therapeutikon of Chrysippus. Seneca refers to the proto-passion as the “first movement” (primum motus) of anger, although here, for convenience, I’ll just call it “proto-anger”.

1. Proto-anger: An automatic physiological and emotional reaction (e.g., blushing, pounding heart, an initial “bite” of agitation) accompanying our initial impression of threat or injury. This may include urges to vent or retaliate.

2. Anger: Anger develops if we “assent” to the initial impression that an injury has occurred and revenge is appropriate (“It is appropriate for me to take revenge, since I have been injured”). This may lead to action, such as attempts to vent anger or retaliate against others.

Anger may then spiral out of control as a consequence, and exceed reason entirely. Chrysippus, who was himself a long-distance runner, compares an excessive passion, such as anger, to the behaviour of a runner who is going so fast that he can no longer stop or change direction easily to avoid an obstacle. This is another sense in which anger may become excessive and maladaptive.

Certain things are within our control at first, whereas the subsequent stages carry us along with a force all their own and leave us no way back. People who have jumped off a cliff retain no independent judgment and cannot offer resistance or slow the descent of their bodies in freefall: that irrevocable leap strips away all deliberation and regret, and they cannot help but arrive at an outcome they would have been free to reject at the outset. — On Anger, 1.7.4

Epictetus, by contrast, compares the wise man to someone who is walking slowly and carefully, noticing where he places his feet. He defines the goal of Stoicism as wisdom, the “correct use of impressions” — the wise person, in other words, does not rush to judgment but is mindful of how he responds to his initial impressions.

In my reading of the Stoics, I question the translation of the technical term synkatathesis as “assent”, because I think this fails to capture the psychological force of the original. The Greek word implies a decisive or conclusive act, such as casting an official vote. I would compare it to the modern psychological concept of “cognitive fusion”, which refers to the identification of a thought with reality. Put simply, no truly enraged person thinks: “I have the impression that this person has injured me, and it seems to me, right now, from my current perspective, that he deserves to be punished.” An enraged person simply thinks: “This guy has injured me; he deserves a punch on the nose!”

This conceptualization is important for our understanding of the rationale for Stoic premeditation. I am to patiently imagine upsetting events such as someone insulting me, long before they happen. That means voluntarily exposing my mind to the first phase of passion: the initial impression and proto-passion. Because I am doing so deliberately, the initial surge of affect or proto-passion has time to dissipate somewhat. The impression is no longer “fresh”, and gradually ceases to be experienced as shocking, novel, or unexpected. I therefore have more time than normal to examine my first impression, in a more composed and self-aware state of mind. In short, Stoic premeditation involves repeatedly experiencing the first phase of passion without allowing it to escalate into the second phase.

The best course is to reject straightway the initial prickings of anger, to fight against its first sparks, and to struggle not to succumb to anger. — On Anger, 1.8.1

We have to experience the initial bites or pricks of anger, however, in order to practice coping with them. Another way of phrasing this would be to say that I rehearse psychological exposure to the provoking or triggering event while refraining from aggressive behaviour or venting, either overtly or in my imagination. At the same time, I withhold “assent”, or rather I do not identify or fuse my initial impression of injury with reality. Epictetus famously advised his students to do this as follows:

Immediately, then, practise saying to every harsh impression: “You are an impression, and not at all the thing you appear to be.” — Enchiridion, 1.5

As noted above, the very language of “impression” (or “appearance”) itself forces us to defuse our thoughts from reality. Epictetus makes this very explicit here. He also advises talking to the impression, which definitely requires shifting our perspective to adopt a more self-reflective attitude.

Tales of the Unexpected

Seneca repeatedly stresses that anger is escalated by unexpectedness (inopinatum) and novelty (novitas). There’s some reason to believe that an emphasis on the “freshness” or novelty of impressions was also central to Chrysippus’ original Stoic theory of the passions. This is central to the Stoic rationale for premeditation of adversity. Cicero claims that Chrysippus believed that when misfortune is unexpected it typically seems more severe because we lack the time to properly evaluate what is happening. That implies that Stoic therapy for anger would build resilience for sudden provocations by patiently anticipating them well in advance. It should provide time to think about the problem more rationally, and challenge our initial impressions.

In CBT, anger is typically interpreted as due, in part, to the perceived violation of a rigid rule, demand, or expectation. For example: “You did something you shouldn’t have done!” It’s possible to see unexpectedness as the flipside of rigid expectation. If I rigidly expect that people must do what I want, it may be highly unexpected when they don’t. I may be shocked and unprepared to cope, not only because I didn’t see a problem coming but, more seriously, because I refused to see it coming. Rigid demands and expectations can be understood as denial of the possibility that the contrary could ever happen. Premeditation is the opposite of denial. It accepts the possibility that what I consider unwanted, undesirable, or unfortunate may nevertheless happen.

When people express shock, confusion, or surprise, it’s often an expression of the fact that something unexpected has happened. Often, a rigid expectation that has been violated lurks beneath questions such as: “How could this happen?”, “Why is this happening?”, “What sort of person would do this?” Likewise, when something appears totally “unfair” or “unjust” — complaints that proliferate in anger — it can be because we had too firmly expected the opposite. When we assume something must happen, but it does not, that can seem unfair.

People judge some things unfair on the ground that they shouldn’t have suffered them, some on the ground that they were unexpected. Because we reckon as inappropriate things that are unexpected, things that happen contrary what we hope and expect cause the greatest upset: that is precisely why the most trivial things in our domestic arrangements give offense, and why we call our friends’ carelessness a “wrong.” — On Anger, 2.31.2

By far the majority of the time, anger is directed toward those closest to us rather than strangers. Seneca astutely observes that this may be because we have more entrenched expectations about their behaviour. We should, however, expect potential offenses to occur from any quarter. Seneca continues: “Always reckon that something will happen to offend you.”

What is surprising if an enemy harms you, a friend offends you, a son goes astray, or a slave does wrong? Fabius used to say that “I did not expect it” was the most shameful excuse a commander could make; I think it the most shameful excuse a human being can make. Think of everything; expect everything: even in good characters something rough will appear. — On Anger, 2.31.4–5

Seneca is referring to the celebrated general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, who fought Hannibal in the Second Punic War. Fabius became known as Cunctator, “the Delayer”, because he saved Rome through his use of strategic delay. Elsewhere, Seneca wrote of the same man:

He set grief and revenge aside, concentrating solely on advantage and opportunity; he conquered his anger before he conquered Hannibal. — On Anger, 1.11.5

Fabius conquered his anger by training himself to expect everything, and being prepared to adapt without complaint. Seneca uses the analogy of a pilot who never sets all his sails so confidently that he does not keep the tackle ready for shortening them. He means that the wise are prepared to meet any circumstance. Their goals are flexible, not rigid. The role of premeditation is therefore to reduce the shock of our expectations being violated by making them more flexible. We do that by actively imagining the opposite of what we want — the premeditation of misfortune.

Assume beforehand in your mind that you will have to endure many things. Does anyone marvel at being cold in winter, seasick at sea, or jolted on a journey? The mind is strong in facing that for which it comes prepared. — On Anger, 3.37.3

Seneca gives examples of applying this to relatively petty sleights and provocations, such as being seated in an uncomfortable location at an important dinner party, and becoming angry with the other guests, or the host. Ask yourself, though, “Can a pillow make you more honorable or more shameful?” What he means is that we should vigorously challenge our initial impression that we have been harmed by the perceived sleight.

He says that anger, in particular, often arises because we do not expect an injury, or because it exceeds our expectations, and therefore our perceived ability to cope (On Anger, 2.31.3–4). That’s an important point. In practice, it’s worth deliberately escalating threats and provocations when we mentally rehearse them. Otherwise, there remains a risk that we will think “I knew this might happen but I didn’t know it would be this bad — I was caught off guard by how extreme it was!” Even if we accept a problem may happen, if we’re not also prepared for its severity, we may revert back to a sense of surprise. Imagine the worst that could realistically happen, and you will be better prepared for everything that falls short of it.

Good Morning, Germania

Seneca recommends beginning each day with a form of premeditation, in which we anticipate potential setbacks and provocations that could occur in the day ahead. In particular, we should adopt a philosophical attitude toward the flaws and errors of other people. Seneca thinks that this becomes more psychologically robust if we turn it into a general principle: “To keep from becoming angry with individuals you must forgive all at once: the human race should be granted a pardon” (On Anger, 2.10.2). Everyone is fallible; nobody is perfect. It is profoundly unwise to expect everyone else to behave as if they are perfectly wise.

And so the wise man—calm and even-tempered in the face of error, not an enemy of wrongdoers but one who sets them straight—leaves his house daily with this thought in mind: “I will encounter many people who are devoted to drink, many who are lustful, many who are ungrateful, many who are greedy, many who are driven by the demons of ambition.” All such behaviors he will regard as kindly as a doctor does his own patients. — On Anger, 2.10.7

Elsewhere, he asks “For who feels angry at the one he’s healing?” (On Anger, 1.15.1). We might also say that Seneca recommends adopting a philosophical attitude, or even a clinical attitude, toward the behaviour of others, rather than being provoked by them. He implies that premeditation involves rehearsing this attitude well in advance, so that when we are suddenly confronted by the misconduct of others, we are prepared, and are not caught entirely by surprise.

Seneca’s advice here, concerning anger, clearly resembles what may perhaps be the most widely quoted passage from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Some scholars believe Marcus may have been influenced by Seneca here but I’m more inclined to the view that they could both be drawing on an earlier Stoic source, now lost to us. Marcus, while stationed on the banks of the Danube, records his Stoic exercises. He begins by turning what Seneca says about the wise man into a daily contemplative practice.

At dawn, say beforehand to yourself: I shall meet a meddler, an ungrateful person, an insolent person, a deceitful person, an envious person, an unsociable person.

He continues by emphasizing his kinship with the others, accepting their errors as natural, and, perhaps most importantly, emphasizing to himself that their actions cannot truly harm what is most important to him: his own character.

All these things have happened to them because of ignorance of good and evil. But I, having understood the nature of the good, that it is noble, and of evil, that it is shameful, and the nature of the person who goes wrong, that he is akin to me—not because he shares the same blood or seed, but because he shares in reason and in a portion of the divine—cannot be harmed by any of them; for no one can involve me in what is shameful.

From rejecting the sense of injury, Marcus proceeds to reject anger and resentment.

Nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him. For we have come into being for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. Therefore to work against one another is contrary to nature; and resentment and turning away are forms of working against one another. — Meditations, 2.1

Although the language he uses may appear different, Marcus is, like Seneca, advocating a constructive attitude of tolerance and kindness, in place of destructive anger. On closer inspection, what Marcus says here echoes many other parts of the Meditations. In particular, it resembles another well-known passage where he writes:

It is not what they do that troubles us—for that lies in their own ruling faculties—but our judgments about what they do. Remove these, then, and resolve to let go of the judgment that you have been harmed, and your anger is gone. — Meditations, 11.18.7

For that reason, Stoic premeditation seems to emphasize patiently questioning the initial impression that we have been harmed or injured. In the language of modern psychology, it permits us sufficient time to carefully re-appraise our automatic appraisals of threat in response in the anticipated situation, thereby reducing our anger. Moreover, we should also anticipate the cost of losing our temper, because, “My anger will harm me more than the injury” (On Anger, 3.25.4).

Stoic Assertiveness

Finally, I want to add a note about a concept in Stoicism that I think bears comparison to modern literature on the psychology of assertiveness. In Plato’s Protagoras, the Sophist famously distinguished between rational and irrational forms of punishment.

No one punishes a wrongdoer simply because he has done wrong, or merely on account of the past act—unless he takes vengeance irrationally, like a wild beast. But the person who undertakes to punish with reason does not punish for the sake of the past wrong—for what has been done cannot be undone—but for the sake of the future, so that neither the offender himself nor anyone who sees him punished will do wrong again. — Protagoras, 324a–b

The Stoics, like several other Greek schools of philosophy, define anger as the desire for revenge. The rational alternative to anger can therefore be compared with the kind of reasoned, forward-looking punishment Protagoras describes here. The verb kolazein can also carry the sense of chastising or correcting.

Seneca may even have this famous passage in mind when he writes:

[W]e will harm a human being, not because he has done wrong, but to keep him from doing wrong, and punishment will never be applied with thought to the past but with an eye on the future: punishment acts from caution, not anger. — On Anger, 2.31.8

It’s worth comparing this to the modern distinction between anger and assertiveness. Anger, or the desire for revenge, is backward-looking — it retaliates, seeks payback, complains and vents. Assertiveness provides a useful modern analogy. Unlike retaliatory anger, it is forward-looking: it seeks a workable change—perhaps setting a boundary, correcting a problem, or refusing a request. It decides what to do by considering the likely consequences, though, rather than behaving impulsively or recklessly out of a desire for payback or the need to vent. Seneca has a similar perspective in mind when he writes:

An objection: “We’ll be less subject to insult if we take vengeance when we’re wronged.” If we’re seeking a kind of remedy, we should seek it without anger, with the thought that vengeance would be useful, not enjoyable. But in fact it’s often better to pretend not to notice than to get revenge. — On Anger, 2.33.1

Ideally, assertiveness is not driven by the immediate pleasure or relief that can come from venting anger. It is motivated instead by what is useful and by the longer-term interests at stake.

As Seneca notes, in many cases, it may be best to say nothing. As he puts it, often reason tells us that the most beneficial course of action is not even to acknowledge an injury, let alone seek revenge. When we do take action in response to offensive behaviour, though, it’s better if our goal is constructive assertion and social problem-solving, rather than venting or retaliation. As Protagoras argues, in Plato’s dialogue, whereas retaliatory punishment looks backward—toward something like “an eye for an eye”—the wise look primarily to the future and consider the longer-term consequences and wider impact of their actions.

In this lesson, we’ll walk through what may be the most philosophical meditation found in ancient Stoicism, known today as the View from Above.

In this technique, you’ll practise looking upon your everyday worries from a cosmic vantage point, reducing their emotional impact and allowing you to see the bigger picture.

Of all the techniques I’ve learned from Stoicism, this one stood out because there are very few direct parallels to it in modern psychotherapy. So, it seemed fitting to save it for the last Stoic Mind lesson that is available to all subscribers, free and paid. Lesson 6, the final lesson, is available to paid subscribers only and will give you a complete synthesis of all five techniques and a downloadable summary of the worksheets and activities we’ve offered throughout the course.

The mind free from unhealthy passions is an acropolis. For a man possesses nothing more secure, into which he can fly for refuge and for the future be unconquerable. — Meditations, 8.48, trans. Long, adapted

For now, let’s dive into the View from Above, and how you can use it to put your problems into perspective.

How I learned to love the View from Above

As we know, ancient Stoics had an extensive toolbox of therapy techniques. In my first book, The Philosophy of CBT, I listed about eighteen psychological strategies found in the ancient Stoic writings. Most of them had obvious parallels in modern psychotherapy, but one of their most important techniques was virtually non-existent.

Although I was intrigued with the concept, the fact that we weren’t practicing this technique in CBT made me wonder, “Hmm. Perhaps it’s no good?”

I sat with this thought for a short while. But then, while living in the UK, I was running a training school for psychotherapists. When I shared the technique with my students, their reaction helped to change my perspective. They didn’t think it sounded crazy, or no good. Quite the opposite: they thought it sounded like it would work, and they wanted to give it a go.

After walking through the technique together, we all had the same thought: “Why aren’t we doing this in CBT?”

What is the View from Above?

Marcus Aurelius compares the mind that has achieved apatheia through Stoic therapy, or freedom from unhealthy desires and emotions, to a high citadel.

I wondered what he meant by the term “citadel”, but it took me some time to investigate. When I finally checked the original Greek text, I realized the word he uses in that passage is acropolis. There were many acropolises in ancient Greece but the most famous then, as now, is the Athenian Acropolis.

The Acropolis was originally a hilltop fort that evolved into a temple complex dedicated to Athena, the patron goddess of Athens. From this high point in the city, you can look down upon the Agora, the city-centre and marketplace, where we believe Socrates was put on trial and executed.

Imagine, now, Athena looking out from the Acropolis to the Agora. Think of her contemplating the people below, rushing from one concern to another. Though the individual dramas might seem enormous to the people caught up in them, from Athena’s view, she can see how small each one is within the life of the city.

Yet, as she contemplates the fabric of the community below, she can also see the meaning in its activity. Each person is playing their part in the universe — be it wondering, worrying, celebrating, mourning, or embracing the different situations that unfold before them.

Throughout the Meditations, Marcus talks about how he regularly imagines himself looking down from high above on the world, as a sort of daily contemplative exercise.

Look down from above on the countless crowds of people and their endless activities, on their many journeys through storms and calm seas, and on the different lives of those who are born, live together, and die.

Think also of the lives people lived long ago, the lives of those who will come after you, and the lives now being lived in distant lands. Consider how many people have never even heard your name, how many will soon forget it, and how those who praise you today may soon turn to criticism.

Remember that neither being remembered after death, nor reputation, nor anything else of that kind has any real value. — Meditations, 9.30, trans. Long, adapted

He wasn’t alone in this kind of perspective shifting. The twentieth-century French scholar Pierre Hadot found examples of this concept scattered throughout ancient literature, in different schools of philosophy, and in the writings of poets.

Hadot called this The View from Above. Through his research, we learn that the View from Above can take different forms:

• Sometimes it takes a mythological form, where we imagine looking down on events from high above, like Zeus looking down on the whole world from Mount Olympus – or Athena looking down on Athens from the Acropolis. In a sense, it’s an attempt to imagine adopting the perspective of God.

• Other times, it takes a cosmological form, where we imagine the whole of space and time, as if from the perspective not of a mythological god like Zeus but of the more metaphysical god of the philosophers.

In both versions, the technique is the same. As we rise above our usual perspective, we imagine seeing things from far above. In that moment, the world around us becomes larger, more interconnected, and easier to appreciate.

Now, let’s look at a related meditation technique. All subscribers have access to the instructions and written exercise below. Paid subscribers will have additional access to a special 14-minute guided audio meditation, where I’ll personally guide them through the whole View from Above technique from start to finish.

Let’s begin.

Activity Reflection

This technique, known as “time projection”, is often used in CBT to help with decatastrophizing. It views problems within a longer timeframe. Typically, when people worry they go over and over the worst moments of an anticipated problem, as if putting them under a magnifying glass. Imagining looking back on events from the future expands the temporal horizon, and helps us to gain perspective in a healthy way. The ancient Stoics often expanded their perspective on problems either temporally or spatially, and it’s possible to combine both at the same time.

They talk about how the wise person has megalopsychia, which literally means having a “big soul” — think mega and psyche. We get the English word magnanimity from the Latin equivalent, magnanimitas — think magnus and animus. That’s probably why they believed they should expand their mind by imagining the whole world seen from above, or even imagine the whole of space and time.

When someone is distressed or anxious, the Stoics believed their soul does the opposite and shrinks. While that may sound odd at first, I think they intuitively grasped something that has interesting parallels in modern psychological research.

When we’re anxious, we often remain on the lookout for potential threats, sometimes to the point of hypervigilance. The scope of our attention tends to narrow, forgetting everything else and concentrating on the source of the problem or the perceived signs of danger. If you’re an animal being chased by a predator, that’s necessary for survival. However, as a human, living in the age of the internet, it can be quite unhelpful, especially if it goes on for too long.

When we’re anxious, we often focus on the worst part of a situation. When we narrow our attention, we engage in selective thinking, which means we often overlook potential signs of safety. We put the bad stuff under a magnifying glass, amplify our distress, or ignore aspects of the bigger picture that might change the way we feel about our problems.

By training yourself to look at things from a wider perspective, you can potentially counteract your narrowing attention and selective thinking, allowing you to recognize aspects of the situation you may have overlooked, and to remember that even intense feelings can change over time, and eventually pass.

I believe this is what Marcus Aurelius meant by the high citadel. To rise above the immediate drama doesn’t mean detaching from life, but rather, gaining enough distance to see it clearly.

Join our Discussion

What changes for you when you view your problems from a much larger perspective? Does it matter more whether you expand your point of view spatially or temporally?

Does something that has been troubling you feel different when viewed from above or from the future? What did this help you recognize about what you can and cannot control?

Please share your thoughts in the comments, including anything you noticed during the exercise. You can use a hypothetical example or omit any personal details. And to help foster social learning, please take a moment, if you can, to respond to the comments of others.

Leave a comment

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can continue below with a guided audio walkthrough of the View from Above technique, followed by a downloadable Journaling worksheet.

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Immediately after they are fourteen, women are called “ladies” by men. And so when they see that they have nothing else available to them but only to be the bedfellows of men, they begin to beautify their appearance, and put all their hopes in that. It is worthwhile for us to take pains, therefore, to make them understand that they are honoured for nothing else but only for showing themselves to be modest and self-respecting.

Commentary

Contrary to some philosophers, the Stoics believed that virtues are the same in men and women. We know Cleanthes, the second head of the Stoa, wrote a book on this topic. Musonius Rufus, Epictetus’ Stoic teacher, argued that girls, as well as boys, should be educated in philosophy — two of his lectures on this point actually survive today.

Read more

A live talk and Q&A on How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

I’ll be at Indigo Pointe-Claire this Sunday, October 11, at 3pm for a talk based on How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.

I’ll be discussing Marcus Aurelius and some of the practical ways Stoic philosophy can help us build resilience, manage difficult emotions, and live with greater purpose. I’ll also talk about the relationship between Stoicism and modern cognitive behavioural therapy, with time for questions afterwards.

Indigo Pointe-Claire
6321 Trans-Canada Highway, Pointe-Claire
Sunday, October 11
Doors open: 2:30pm
Talk and Q&A: 3:00–4:00pm

Tickets are $5, or $30 including a signed paperback copy of How to Think Like a Roman Emperor. The event is limited to 20 places.

Reserve your place

Hope to see you there.

Donald Robertson

Whenever you wish to know what should be avoided or pursued, look to the supreme good, the purpose of your whole life. — Seneca, Letters, 71.2

In this article, I’m going to begin by briefly explaining how traditional cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is used in therapy and coaching, particularly cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), and then explain how ancient Stoicism approached the same basic problem differently. The Stoic approach is, of course, more philosophical, and it seems to me to be more radical and insightful. I believe it may also have some important psychological advantages, as we shall see.

The conventional approach to cost-benefit analysis is definitely useful. The problem, I think, is that it usually begins weighing up the pros and cons of some course of action before asking a more fundamental question: What are our scales supposed to measure?

The condition and character of a non-philosopher is that he never expects benefit or harm from himself, but from external things. The condition and character of a philosopher [one who loves wisdom] is that he expects all benefit and harm from himself. — Epictetus, Enchiridion, 48

How do we define these terms? What do words such as “cost” and “benefit”, “pro” and “con”, “advantage” and “disadvantage”, “help” and “harm” actually mean? Something can, in fact, only be advantageous or disadvantageous in relation to a goal or value. If we don’t make that goal explicit, we risk simply assuming that the things our culture conventionally treats as desirable —such as money, status, pleasure, approval, etc.— are ends in themselves, that they are inherently helpful (benefits) and their opposites are harmful (costs).

Socrates, and the Stoics, thought about this very differently from most people today. Their solution was to challenge the standard by which we classify things as costs and benefits in the first place. They urge us to begin by identifying our fundamental goal in life (telos), and achieving that goal is how they define flourishing (eudaimonia). The famous Stoic slogan “living in agreement with Nature” alludes to the idea that our supreme goal can also be understood as flourishing by fulfilling our natural potential as rational and social beings.

For the Stoics, therefore, the goal of life is defined more specifically as a form of wisdom, from which the other cardinal virtues derive — justice (and kindness), temperance, and courage. Philosophy means the love of wisdom, or, you might say, treating wisdom as our highest good and the greatest virtue. The Stoics are emphatic that we should only call something truly “advantageous” or “disadvantageous” in relation to that goal. Stoic cost-benefit analysis would therefore weigh up pros and cons in relation to our highest good, and the source of flourishing, which they equate with wisdom and virtue. In this article, I’m going to suggest that, although many people today may broadly agree with Stoic ethics, they can also benefit from this approach even if they adopt a more flexible definition of the fundamental goal.

The Traditional Approach

Cost-benefit analysis, or weighing up pros and cons, is a familiar technique in modern psychotherapy and coaching. For example, it’s used in cognitive therapy of anxiety disorders to help clients evaluate the short- and long-term consequences of holding certain beliefs.

Cost–benefit analysis is a cognitive intervention that teaches clients to take a pragmatic approach by examining the immediate and long-term advantages and disadvantages of assuming exaggerated threat, or alternatively, of adopting a more realistic perspective. — Clark, D. & Beck, A.T., Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders, 2010

It can just as easily be applied to behaviour. A phobic client, for instance, might compare the pros and cons of avoiding a feared situation with those of confronting it through exposure therapy.

One of the most important insights that emerges from this method is that we often exaggerate the short-term benefits of our current behaviour and overlook its long-term costs. Avoidance, for example, genuinely can reduce anxiety for a little while. Unfortunately, persistent avoidance also tends to maintain anxiety and perpetuate the phobic disorder. In the long run, the behaviour gives us more or less the opposite of what we wanted. Psychologists once called this pattern the neurotic paradox: we continue doing something because of its immediate payoff even though it ultimately makes our problem worse.

The same method is often applied to mental activity and emotions. Worrying may seem to keep me prepared for danger. Self-criticism may seem to motivate me. Anger may seem to protect me from being pushed around. Cost-benefit analysis asks whether these apparent benefits are real, how long they last, and what hidden costs they may entail. Likewise, certain beliefs, especially those taking the form of rules, can be evaluated in a similar way. We can ask, for instance, what the advantages and disadvantages are of believing “Other people should respect me, because if they don’t they’re complete jerks!” There’s an important philosophical assumption hidden in this procedure, though.

Clark and Beck’s (2010) standard Cost-Benefit Form, for instance, asks clients to list the immediate and long-term “advantages” and “disadvantages” of a belief and then circle the ones that are “most important to you.” Crucially, it does not explicitly ask the client: Advantageous for what? In other words, what goal or value is being assumed? The client is asked to rank things that have already been classified as benefits or costs, without first being required to specify the standard according to which that classification was made. As Seneca put it, though, there is no wind that is advantageous to you if you don’t know to which port you’re sailing. How can you truly say whether something is a “pro” or “con” unless you first know what you’re trying to achieve?

That ambiguity is left unresolved in many approaches to CBT and coaching. However, one specific form of CBT, called problem-solving therapy (PST), which makes more extensive use of cost-benefit analysis, does encourage clients to explicitly identify their goal first. Its usual sequence is to define the problem, set a realistic goal, generate possible solutions, and then systematically evaluate the pros and cons of each solution. As Arthur Nezu explains, “effective solutions are those coping responses that not only achieve such goals, but also simultaneously maximize other positive consequences (i.e., benefits) and minimize other negative consequences (i.e., costs)”. Even in PST, however, the goal is usually defined as a relatively concrete desired outcome: resolve this conflict, change this situation, reduce the distress it causes, find a job, become more socially active, and so on.

Another cognitive-behavioural approach to have explicitly emphasized the role of personal goals is Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), developed by Albert Ellis in the mid 1950s. From the early 1980s onward, Ellis was explicitly teaching clients to identify their personal goals and defining rational beliefs partly by whether they helped people fulfill those goals or not. However, although Ellis’s conception of rationality was fundamentally goal-relative, techniques such as cost-benefit analysis did not always require clients to make the link to a specific personal goal explicit. Moreover, not unlike PST, REBT typically assumed those goals were specific external outcomes rather than character traits or qualities of action, resembling the Stoic virtues.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a modern form of behaviour therapy, comes closer to the Stoic position. ACT therapists talk about workability: whether a thought or behaviour is actually helping someone move toward the sort of life they want and the values they have chosen. Russ Harris summarizes the basic question as:

Is what you’re doing working to give you the sort of life you want, in the long term?

ACT also distinguishes values, meaning ongoing qualities of action, such as being loving, courageous, or supportive, from goals that can simply be achieved and crossed off our list. That is much closer to the perspective I’m describing here, which derives from ancient virtue ethics. However, ACT usually applies this through questions about workability and valued direction rather than by systematically reconstructing a full cost-benefit analysis around those values.

The Need for Speed

There’s also a problem with doing a conventional cost-benefit analysis in the heat of the moment. It can easily become too laborious. If there are several possible courses of action and numerous immediate and long-term consequences to consider, the full procedure can take a while.

That’s fine when we’re reflecting beforehand or reviewing what happened afterwards. If I’m afraid of dogs, I can sit safely at home with a sheet of paper and examine the costs and benefits of avoiding them. During an actual encounter with a large dog in the park, however, I’m anxious, distracted, and short of time. I probably don’t have enough mental bandwidth to go through a detailed worksheet.

Therapists therefore often compress this sort of reasoning into much simpler questions:

• “How’s this sort of avoidance working out for me?”

• “Where’s running away from my fears getting me?”

• “Is avoiding facing my fears helpful or harmful?”

• “Could running away get me the opposite of what I want?”

Preparing ourselves, however, by reflecting systematically on cost-benefit analysis when we have time, and no distractions, makes these questions much easier to answer when we’re under stress.

These brief questions leave us with the same philosophical problem, though. Helping me to do what? Harming me in relation to what? Where am I actually trying to get? The Christian phrase quo vadis — where goest thou? — is used to highlight the need to understand what direction your life is going in.

This is why I think the Stoics offer a better perspective.

The Stoic Approach

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own psyche? — Mark, 8.36

Plato depicts Socrates discussing something surprisingly similar to cost-benefit analysis in the Protagoras. He describes an “art of measurement” (metretike techne), in which pleasures and pains are weighed against one another, although he also applies the method more generally to good and bad outcomes.

Socrates, nevertheless, seems reluctant to fully endorse this method. He thinks of it as how the majority of people might make decisions, if they were to reflect more carefully. In another of Plato’s dialogues, though, the Phaedo, Socrates appears to give the reason for his hesitation.

The exchange of one fear or pleasure or pain for another fear or pleasure or pain, which are measured like coins, the greater with the less, is not the exchange of virtue. O, my dear Simmias, is there not one true coin, for which all things ought to exchange?—and that is wisdom; and only in exchange for this, and in company with this, is anything truly bought or sold, whether courage or temperance or justice. — Plato, Phaedo

Pleasure and pain should not be the main currency we trade in throughout our lives because the “true coin” by which everything must be evaluated is wisdom.

The problem is not simply that we’ve assigned the wrong weight to money, pleasure, pain, or reputation. The problem is that we are weighing them against one another, as though they constitute the only standard of value in life. Socrates and the Stoics believed, though, that we should weigh all such external goods against our fundamental goal in life.

The Stoics certainly did not ignore consequences. Epictetus explicitly tells his students to consider what comes before an action and what follows from it. But the Stoics also insist that we have to distinguish ordinary outcomes from what genuinely benefits or harms us as human beings.

Marcus Aurelius makes this point very clearly:

If you find in human life anything better than justice, truth, moderation, courage, and, in a word, anything better than your own mind’s self-sufficiency when it enables you to act according to right reason and to accept what is assigned to you without your own choice—if, I say, you see anything better than this, turn to it with all your soul and enjoy what you have found to be best. […]

It is not right that anything different in kind—such as popular praise, power, wealth, or sensual pleasure—should come into competition with the rational and social good. […]

So simply and freely choose what is better, and hold to it. “But what is better is what is advantageous.” Well then, if it is advantageous to you as a rational being, hold to it; but if only as an animal, recognize it as such and guard your judgment without arrogance. Only make sure that you conduct the inquiry soundly. — Meditations, 3.6, trans. George Long, modified

“Advantageous to me in what way?”, is the crucial question. Something may benefit me merely as an animal: it may give me pleasure, warmth, food, physical security, or sexual gratification. Something else may benefit my reputation or bank balance. Marcus is saying that we must avoid assuming that these benefit us as rational and social human beings. In particular, what feels painful or unpleasant doesn’t necessarily harm my fundamental goal, and what feels pleasant doesn’t necessarily do me any good in that regard. Indeed, sometimes having the temperance to renounce certain pleasures or the courage to endure painful or uncomfortable sensations can be necessary in life if we want to flourish.

Notice also that Marcus says wealth, popularity, power, and pleasure are “different in kind” from the goal of flourishing as rational and social beings. He doesn’t merely put flourishing, or virtue, on one side of the scales and give it a very heavy weight, setting it against wealth, reputation, and so on. The Stoics don’t think these things belong on the same scale at all.

The very next passage continues to apply this principle:

Never regard anything as advantageous to yourself if it requires you to break your word, lose your self-respect, hate someone, become suspicious, curse others, act hypocritically, or desire anything that needs to be hidden behind walls and curtains. — Meditations, 3.7

Suppose lying would earn me an extra $20,000. A conventional first pass might list the money as a benefit and the risk of being caught as a cost. Marcus wants us to stop earlier. If obtaining the money requires dishonesty, in what sense is it genuinely “advantageous” to a rational and social human being? It may be the sort of thing most people value, as though by default, but, on reflection, how does it serve your fundamental goal in life?

Epictetus makes the same point with a much more down-to-earth example. Someone once stole his lamp. His response was that the thief had indeed acquired something but had paid an astonishingly high price for it:

For a lamp he became a thief, for a lamp he became untrustworthy, for a lamp he became like a wild beast. — Discourses, 1.29

The thief possesses the lamp. If our criterion is simply Who ended up with more property?, he has profited. Epictetus changes the criterion. What sort of person did he have to become in order to obtain it? He gained the lamp but lost part of himself in exchange, by sacrificing his own character.

This does not mean that Stoics regarded money, health, friendship, or reputation as completely irrelevant. They famously distinguished between “preferred” and “dispreferred” externals. You can think of these as typically advantageous. Money can be useful; illness can make some things much harder. The crucial point is that externals do not by themselves constitute wisdom or flourishing. Their value depends largely upon the use we make of them. This is why Epictetus defines wisdom as the “correct use of impressions” or, as we might put it, the correct use of our experiences. That way of looking at things changes cost-benefit analysis quite dramatically.

In conventional cost-benefit analysis, being criticized by your colleagues, for example, might appear in the “costs” column by default. But criticism can provide an excellent opportunity to practise wisdom, courage, and temperance. Receiving praise might, for most people, appear in the “benefits” column, although love of praise could damage my character if I become more vain, anxious, or dishonest.

The good and evil of the rational and social animal lie not in what it undergoes but in what it does; likewise, virtue and vice lie not in being acted upon but in action. —Meditations, 9.16

Ancient philosophy placed considerable emphasis on the importance of not equating appearance and reality. An opportunity that appears to be beneficial, may be harmful in reality, and vice versa. The classification of experiences as costs or benefits may therefore turn out to be less obvious than it initially seemed.

Stoic Cost-Benefit Analysis

The simplest way to adapt conventional cost-benefit analysis is simply to clarify the goal relative to which we are using the words cost and benefit.

Epictetus actually uses the metaphor of weighing things on a scale. Philosophy, he says, requires us first to discover a standard (kanōn), “just as in the case of weights we have discovered the balance.” When considering pleasure he says, “Bring it to the standard; put it in the balance.” His conclusion is that things can only be properly “judged and weighed” once we have prepared the standard by which we’re going to measure them. In other words, before we begin weighing supposed costs and benefits, we need to know what our fundamental goal is, if that’s the standard we are using to judge them.

For a Stoic, the ultimate goal is living wisely and virtuously, or fulfilling our nature as rational and social human beings. You don’t have to begin there, though. Most people cannot clearly state their fundamental goal in life. In that case, a perfectly reasonable provisional goal might be “understanding what my fundamental goal actually is”, or simply learning to live more wisely. In some cases, even “self-improvement” can serve as a good enough provisional goal, as long as it ends up being defined more carefully later.

Once you’ve chosen a course of action to evaluate, you can then proceed in two passes.

1. On the first pass, do an ordinary cost-benefit analysis. Write down whatever initially strikes you as an advantage or disadvantage of the action. Those are your current assumptions about value, and seeing them written down is useful.

2. On the second pass, revisit each item and ask how it actually relates to your fundamental goal. In some cases, the answer may appear paradoxical because what at first seemed like a harmful outcome may turn out to be an opportunity for us to help ourselves improve if we cope with it wisely.

Suppose you’re considering accepting a promotion. On the first pass you might write:

Pros
increased salary
more status

Cons
longer working hours
more difficult people to manage

Now make your goal explicit. Let’s say you define it as some sort of wisdom. Would the extra income actually help you live more wisely? Perhaps it would give you greater freedom or allow you to support other people. Perhaps it would mainly finance things you don’t particularly need.

Are longer hours inherently a cost? Perhaps. Or perhaps accepting greater responsibility would provide useful opportunities to develop patience, courage, leadership, and self-discipline. Much depends upon how you use the situation.

What about the difficult people you’ll have to manage? They may be annoying, but that doesn’t settle their value relative to your fundamental goal. They might provide exactly the sort of challenge through which you become more tactful, patient, and fair.

Conversely, the promotion might genuinely draw you away from what matters most. The Stoic approach requires examining your reasons more carefully.

The same thing happens with social approval. Suppose speaking honestly but tactfully is likely to ruffle a few feathers. “People may think less of me” initially looks like a cost. But if fear of disapproval prevents you from acting courageously or honestly, avoiding that “cost” may actually interfere more seriously with your fundamental goal.

The important thing to realize is that the external event, the consequence of your action, does not arrive with a plus or minus sign already attached to it. What matters is the use you make of it.

Cicero reports that the Stoic Panaetius organized practical deliberation around a closely related distinction. We first ask whether an action is honourable or shameful, then whether it appears advantageous or disadvantageous, and finally what to do when apparent advantage seems to conflict with what is right. For the Stoics, the final conflict is ultimately illusory: something that requires us to act viciously cannot be genuinely advantageous to us in the fullest sense.

A more concise version of the two-pass method above would be simply to cut to the chase and ask, in one pass, what the costs and benefits of the action you’re evaluating are for your own character.

Rapid Stoic Evaluation

There is another advantage to this way of doing cost-benefit analysis. In my experience, a virtue-oriented approach lends itself much better to rapid coping under stress. Conventional cost-benefit analysis tends to make us project ourselves into the future and consider several possible consequences unfolding at different times. That can be extremely useful when we’re sitting quietly at home with a notebook. Under stress, and under time pressure, in the heat of the moment, it can be cumbersome, though.

Marcus Aurelius gives himself a much more concise instruction:

With each action ask yourself: “How does this stand with me? Will I come to regret it?” […] What more am I looking for, if the present action is the work of a rational and social creature? — Meditations, 8.2

The question brings attention back to the present moment: What am I doing right now, and what sort of person am I being by doing it?

What am I making of my own mind right now? On every occasion I should ask myself this again and examine what is now going on in that part of me which they call the ruling faculty. What sort of mind do I have at this moment? — Meditations, 5.11

He goes on to ask himself whether he has the psyche of a child, a tyrant, a tame animal, or a wild beast. In short, Marcus was asking himself whether he was behaving wisely or unwisely, virtuously or viciously.

Suppose someone insults me at a party. Later, I can perform a detailed cost-benefit analysis of retaliating, remaining silent, confronting them calmly, making a joke, leaving, and so forth. In the moment, I need something quicker. I can simply ask: Would what I’m about to say be wise, just, courageous, and self-controlled?

That shifts my attention away from the insult and back toward the one thing over which I have considerably more control: my response to it.

Some useful rapid questions are:

• Am I acting in accord with my core values?

• Am I using my potential to live rationally?

• Does this help me act with wisdom?

• Am I acting with justice, fairness, and kindness?

• Am I exhibiting courage and self-control?

• Does this help me become the sort of person I want to be?

• How could this become an opportunity to practise wisdom?

• What does me more harm: my anger, or the thing I’m angry about?

You don’t need to run through all of them. The point is to find one question that works well enough to interrupt the habit, restore self-awareness, and improve your choices.

In the heat of the moment, under stress, it may be enough simply to ask yourself: “Does this serve my fundamental goal?” Or to borrow Marcus’ question: “Will I regret this?” — am I acting unwisely or going against my core values. Then a more detailed cost-benefit analysis, of the kind we discussed above, can come later.

Conclusion

There’s nothing wrong with weighing up pros and cons. The problem begins when we forget that the words pro and con, advantage and disadvantage, cost and benefit, already contain judgments about value. As Epictetus said, before weighing anything, we need to know what our scales are measuring. We need a standard against which to measure whether something is truly a cost or a benefit.

Conventional cost-benefit analysis, such as the CBT approach used by Beck, often leaves that standard unspecified. That risks encouraging us to default to the unreflective values taken for granted in our society — such as viewing wealth or reputation as ends in themselves. Problem-Solving Therapy improves on this by defining a concrete goal before weighing possible solutions. ACT goes further by explicitly asking whether our behaviour is workable in relation to our chosen values and the life we want to build.

The Stoics, however, pushed the question further still. They ask the underlying philosophical question. How are we defining “cost” and “benefit”? Ultimately, they evaluate the consequences of our actions in relation to the fundamental human goal of living wisely and virtuously. That dramatically shifts our perspective because whether something is truly an advantage or disadvantage, in that regard, clearly depends to a large extent on the use we make of our experience. The Stoic approach also seems more consistent because all decisions are ultimately referred back to the overarching philosophical-therapeutic goal of self-improvement and the attainment of flourishing.

One practical way to begin is simply to ask yourself, before acting, whether what you’re about to do serves your fundamental goal or helps you to improve your character. Later, when you have more time, you can revisit the decision and perform the more systematic two-pass analysis we discussed. If you want to practice, I’ve created an online worksheet using Google Forms that can be used for Stoic cost-benefit analysis.

Complete the Online Worksheet

The ancient Pythagorean practice of reviewing the day before sleep lends itself naturally to this. Ask yourself:

What did I do well?
What did I do badly?
What did I leave undone?

In other words, how did I use today’s experiences in relation to the person I am trying to become — and what could I do differently tomorrow?

That, I think, is the most important Stoic correction to conventional cost-benefit analysis. The things that happen to us are not simply costs and benefits waiting to be weighed in the balance. They are also opportunities to be used either wisely or unwisely.

Like most people, I was initially drawn to Stoicism because it promised emotional resilience, but I soon learned that it offered something much deeper: a whole philosophy of life. As you no doubt remember from earlier lessons, Stoicism is fundamentally a virtue ethic. Perhaps surprisingly, a very similar perspective has become extremely important over the past few decades in modern evidence-based psychotherapy. In particular, one of the leading treatments for clinical depression, known as Behavioural Activation, focuses on identifying your core values and scheduling daily activities that align with them.

Behavioural Activation

The Stoics teach us to accept uncomfortable feelings in order to learn to endure and cope with them. Many people live lives where their behaviour completely revolves around avoiding pain, anxiety, or discomfort, and seeking out pleasure, often as a form of distraction. And it turns out that depressed people tend to do that more than average. When we allow anxiety to run our lives, we have to sacrifice something, which often means abandoning activities that we potentially find more meaningful and fulfilling. Modern therapy for depression involves reducing avoidance behaviour and increasing activities that honour our core values. Similar techniques that clarify our values and align our actions with them, have been found to be helpful in treating anxiety and other problems.

A lot of traditional therapy and self-help assumed that its goal was to reduce anxiety or eliminate other unpleasant feelings. Many people share that assumption. While that might seem like common sense, there’s a problem. Research shows that people who think anxiety is really bad and desperately want to get rid of it often end up becoming even more anxious over time. We tie ourselves in knots trying to avoid feeling anxious because trying too hard to control the involuntary aspects of anxiety can make them even worse. We end up with the opposite of what we really want. Consider the state of the striving-to-be-Stoic statue in the scenario below.

We all know that trying too hard can often backfire. Trying too hard to fall asleep can keep you awake; trying too hard to relax can make you tense; trying too hard to be funny at a party can make you awkward and self-conscious; and trying too hard to avoid feeling anxious can make you even more anxious. In fact, psychologists measure a trait called “anxiety sensitivity,” basically intolerance of anxiety, which is correlated statistically with more severe worry and anxiety, including panic attacks — and, to some extent, it is even associated with depression.

People with severe anxiety symptoms tend to have higher than normal ratings of anxiety sensitivity. They are more likely to interpret the experience of anxiety itself as threatening. In fact, researchers have found that ratings of anxiety sensitivity account for nearly 20% of the variation, statistically, between people’s ratings of anxiety severity. That suggests that learning to fear anxiety may often make anxiety worse.

For example, people who suffer from panic attacks often worry that because their heart is beating very fast they’re going to collapse or have a heart attack. So they see anxiety as dangerous and feel a desperate need to avoid or control the symptoms. Of course, if you believe anxiety is dangerous, you’re going to have anxiety about your anxiety — which is second-order anxiety, and it can rapidly spiral out of control. If you regarded the anxious feelings as harmless, however, you might eventually get used to them, allowing them to calm down naturally.

Likewise, with social anxiety, people are often ashamed of looking anxious. They worry about things like, “What will other people think if they see my hands shaking?” So they try really hard to conceal how anxious they feel. But the more people worry about looking anxious, the more anxious they become. It’s a vicious cycle. If they didn’t care about looking anxious, they’d feel much less anxious. Given enough time, they may then get over their initial nervousness about how they come across in social situations.

Second-Order Anxiety

Second-order anxiety, or anxiety about anxiety, can prevent anxiety from running its course naturally and wearing off over time. I like to call it “anxiety squared” or “anxiety BOGOF” (buy one, get one free) — it’s a double-helping of anxiety.

What should your goal be, if not to control, reduce, or avoid your anxiety? Well, maybe the anxiety itself is less of a problem than the avoidance that it causes. Perhaps rather than allowing anxiety to run your life and railroad you into avoidance, a healthier goal should be to live more in accord with your true values despite feeling anxious. Perhaps the number one priority shouldn’t be “no anxiety” but instead to have an attitude that says, “I’m taking my life back, and I’m not going to let anxiety stop me!” We can view anxiety as an obstacle that blocks us from living in accord with our values. Or, we can view it, paradoxically, as an opportunity to strengthen our commitment to those values. Interestingly, when we stop fighting against anxiety, accept it, and focus instead on our values, our anxiety often diminishes anyway.

When we are more preoccupied with avoiding unpleasant feelings than flourishing and living in accord with our values, we get ourselves turned around. If we want to live in accord with our values, we’re often going to have to do so despite feeling anxious and uncomfortable. In fact, even if you were the least anxious person in the world, you would inevitably still feel some anxiety at some point in your life. You cannot completely avoid feeling anxious, except perhaps by having brain surgery. So coping with anxiety is essential to courage. And, as C.S. Lewis said, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

If you want to be a compassionate person, for example, you’ll need, at some point, to endure anxiety in order to stay true to your compassion. If you want to be creative, you’ll need, one day, to tolerate anxiety in order to be fully creative. Otherwise, avoidance of anxiety will undermine your commitment to your values. And interestingly, remaining committed to your values can help you to experience anxiety differently. Let’s test that out right now.

Activity Reflection

The ancient Stoics believed that we should challenge the belief that unpleasant feelings are harmful or unbearable and that we must avoid them, complain about them, or express them in other self-defeating ways. Instead, they believed that we can align our actions with wisdom and virtue, in order to flourish as human beings. Pain and other unpleasant feelings are classed as “dispreferred indifferents” in Stoic philosophy, meaning that they’re not evaluated as inherently “bad” or “harmful”.

Anxiety thus becomes an opportunity for us to behave courageously, rather than an obstacle that prevents us from doing so.

No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.16

Join our Discussion

What’s one situation you tend to worry about or avoid? Suppose you had faced similar situations countless times already and increased your tolerance of the associated discomfort until your attitude became: “I may not like this but I can cope with how it feels.” How might becoming more tolerant of anxiety and discomfort help you in the long run? How could you potentially gain something by facing situations that you tend to avoid? In what way might you be able to approach them as opportunities for self-improvement or the exercise of character traits you value?

Please share your thoughts in the comments, including anything you noticed during the exercise. You can use a hypothetical example or omit any personal details. And to help foster social learning, please take a moment, if you can, to respond to the comments of others.

Leave a comment

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Greek cities and settlements were scattered around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, including along the latter’s northern shores, at the edge of the vast Pontic Steppe. Here Greek colonists encountered many different peoples, most famously the Scythians — nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes whom the Greeks classed among the barbaroi, so-called ‘barbarians’, although the Greek word primarily meant those speaking a foreign tongue. Much of this ancient frontier lies within what is now southern Ukraine.

The earliest of the famous sages and philosophers associated with this region was not Greek at all but Scythian: Anacharsis, a member of the Scythian royal family who probably lived during the sixth century BCE. He travelled through the known world and acquired such a reputation for wisdom among the Greeks that later authors numbered him among the legendary Seven Sages.

Unfortunately, much of what we are told about Anacharsis comes from the grey area between ancient history and legend. Herodotus is our earliest surviving source, although most of the colourful anecdotes and sayings attributed to him come from authors writing centuries later such as Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch.

The Life of Anacharsis

Herodotus, the Greek historian, praised the Scythian nation for its exceptional resilience and resistance to invasion. Being mounted nomads without walled cities, they could tactically retreat across the steppe in the face of a stronger enemy. If the Scythians did not wish to be found, Herodotus says, they could not be caught. However, he wrote that the people around the Black Sea were generally lacking in wisdom, with one notable exception: Anacharsis.

Anacharsis was a member of the tribe known as the Royal Scythians. He was the brother of King Saulius, according to Herodotus. Later traditions added that his mother was Greek, and he was fluent in both languages. He left Scythia to explore the Mediterranean world and especially to study the customs of the Greeks.

Anacharsis arrived in Athens around 590 BCE, according to a later tradition, where he sought out Solon, the ancient lawmaker of Athens, and one of the Seven Sages. The two became good friends. Indeed, Anacharsis was known for saying that it is better to have one friend of great worth than many who are worth nothing.

He composed a lost work comparing the laws of the Scythians to those of the Greeks, which also contrasted their militaries and advocated for a simple way of life. He became known among the Greeks for his outspokenness and plain speech (parrhesia), which led to the proverbial expression “to speak like a Scythian.” Parrhesia later became a virtue especially associated with the Cynic philosophers, and to some extent the Stoics.

The Scythians were known for their horsemanship not seafaring. Despite journeying far from home, and sailing through the Hellespont, Anacharsis obviously distrusted ships. When he found that the hull of a Greek vessel was four finger-breadths thick, he started saying that those sailing in one were exactly four fingers away from death. When asked what ships were the safest, he said “The ones hauled up on the land.” When asked whether the living or dead were more numerous he replied: “In which group do you place those who are sailing?” It was a familiar complaint in the ancient world that life at sea was like a kind of living death.

When he eventually returned to Scythia, after many years travelling, he taught his countrymen Greek customs. He was murdered by his brother, King Saulius, for carrying out a Greek religious ceremony.

Self-Mastery

Anacharsis seems to have advocated moderation in the consumption of alcohol. He said that the vine bears three clusters of grapes. The first brings pleasure, the second intoxication, and the third displeasure — meaning regret. When someone asked how they could avoid becoming a drunkard, he said that they should keep before their eyes the behaviour of those who are drunk. When he was insulted by a young man during a drinking party, he said, “Boy, if you cannot bear your wine when you are young, you will be bearing water when you are old.” Water-carrying was a byword for the menial work of slaves in the ancient world. Anacharsis meant that if we don’t learn to control our desires, eventually we’ll be enslaved by them.

Asked what part of a human is both good and bad, he replied, “The tongue.” In other words, he seems to have believed that speech is bad when we don’t master our tongues, and lie, but becomes good when we learn to speak honestly and with integrity. He was famous for advocating temperance and self-mastery. Statues of him were inscribed with the words: “Master your tongue, your belly, and your genitals.” Again, that could easily be a slogan of Cynic philosophy.

Cynicism

As an outsider, from a more rural country, observing Greek civilization, Anacharsis was at times quite cynical (in the modern sense of the word). Diogenes Laertius says that Anacharsis was perplexed by the fact that among the Greeks experts competed while non-experts judged them. Plutarch gives the joke a political form: in Athens, wise men gave speeches but fools made the decisions. He meant that in the Athenian democracy, advisors were regularly called upon to speak before the Athenian Assembly but their suggestions were then put to vote among all of the male citizens present. With regard to public policy on matters such as health, construction, military campaigns, etc., the ignorant therefore judged whether or not to follow the advice of experts. Anacharsis also found it odd that the Greeks passed laws against assault but honoured athletes who fought each other in sports such as wrestling, boxing, and the pankration.

He described the agora, the Greek marketplace and civic centre, as a place designated for deceiving and cheating one another. One of his most famous sayings, quoted by Plutarch, came in response to observing Solon working on Athenian legislation. Anacharsis quipped:

Written laws are like spiders’ webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but they will be torn to shreds by the rich and powerful.

A remark that could still be made of many laws today.

Plutarch also claims that when asked to define the best form of political state, Anacharsis replied:

That republic is perfect in which, while all other things are considered equal, virtue is honored the most and vice is hated the most.

And when he was asked to name the worst enemy of human beings, he replied darkly: “They themselves.”

Anacharsis gradually evolved into a semi-legendary figure and became increasingly associated with the Cynic tradition of Greek philosophy. Cynicism emerged roughly two centuries after his lifetime, primarily through Diogenes of Sinope, who was himself a native of the Black Sea, from Sinope on its southern coast.

Around the time Bion of Borysthenes arrived in Athens in the late fourth century BCE, Anacharsis was perhaps already being appropriated by the Cynic tradition as a legendary precursor. Bion came from Olbia, a Greek city on the Scythian frontier in the same broad region from which Anacharsis emerged. Bion himself was particularly drawn to Cynicism, although he retained an eclectic view of philosophy. Though they lived centuries apart, one was Scythian and the other a Greek from the frontier with Scythia, the parallels between Anacharsis and Bion are quite striking. In both cases, resilience begins with simplicity and independence from convention: the capacity to master one’s appetites, speak frankly, and judge a civilization’s values from the outside.

Imagine you’re catching up with a friend or family member over coffee, and they start telling you about something that’s really bothering them. They’re frustrated, upset, and going over all the reasons they can’t seem to move past it.

As you listen, a little voice in your head might think, “Oh, come on… you’re not dealing with this very well!” You might even think, “Why don’t they just stop dwelling so much on the negatives?” or “Surely they can see that they’re making this harder for themselves?”

When you’re one step removed from a problem, self-defeating behaviour can seem quite apparent, and potential solutions may become more obvious. When you’re the one experiencing the problem, however, that same clarity can be much harder to find.

The good news is this:

As it turns out, you’re wiser than you realize

At the University of Waterloo, Professor Igor Grossman runs a lab doing research on wisdom, and his studies have shown that people can be significantly wiser when solving other people’s problems than when trying to solve their own.

Ancient philosophers were also well aware that we are, unfortunately, biased in many ways that interfere with our ability to solve our own problems. When asked what the most difficult thing was in life, the presocratic philosopher Thales of Miletus reputedly said: “To know oneself.” When asked what the easiest thing is he replied: “To advise another person.”

Marcus Aurelius’ court physician, Galen, wrote about this phenomenon. Galen said that because love is blind, self-love often blinds us to our own flaws. He quoted one of Aesop’s fables that says everyone is born with two sacks hanging around their neck. Before our eyes is a large sack, which we see wherever we go, containing everyone else’s flaws. However, a smaller sack hangs behind our neck. We don’t see it ourselves, according to Aesop, but it’s obvious to everyone else. It contains our own flaws.

Because it’s easy to see the flaws of others, it can also be easy to imagine how they might overcome them and improve. The Stoics, for instance, believed that we can better understand wisdom and resilience by imagining how a wiser person might react in the difficult situations we’re facing. For example, Epictetus advised his students to ask themselves what Socrates or Zeno would do in the scenarios they were struggling with themselves.

When you are about to meet somebody, in particular when it is one of those men who are held in very high esteem, propose to yourself the question, ‘What would Socrates or Zeno have done under these circumstances?’ – Enchiridion, 33

He did this with an understanding that his students could model their own behaviour after the strategies they imagined their sage or wise person would use. In other words, we can often unlock a greater capacity for wisdom, by looking at our problems from a different perspective.

Building an Inner Sage

Let’s pause for a minute here, to think about who your “inner sage” might be. Sure, you can choose to imagine how the great Stoics would react in any given situation. But who else might you consider an expert, as it relates to your own life experience? Can you think of other people, real or fictional, who have the qualities and traits you want to emulate in your own life?

Making a list of your ideal qualities and virtues isn’t easy for everyone. Some people struggle to articulate the list of traits they admire. However, even those people who are unclear about their values often have no problem telling you about the things, or people, they find annoying! Why is that?

The truth is that many people, especially when under stress, find it easier to express disapproval than admiration for others. Politicians, celebrities, and other public figures, are easy targets. These people can be described as negative role models — they show us what not to be. But if you can’t stand politicians or celebrities who you think are corrupt or dishonest, doesn’t that imply that you must value integrity and honesty?

As you think about it, you’ll notice something interesting:

So ask yourself: What do you actually dislike most about the characters of other people? What do you wish they were like instead? Could you praise someone who exemplified the opposite traits? If you hate cowards, does that not imply that you admire bravery? If lazy people infuriate you, doesn’t that suggest that you probably value industriousness — or at least that you should? It’s important to look for those positive values, and bring them to the surface, because you will naturally emulate the traits you focus upon. Although it’s easier to ruminate about the weaknesses and failings of others, that doesn’t give your brain good content for modelling. How could you do better than them? Constructing a positive alternative to the qualities we dislike in others, and emulating those good qualities, can be described as counter-modelling.

Take a few moments now to build your inner sage. Start by imagining both the things you like and dislike about the character of others. As you do, take notice of the qualities and traits you’d look for in your own sage or mentor.

You may have to look hard to hunt down glimmers of virtue in others but by studying people who have the qualities you admire, you can learn how to become a better person yourself, in your own eyes.

Now that you’ve started sculpting this wise and resilient character, ask yourself:

In the rest of this lesson, I’ll show you some techniques you can use to consult with, and learn from, your inner sage. As you apply them, you’ll probably notice new or different values that you want to add to the list of virtues you admire. That’s okay! Rome wasn’t built in a day and your inner mentor may require patient work. You can shape them, and yourself, over time.

Consulting with Your Inner Sage

Now that you’ve put together a vision of what a wise, resilient person looks like to you, let’s start learning from them. We’ll do this using a technique called modelling, or emulation.

There are two types of modelling:

1. Mastery modelling and

2. Coping modelling

Mastery modelling basically means emulating people who are perfect, or at least who perform the task confidently and successfully, without any visible difficulty.

For instance, if you have social anxiety you might be tempted to look for examples of the world’s greatest public speakers and try to be like them. Or, if you fear flying, you may be tempted to model your behaviour after the most seasoned pilot.

Unfortunately, research on this topic has highlighted a problem, which is that mastery modelling can backfire. By comparing yourself to someone you feel is already perfect, in some regard, you may find it difficult to visualize any of the steps that you need to take in order to make progress, and it can also result in you comparing yourself negatively to them — it sometimes makes progress feel impossible.

We can solve this problem by using our second type of modelling, which is called Coping modelling. This is when you look at people who are struggling, but overcoming setbacks. In other words, it’s more useful to study how people make progress than to study people who no longer need to do so. Many anxious people suffer from perfectionism, or rigid high-standards, and may rely too much on mastery modelling, but this often helps maintain their anxiety.

Thinking back to our earlier example of a fear of flying:

• If you are using Mastery modelling, you may imagine the seasoned pilot boarding the plane and entering the cockpit without feeling nervous at all. Good for them, but it may be hard for you to emulate this in your own situation!

• Using Coping modelling, you can more easily imagine the anxious flyer getting on a plane and taking off, looking a bit nervous, but doing it anyway, and coping with their feelings. Instead of picturing mastery, or perfection, therefore, try adjusting your model to imagine an anxious flier who is learning to deal with it wisely and resiliently, one step at a time.

If you have anxiety, and it feels difficult to control, it’s going to be more helpful to learn from someone who also has anxiety but copes well with the feelings, and behaves in accord with their values despite feeling nervous, rather than trying to be like someone who doesn’t seem to feel any anxiety at all. That could lead you to try to suppress your anxiety, deny it, or pretend it doesn’t exist, which we know usually does more harm than good.

Mastery modelling can still be useful, as an aspirational goal. It’s more like the destination, whereas coping is the journey. For the remainder of this lesson we’re going to focus on this journey, especially the initial steps you need to take to begin making progress. The Stoic Sage was not free from involuntary first movements of fear or distress. Although free from irrational passions in the strict Stoic sense, the Sage could still experience what later Stoics called propatheiai: automatic bodily and emotional reactions that arise before voluntary judgment.

The Sage is still an expert in coping: these reactions occur, but he responds to them exceptionally wisely. In a sense, therefore, he is somewhere between a mastery and coping model. So I prefer to think of the Stoic Sage not as a model of mastery but more as an expert in coping. He has achieved the maximum progress toward wisdom possible for a human, but he still has a fallible human nature, and experiences the propatheiai or involuntary urges and feelings of anxiety, etc. So he must cope with them, but he does so exceptionally well.

Coping modelling is especially beneficial because it can not only relieve anxiety, but also enable us to make wiser decisions under pressure. After imagining an anxious flyer getting on a plane, taking off, and then coping with turbulence, for example, you might be better equipped to deal with turbulence in the moment yourself.

Now, when you encounter turbulence while flying, instead of going into panic mode and catastrophizing as you have in the past (“This plane is definitely going down!”), you may be able to instead decide to look at the turbulence as a normal part of flying. (“While I really hate turbulence, it’s to be expected when flying.”) First, ask yourself: How might someone cope badly or unwisely with your problem? Then ask: How might someone cope well or cope wisely with it? What can you learn from those who cope better than others?

Coping modelling and consulting your inner sage can help you to make these sorts of decisions. Let’s try it out.

Epictetus famously said everything has two handles: a good handle and a broken handle. You can carry a burden if you firmly grasp the good handle, but not if you try to take hold of it by the broken one.

You can expand this logic to thinking about how you approach problems. If something is difficult or painful, you can “pick it up” by focusing on what is within your control, or you can grab the wrong handle, by focusing on what isn’t.

If you find yourself saying things like “I must not feel this way, it’s unbearable!”, or “This is awful and I can’t stand it”, you’re picking up your anxiety by the broken handle.

If you say things like “I don’t like these feelings but I can tolerate them; I can cope, if I take things one step at a time, and it’ll get easier with practice”, you’re reframing the situation and focusing on coping with your anxious feelings, like you did in the Imaginal Exposure activity we practised in Lesson 2. In other words, you’ve decided to use the handle that works.

We know from research that people who cope well often say things to themselves like:

• “Stay calm—just take it one step at a time.”

• “These feelings are uncomfortable, but they’re harmless.”

• “Focus on what I need to do right now—and accept the feelings.”

• “Notice my breathing… stay with it for a while… these feelings will pass.”

• “I can handle this; I’ve gotten through things like this before.”

• “I’m coping well. Keep going. You’re doing well.”

They’re coaching themselves through the problem. This technique is sometimes called writing a coping plan or a coping script.

Now, let’s put these pieces together in our Coping Modelling activity.

Activity Reflection

In addition to the Inner Mentor, another strategy that gets used quite a lot in cognitive therapy is asking “Would you teach this attitude to your kids (or someone else you care about)?”

If your kids had your anxiety, how would you advise them to cope – would you teach them to pick up problems by the broken handle?

If you want to teach other people good coping models, especially children, the best way to do it isn’t by lecturing them but by demonstration – making yourself a good role model by using a coping model that works.

Join our Discussion

What strategies did your coping model include? How did you imagine your wise, resilient character responding? Were there specific phrases you repeated to yourself that worked better than others? What do you find it helpful or unhelpful to tell yourself when coping with anxiety?

Share your thoughts in the comments, including anything you notice during the exercise. You can use a hypothetical example or omit any personal details.

Leave a comment

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In a nutshell, throughout this discussion, Tang’s description of Stoicism as a daily self-improvement routine isn’t accurate. It’s more based upon popular self-help books than ancient Stoicism. It’s pretty clear that the image of Stoicism being discussed here doesn’t come from direct study of the actual philosophy, either in modern commentaries or the primary sources, but from blogs, podcasts, etc. That’s just not a good way to research a philosophy. It would be as though I created a video with a Stoic critique of Daoism and based it on having listened to a handful of self-improvement podcasts talking loosely about Daoist ideas — of which there are plenty, say, in the martial arts field — without actually reading Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, or other primary sources. People complain about AI slop but, in all honesty, AI could probably have done a better job of this comparison.

The Practices

The three “Stoic” practices mentioned in Tang’s video are:

Daily journaling. There’s no evidence that what we call “journaling” today resembled a standard feature of ancient Stoicism. Epictetus does tell his students to keep notes. People sometimes refer to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as a “journal” but that’s misleading as it appears to be more like a notebook, probably maintained intermittently, than a regular daily practice of recording thoughts more systematically. Some people don’t distinguish between “notebook” and “journal” but generally in self-improvement when we use the latter term we’re talking about an ongoing daily practice of recording reflections, or doing written exercises, in a broadly consistent format. Research on the psychological effect of journaling has been mixed. How helpful it is depends how you use the method, and in some cases, certain approaches to journaling, have even been found to do more harm than good. You could easily design a good Stoic system of journaling but, strictly speaking, there’s no evidence to conclude it was a self-improvement method integral to ancient Stoicism.

Cold showers. The ancient Romans did take cold baths, if not showers, but that was a common practice not really a technique specific to ancient Stoicism. Seneca and Epictetus do both mention cold baths but it’s a stretch to portray this as especially Stoic. As with journaling, taking “cold showers” is more of a modern self-help trend, which can certainly fit in logically with Stoicism but it’s definitely not a central practice of ancient Stoicism.

Negative visualization. This is William B. Irvine’s name for a mental imagery technique described in his book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. In that book, Irvine explicitly states that the philosophy he’s describing is unlike ancient Stoicism in certain key regards — it emphasizes peace of mind over virtue, which would make it closer in some ways to Epicureanism. This technique resembles the Stoic method of premeditatio malorum, except in Irvine’s version the rationale is “hedonic adaptation”, or learning to enjoy the pleasurable things we already have more fully by visualizing their absence, which again would be more consistent with Epicureanism. The Stoic method has a very different rationale, which is more about the rehearsal of a philosophical attitude toward loss and adversity, and challenging our cognitive evaluation of adversity as something terrible. I think this mix up has led to some confusion online among people about what Stoicism recommends, and its underlying goals.

I can promise you that if you could go back in time and tell Zeno of Citium that in the 21st century, people believe that Stoic philosophy is all about journaling, taking cold showers, and “negative visualization”, for the purposes of “hedonic adaptation”, he’d be very confused.

The History

Tang says that Stoicism was “written” by Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. That’s almost true, in a sense, but also very misleading. Epictetus wrote nothing, strictly speaking, and his words were recorded by Arrian, one of his students. More importantly, though, if “written” implies that Epictetus and Marcus were the originators of Stoicism, that’s definitely not true. Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium, around 301 BCE.

Tang says that centuries before Marcus Aurelius, Chinese sages were teaching similar things. That may be true, and the historical chronology is perhaps not the most important thing at stake here, but what he says here is also misleading. Marcus Aurelius is the last famous Stoic of antiquity. Stoicism had already existed for nearly five centuries, by the time of Marcus Aurelius’ death in 180 CE, as we’ve seen that it was founded by Zeno of Citium. Moreover, the Stoics saw themselves as developing the ideas of earlier philosophers such as Socrates, Heraclitus and Pythagoras, going back to the fifth and sixth centuries BCE.

Tang is comparing this tradition to Daoism, which actually originated around the same time as Pythagoreanism, or possibly slightly later. Most modern scholars now believe that Lao Tzu was a semi-legendary figure and that the Dao de Jing was actually composed, in progressive stages, around the fourth and third centuries BCE. That would, in other words, date it to the century or so after the death of Socrates, from whom the Stoics derive most of their ethical teachings. The tradition from which Stoicism derives may, therefore, be slightly older than Daoism. Of course, we can never be completely certain which came first. In any case, it’s certainly misleading if the viewer comes away thinking that we can securely state that Daoism is centuries older than Stoicism.

The Goal

In a nutshell, the quotes he takes from Stoicism and Daoism seem to me to be far too selective. They’re cherry-picked to align with the video’s agenda. So much so that you could, I think, easily reverse the comparison Tang is attempting to make in this video, by finding quotes in Daoist texts that advocate relentlessly guarding your own mind, and ones from Stoic texts that advocate a less is more approach. See the passage in the conclusion below, for example.

He says that the goal of Stoicism is “inner peace”. That’s certainly incorrect. Again, Irvine makes ataraxia (peace of mind) not arete (virtue) this the goal of his unconventional form of “Stoicism”, which perhaps contributed to this confusion. Ancient Stoicism consistently made virtue its supreme goal, and the Stoics were very aware of the significance of distinguishing between that and inner peace. “Inner peace” (ataraxia), the goal of Epicureanism, is not entirely under our control. (The supreme goal of Epicureanism was hedone or pleasure, but they considered its most important form to be ataraxia or peace of mind — a notoriously confusing point.)

Put simply, the ancient Stoics believed making inner peace our supreme goal, in the way the Epicureans did, would risk leading to avoidance, and frustration, as well as other problems. Instead they made virtue, which is defined as a quality of our voluntary actions, and therefore up to us, our supreme goal, and ataraxia, if at all, is of value only as a consequence of virtue. For instance, the “inner peace” that might come from injecting heroin, or by withdrawing from society into seclusion, say, would not be considered intrinsically valuable by Stoics. The Stoics generally preferred to speak of apatheia rather than ataraxia, which more specifically refers to overcoming irrational desires and aversions (passions) rather than general peace of mind, although even apatheia is more like a correlate of virtue in Stoic philosophy rather than the supreme goal itself.

One of the main points in the video is that Stoicism allegedly tells us to “hold the line” and stand firm like a rock whereas Daoism teaches us to be soft like water. This reading takes metaphors too superficially and literally, though. When Marcus says he should be like a rock, against which water crashes — an image also found in Seneca, so probably borrowed from an earlier author — he does not mean that Stoics should be completely unyielding toward external events. Ironically, he means that by having a certain amount of flexibility, in one regard, we become as hard as a rock, in another regard. You could call it a paradox. Stoic literature is also full of references to being flexible and yielding in relation to our desires. The quote that Tang uses at the start of his video “The obstacle is the way”, ironically, makes precisely this point. Marcus means that the wise adapt smoothly to obstacles, like water flowing around them.

Indeed, Zeno famously defined the goal of Stoicism, or eudaimonia, as a “smooth flowing life”, and this metaphor of water flowing recurs throughout Stoic literature. Epictetus has Zeno’s image of the Stoic way of life as water flowing in mind when he says, centuries later, “Do not seek for events to happen as you wish, but wish for events to happen as they do happen, and you will flow well” (Enchiridion, 8).

Conclusion

Off the top of my head, the parallel between Stoicism and Daoism that always struck me is captured in the following passages. (I think I may perhaps already have pointed to this similarity in one of my earlier books on Stoicism.) First, here are two excerpts from Epictetus:

As in walking you take care not to step upon a nail or turn your foot, so likewise take care not to hurt the ruling faculty of your mind. And, if we were to guard against this in every action, we should undertake the action with the greater safety. — Enchiridion, 38

The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is this: […] he watches himself as if he were an enemy and lying in ambush. — Enchiridion, 48

So the Sage is cautious like someone who walks barefoot, basically, and he is mindful of himself as though always on the lookout for an ambush. (He’s clearly not hypervigilant for threat, incidentally, as the Stoics don’t view external events as inherently dangerous.)

Tang, as we’ve seen, attributes the idea of continually guarding the mind to Stoicism but he believes that Daoism rejects this. However, the Dao de Jing employs basically the same image as Epictetus, of walking carefully, to make more or less the same point about guarding the mind against “danger on all sides”.

The wise ones of old had subtle wisdom and depth of understanding,
So profound that they could not be understood.
And because they could not be understood,
Perforce must they be so described:
Cautious, like crossing a wintry stream,
Irresolute, like one fearing danger all around. — trans. Lin Yutang, italics added

Of course, a few lines later, Lao Tzu says the Sage is “Fluid and yielding, like ice about to melt” but the Stoics also say similar things. Basically, both these traditions try to articulate their ideas by using contrasting images, and paradoxes, which can lead to a lot of confusion if we’re too selective about which passages we pick from each source for comparison.

Forget all else, Lucilius, and concentrate your thoughts on this one thing: not to fear the name of death. Through long reflection make death one of your close acquaintances, so that, if the situation arises, you are able even to go out and meet it. — Seneca, On Earthquakes

One day you will die. In many ways, though, death is already present with us throughout life. First, and most obviously, there is the fact that we are, most of us, bereaved several times. We also witness the bereavements suffered by others, and hear about deaths happening all over the world. As children, we learned that animals and plants die — as adults we have already come to know that everything born must die.

Then there is death in another sense: we are, in fact, dying every day. This is not the body to which your mother gave birth, as the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius put it. The child dies to become the adolescent. The adolescent dies to become the man. The boy is father to the man but also predeceases him. We die every night when we go to sleep and awaken a different person, although we often barely notice what has been lost in the process.

Third, death is present in our awareness that every thought and act could, for all we know, be cut short. Whatever we begin may, by its nature, insofar as it takes time to complete, be interrupted. We’re always, inescapably, conscious at some level of the utter fragility of our existence. No matter how much we try to ignore it, we know, each moment of our lives, that our life could suddenly stop.

The Stoic teacher Epictetus told his students to learn from the slaves whispering memento mori, and words to that effect, in the ears of generals and emperors as they rode in triumph through the streets of Rome. I think for many people, as I write this, the threat of death is on their minds more than usual. A few months ago I found myself lying in a hospital bed staring at the ceiling, hoping my heart would continue beating. I didn’t close my eyes and go to sleep that night just in case I didn’t wake up. A few weeks later, first thing in the morning, my phone rang and the stranger’s voice on the other end told me that one of my parents had died suddenly, in another country. We’re surrounded by death. We can try to close our eyes and shut it out but it won’t go away. It’s already there inside us, waiting. Et in arcadia ego — even in paradise, death is waiting.

The Ancient Philosophy of Death

Accepting our death can become a philosophy of life. One of the first men to speak openly about the philosophy of life and death in this way was the ancient Greek Sophist known as Prodicus of Ceos. I think it’s imperative today that we rediscover the ancient Greek wisdom concerning death that used to be part of our heritage.

Contrary to what I’ve said above, Prodicus taught that death does not exist, either for the living or for the dead. He meant that the living cannot know what death is like until they experience it — it’s just a word or something we perceive happening to other people. Death does not exist yet for the living; yet those who are dead no longer exist themselves. In the eponymous dialogue, Socrates explains this argument to his friend Axiochus, who is dying, and adds “Vain then is the sorrow in Axiochus grieving for Axiochus!”

Socrates describes the argument, perhaps also from Prodicus’ speech on death, that the state of nonexistence to which we permanently return after our demise is no different than the one we inhabited, for countless aeons, before we were born. (This “Argument from Symmetry” is usually attributed to the Epicureans, I know, but here we’re told it predates their school by well over a century.)

There’s a wonderful illustration, by the way, of the same idea in an anecdote about Diogenes the Cynic. When he was dying, Diogenes reputedly asked his followers to simply dump his body outside the city walls. They were horrified and said that wild beasts would eat his corpse if it wasn’t disposed of properly. Diogenes calmly said that in that case he’d like them to leave his staff beside his body so that he could use it to beat back the animals. His friends were confused and said that if he was dead he surely wouldn’t know to lift his staff and defend himself — he’d be unconscious. Exactly, said Diogenes, so why on earth would I care, you fools, whether or not my corpse is being eaten? Death, as Seneca put it, is a release from all suffering, and a boundary beyond which our ills cannot pass.

However, to return to our friend, Axiochus objects that supposing death is a state of nonexistence free from pain, nevertheless he is right to fear losing his life, because death is also devoid of pleasures. Life contains many opportunities for enjoyment, he contends, of which he is about to be robbed. Socrates nods and replies that his friend will not, however, be at all conscious of that deprivation. It seems Axiochus can’t escape that easily from the steamroller logic of Socrates’ argument.

This line of reasoning is, of course, not meant to justify taking one’s own life. Socrates is consoling Axiochus about the inevitability of his own impending death from illness. However, Socrates seems also to agree with most of these arguments, and he goes on living. The Stoic ideal holds that the Sage, the man we should seek to emulate, “finds it a joy to live and in spite of that is not reluctant to die”, accepting his mortality and facing death with dignity when the time comes. Life gains value, paradoxically, from our acceptance of death.

The Value of Living

Everyone knows that a brush with death can make you reappraise your priorities in life. What does that really mean, though? It’s not the same for everyone, of course. For most people, nevertheless, it’s pretty similar. We realize that a lot of the things we previously thought were really important, and invested a lot of time and energy in, aren’t actually important at all. That’s powerful medicine. It shatters the illusions that we inherit from the society around us: all the consumerism, celebrity culture, narcissism, egotism, hedonism — all that kind of stuff. To learn how to die, is to unlearn how to be a slave, as Seneca puts it.

Wealth and reputation… You can’t take any of it with you — even if you were going anywhere. Alexander the Great knew that. He reputedly asked for his body to be carried through the towns with his hands dangling out either side of the casket so that everyone could see that he left the world empty-handed. It’s the revelation that most of the things people make out to be so very important in life are not — that it’s all a big con, basically. The Stoics and Cynics called this the τύφος (smoke) that surrounds us in life — smoke and mirrors.

The Stoics called this ability to rise above our fears “magnanimity” (μεγαλοψυχία), which literally means having a big soul or vast mind in Greek (and Latin). All other virtues, they said, depend upon this quality.

For if magnanimity by itself alone can raise us far above everything, and if magnanimity is but a part of virtue, then too virtue as a whole will be sufficient in itself for well-being — looking down upon all things that seem troublesome. — Diogenes Laertius

Accepting the certainty of our own death is the royal road to Stoic magnanimity, the ability to become bigger than our troubles, and look down upon both pain and pleasure with equanimity. It’s the source of our moral and psychological freedom.

The Love of Wisdom

The Stoics believed that grasping this realization and holding on to it is, in a sense, the goal of life. It’s the beginning of wisdom — the epiphany that reveals all “external goods” such as wealth and reputation are necessarily ephemeral and ultimately vacuous. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and by that he meant first and foremost examining our knowledge of virtue, our highest good. The meaning of philosophy as a way of life, for Socrates and the Stoics, is right there in its name, which literally means the love of wisdom. The way of the philosopher consists in cherishing insights such as these and viewing them as worth fighting to maintain.

Seneca thought that, ironically, an excessive fear of dying often leads to an early grave — nobody, I think, would dispute that. He goes much further, though, and says that the man who fears his own death will never do anything worthy of life. When we face death, if we can bear to look him in the face we have the opportunity to learn something that liberates us forever. If we dare to lift the bogeyman’s scary mask, as Socrates put it, each one of us may make the discovery that not wealth or reputation but wisdom is the goal of life.

Conquering Death-Anxiety

Marcus therefore advises contemplating death in each action, to focus our attention on its true worth:

During every one of your actions pause at each step and ask yourself: “Is death deemed catastrophic because of the loss of this?” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Seneca likewise imagines that we should respond to those afraid to die by saying “So are you living now?” We cannot be truly alive so long as we are enslaved by fears, and dread of death itself is the mother of all fears. The philosophy that makes us fearless in the face of death, says Seneca, is a battle plan “effective against all weapons and every kind of enemy”.

In his essay On Earthquakes, Seneca likewise emphasises the folly of fearing death by earthquakes or any other specific thing, when death surrounds us and can strike us down in an infinite number of ways. We can as easily be killed by a single stone as an entire city collapsing on our heads. He writes: “If you wish to fear nothing, consider that all things are to be feared.” Elsewhere he says in his letters: “It is not clear where death is waiting for you, so you should wait for it everywhere.” Epictetus makes the same point: “Do you want me, then, to respect and do obeisance to all these things, and to go about as the slave of them all?” To be everywhere is to be nowhere — and to fear everything is to fear nothing.

Know Thyself and be Mortal

The Delphic Temple of Apollo had several maxims engraved on a pillar at its entrance. According to legend, these went back to the Seven Sages of Greece, in the 6th century BC. Their influence permeated Western philosophy, in other words, from its very beginning. The most famous of these Delphic maxims was undoubtedly “Know thyself.” Seneca claimed that it was to be interpreted as a reference to human mortality:

Those whom you love and those whom you despise will both be made equal in the same ashes. This is the meaning of that command, “Know thyself”, which is written on the shrine of the Pythian oracle. — Seneca, Moral Letters

“What is man?”, asks Seneca. Nothing more than a potter’s vase, which can be shattered into pieces by the slightest knock.

You were born a mortal, and you have given birth to mortals: yourself a weak and fragile body, liable to all diseases, can you have hoped to produce anything strong and lasting from such unstable material? — Seneca, Moral Letters

The oracle also said “Think things befitting a mortal” (Φρόνει θνητά). To know ourselves is to remember that we are mortal, reason accordingly, and live accordingly.

Seneca told himself each night as he closed his eyes to sleep that he might not awaken to see the morning. Marcus Aurelius told himself repeatedly to contemplate his own death. In fact, he told himself to imagine he was already dead, and living on borrowed time.

In a world torn by hope and worry, dread and anger, imagine every day that dawns is the last you’ll see; the hour you never hoped for will prove a happy surprise. — Horace, Letters

This notion of contemplative meditation on the inevitability of death, and the transience of life, was common in philosophy until recent centuries. The iconic image of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a young philosophy student, holding aloft the skull of his childhood friend Yorick would have been recognisable to Elizabethan audiences as an allusion to common philosophical practices that involved contemplating images of death. It should make you realize, if nothing else, that anyone who resents or complains about absolutely anything in life is a rank hypocrite — because we’re ultimately all here by our own choosing.

The Contemplation of Death

Plato wasn’t there to witness Socrates’ execution. He portrays Phaedo, a beautiful and talented young man whom Socrates had rescued from life as a slave in an Athenian brothel, recounting the event, with awe, in the dialogue that bears his name:

Although I was witnessing the death of one who was my friend, I had no feeling of pity, for the man appeared happy both in manner and words as he died nobly and without fear. — Plato, Phaedo

In prison, awaiting execution, Socrates spent his final hours debating amiably with his friends about philosophy. Given the nearness of his own end, he chose to explore the question of what happens to the soul after death. He coolly examines several possibilities while keeping an open mind, tolerant of uncertainty.

He explains his view that philosophy is essentially a lifelong “practice of death” (melete thanatou), as the reason for his surprising indifference. He says that those who practice philosophy in the right way are constantly in training for death. His friends ask him to speak to them as though a little child remains deep within them who still fears death, and to reassure them there is nothing scary behind the mask of this bogeyman. He replies that they should “sing a charm” over their inner child every day until they have charmed away his fears. True philosophers, he says, fear dying least of all men.

The “contemplation of death” therefore emerged right at the most dramatic moment in the birth of Western philosophy, spoken at the heart of what Socrates called his philosophical swansong. When the time came, he calmly drank the poison and waited to die, something he’d clearly reconciled himself to, and faced with supreme equanimity and an attitude of philosophical curiosity.

It is not the things themselves that disturb men, but their judgements about these things. For example, death is nothing catastrophic, or else Socrates too would have thought so, but the judgement that death is catastrophic, this is the catastrophic thing. — Epictetus, Enchiridion