The Stoics

About 2000 years ago, a slave and an emperor arrived at the same idea about how to live. That alone makes it worth a look. Ideas that work only for the lucky are not tools. Ideas that work from the bottom of society to the top might be.

Who the Stoics were

Epictetus was born a slave in the first century and spent his early life owned by another person. Freed as an adult, he taught philosophy, and his students wrote his lectures down. Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the Roman world, and at night in a war camp he wrote private notes to himself that were never meant to be read by anyone else. We now call them the Meditations. Seneca was a wealthy writer and political adviser who wrote letters about how to handle setbacks, anger and time. Different lives, same toolkit.

The school itself is older than all three of them. It began around 300 BC in Athens, where a teacher named Zeno lectured from a painted porch, a stoa in Greek, which is where the name comes from. For the next several centuries the ideas were argued over, tested and refined by people whose actual jobs were running households, courts, armies and eventually an empire. Stoicism was never a puzzle for a classroom. It was a working manual, and the parts that survived are the parts its users kept because they helped.

The dichotomy of control

The core Stoic move is a sorting exercise. Some things are up to you: your judgements, your choices, your effort, how you respond to what happens. Some things are not: other people, the weather, results, the past, your reputation in other heads. The Stoics argued that most wasted anguish comes from pouring effort into the second column, where effort cannot land.

You cannot control whether the exam was hard. You can control how you prepare for the next one. You cannot control what someone said about you. You can control whether you spend the evening replaying it. Aiming your effort at the first column does not shrink the problem, but it stops you spending energy where it buys nothing. Modern cognitive approaches to psychology echo the same insight in general terms: how we interpret events shapes how we react to them, and interpretations, unlike events, can be worked on.

The archer, and the things in between

The obvious objection is that most things sit in between. Your exam result is not fully outside your control, because study moves it, but it is not fully inside it either, because you do not write the questions or mark the paper. The Stoics had thought of this, and their answer was to split the in between things into parts. Their example was an archer. The archer controls the training, the choice of target, the aim and the moment of release, and once the arrow leaves the string, a gust of wind owns the rest. So the archer's job is defined as shooting well, not as hitting, and a good archer can do the job perfectly and still miss.

The same split works on anything. Your part of an exam is the preparation and the sitting. Your part of a team tryout is the training and the showing up. Your part of a friendship is your own conduct inside it, never the other person's. Once you define your job as your part done well, a miss stops being evidence that you failed at your job, because hitting was never the job. It was the hoped for result of doing the job.

Sorting a real week

Take a concrete week: you have a maths exam Friday, your group chat has gone strange since Tuesday, and Saturday's game is forecast for rain. Run the sort. The questions on the paper, the marker and the rain are not yours. The hours you put in before Friday, whether you ask the teacher about the topic that confuses you, and whether you sleep properly on Thursday night are yours. Whatever was meant by the message that started the chat weirdness is not yours, and neither is what the others think of it, but whether you ask the person directly instead of guessing is. Boots packed and warm up done properly are yours; the weather never was. Written out like this, the week shrinks from three open ended worries into five or six specific actions, and specific actions are things a person can actually do on a Wednesday.

Why worrying feels like work

If effort poured into the second column buys nothing, why do we all keep pouring it there? Because worry impersonates work. Replaying the conversation feels like dealing with the conversation, and rehearsing the disaster feels like preparing for it, so the brain collects a small sense of doing something while nothing is actually done. The sorting exercise breaks the impersonation. Once a worry sits in the not mine column on paper, the question changes from what if to what now, and what now either has an answer in the first column or it has no answer at all, in which case the worrying was pure cost.

What Stoicism is not

The word stoic now means showing no feelings. That is a misreading. The Stoics felt grief, fear and anger like everyone else, and their writing says so plainly. The practice was never to suppress feelings or to stop caring. It was to notice the feeling, then choose where the effort goes next. Marcus cared enormously about doing his job well. He just refused to spend the night raging at things no rage could move.

A fair criticism

Be honest about the weakness too. Taken lazily, release what you cannot control can slide into accepting things that should be fought, in your own life or in the world. The Stoics had an answer, which is that acting well is always in your control, so the philosophy demands action rather than excusing you from it. It is also fair to note that Seneca preached simplicity while being one of the richest men in Rome. Test the ideas, not the salesmen.

The rest of this topic keeps drawing on these people. The perspective lesson borrows their zoom out and their journal, and the gratitude lesson is a modern test of a habit Seneca wrote about at length. So hold onto the two columns as you go, because nearly every tool that follows is a way of working on the first one.