Image generated from DALL·E 2 with the prompt “modern stoics”
One of my New Year's resolutions is to be more focused and disciplined. To help achieve this, a friend and I decided to read A Handbook for New Stoics by Massimo Pigliucci together this year. The book offers 52 weekly exercises that teach us how to train our minds with Stoic practice.
Stoicism is a Greco-Roman philosophy that began around 300BCE with Zeno of Citium. Stoic ideas influenced thinkers throughout the Western history (e.g. Descartes) and inspired an effective psychotherapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in the 1950s.
The Stoics believe the best way to live our life is to “live according to nature.” To decide how to live meaningfully (ethics), one has to understand how the world works (physics), and reason appropriately about it (logic). This leads us to the idea of living according to nature—using reasoning-based problem solving to improve social living, as we are social creatures who are deeply interdependent with other people.
To do so, the Stoics, and Epictetus in particular, translate this into living by practicing three disciplines: desire, action, and assent. The Discipline of Desire teaches us what to want (or to avoid), while the Discipline of Action shows us how to act in social situations. The Discipline of Assent helps us make correct judgments about the obstacles that arise in life.
The central concept of Stoicism is the “dichotomy of control,” arguing we should focus our energy on affecting what we can control while regarding everything else as indifferent. This practice is the path toward ataraxia, the Greek word meaning serenity. By training ourselves to only want what is completely in our control, which is the promise of the Discipline of Desire, we become serene.
According to Epictetus, “thought, impulse, and the will to get (and to avoid)” are ultimately under our control. Accounting advances in cognitive sciences, modern Stoics define them as follow:
Thought is the judgment that things are inherently good or bad; can be implicit or explicit
Impulse is the urge to act based on value judgments
Will to get and will to avoid is deciding if it is worth spending the energy, time, and money
Although these three things are in our control, which we can make a conscious decision of, they’re sometimes influenced by external factors (e.g. other people’s opinion) and internal factors (e.g. physical sensations and cravings). Epictetus concludes that everything which is not in our own doing are not under our control (e.g. the body, property, reputation).
Image generated from DALL·E 2 with the prompt “modern stoics”
1. Focus on what’s completely in your control
Counterintuitively, aversion can be seen as a type of desire: the desire to avoid misfortune. The important idea here is to redirect our aversion away from things that we dislike but are not in our power, and to transfer it to things that we can completely control.
2. Take an outside view
The Stoics suggest that we should cultivate sympathy more than empathy. Sympathy is a feeling of sincere concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful, while empathy is actively sharing another’s experiences on an emotional level to the extent possible.
This is initially counterintuitive to me, especially as a UX researcher, because our job is to empathize with users and design studies to enable others to fully understand, mirror, and share another person's expressions, needs, and motivations to the extent possible, so we can create products and services that are driven by real user needs.
The Stoics, along with modern psychology and philosophy, further explain that empathy tends to be disproportionate to the situation (i.e. we feel more empathy for people we know or see directly), and does not scale up (i.e. it is impossible to feel empathy for anonymous thousands of people, regardless of how deserving they are).
Whereas sympathy is informed by reason and is therefore more wide ranging. We can sympathize with people we don’t know or whose specific situation we have never experienced, because we’re able to recognize that similar situations would be distressing for us, and that it would be unjust both for us and for anyone else to have to suffer through them.
It’s similar to taking a third-person view of the things we go through personally. This allows us to develop a more balanced and reasonable judgment, as if these events do not touch us directly. This approach also aligns with the method of practicing more self-sympathy when facing hardship, which is common in psychotherapy.
And here comes one of my favorite exercises: write about a problem or worry and offer yourself some advice from the outside perspective each night for a week. For example, instead of writing “I feel nervous about …” start by writing “You feel nervous about …” Self-empathy may lead to magnifying internal turmoil, whereas self-sympathy helps us take a step back to take the emotion out of frustrated situations, so we can see things in an objective and clearer way.
Generated from DALL·E 2 with the prompt “statue of stoics pondering with a blue sky”
Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Practicing Modern Stoicism series to learn more about my journey.