0:15

Pushkin. We

0:23

all have bad days. Our laptops

0:26

die, our relationships fail, our

0:28

bosses let us go. I'll freely

0:30

admit that I sometimes get weighed down

0:32

by it all, that all those bad events

0:34

can make me feel like I'm a long way

0:36

from my goal of being happier. And

0:39

that's when I try to think of James Stockdale

0:42

and a particularly bad day in his

0:44

military career. It

0:46

was September ninth, nineteen sixty

0:48

five. James was flying his jet

0:50

low over North Vietnam.

0:53

Stockdale was hit by Enemy five and

0:56

had to reject. As

0:59

he parachuted down to earth, he recognized

1:01

that he was enjoying probably his final

1:04

seconds of freedom and that the next

1:06

five years minimum would be hell.

1:09

He was looking at beatings, torture, and

1:11

a long imprisonment. But

1:13

as enemy soldiers on the ground took shots at

1:15

the pilot, ripping his parachute, Stockdale

1:18

gave himself a bit of a pep talk. He

1:20

whispered, I'm entering the world

1:23

of Epictetus. Epictetus

1:26

was born into slavery two thousand years ago.

1:29

His Roman master permitted him to study an

1:31

ancient philosophy called Stoicism.

1:33

Eventually, Epictetus gained his freedom

1:35

and became one of the most important stoic philosophers

1:38

in history. His ideas about

1:40

how to live a happier life have continued helping

1:42

people long after his death. In

1:45

fact, his lessons on how to deal with challenges

1:47

and how to put setbacks into perspective

1:50

helped James Stockdale survive more than

1:52

seven years as a prisoner of war. They've

1:55

also helped me through some difficult times

1:57

and more than two thousand years later. I bet

1:59

they'll help you too, So welcome

2:02

to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients with me,

2:04

Doctor Larry Santos. Okay,

2:09

this is Bill Irvine, testing professor

2:12

of philosophy at Right State University.

2:14

Yes, I'm recording his latest book,

2:16

The Stoic Challenge, is probably my book

2:18

of the year. It's just curious.

2:20

But it was a great time to launch a book on

2:22

dealing with setbacks because we

2:24

had COVID come along, which was for

2:26

a lot of people a major setback. I

2:29

talked to Bill for one of our bonus episodes on the coronavirus,

2:32

but we were only able to scratch the surface

2:34

of what stoicism can really teach us today.

2:36

So I invited Bill back to school us on

2:39

Stoicism in general and on my favorite

2:41

Stoic of all, Epictetus. So

2:43

Stoicism was cobbled together

2:45

from other philosophies that existed in three

2:48

hundred BC by Zeno

2:50

of Sidium. This was in Athens,

2:53

it got to Rome in the first

2:55

century BC. There are

2:57

the four greatest Roman

3:00

Stoics, and those would be

3:02

Seneca, Musonius, Rufus, Epictetus,

3:05

and Marcus Aurelius. Seneca,

3:08

besides being a Stoic philosopher,

3:11

he was also an investment banker, a

3:13

playwright, counselor to an

3:15

emperor. People get this idea that Stoics

3:18

were just interested in preserving

3:20

comme at all costs, but when you look at actual

3:23

Stoic history, you realize that a

3:25

lot of them were very busy individuals

3:27

where there was that external success

3:29

going on, but that wasn't the key thing to

3:32

them. After Seneca was Musonius

3:34

Rufus. Musonius had his own

3:37

school. That was what you did. There were no colleges,

3:39

so you couldn't get a job teaching in a college.

3:42

So what you did is you started a school. For

3:44

you to have a successful

3:46

school, you needed to have an

3:48

intellectual product that would draw students

3:51

someplace where they would get the skills they would

3:54

need in life, skills like how to

3:56

be a success in politics, how to

3:58

be a success in law, but

4:00

how to have a good life was also a

4:02

component. One of the students

4:05

was Epictetus. We

4:08

don't know a lot about Epictetus.

4:10

He was born in about fifty

4:13

CE and started

4:15

out life as a slave.

4:18

You know, he wasn't out laboring in the fields,

4:20

but he was acquiring basic

4:22

skills of writing. Remember, they didn't

4:25

have xerox machines, they didn't have typewriters.

4:27

And apparently at one point he got

4:30

a beating severe enough to

4:32

make him a lame slave. So he was spent

4:35

his life lame. Finally

4:38

succeeded in getting his freedom

4:40

and used it to start his own

4:42

philosophy school. What made

4:45

him special he came up with a

4:47

lot of catchy sayings that

4:50

became what was known as the Handbook or

4:52

in Caridian. And it's this short

4:54

little thing. You can read it in an

4:56

hour, and then you can spend the

4:58

next decade pondering its contents.

5:01

Still as some continued to rumble

5:04

along until the twentieth century,

5:06

when as far as I can tell it went

5:09

into a decline. I mean, so

5:11

I was a college student starting in nineteen

5:13

seventy philosophy major

5:16

and was not exposed to Stoicism

5:19

because we weren't exposed to philosophies of

5:21

life, because that didn't really matter.

5:24

And the beautiful thing is, right now

5:26

we're in the midst of a Stoic renaissance.

5:28

So that's that's kind of the backstory

5:31

on Stoicism, and that's the kind of the place

5:33

that Epictetis has in that story. One

5:36

of the like maybe twentieth century adopters

5:38

of Stoicism is Admiral James Stockdale,

5:41

And you know, when his plane

5:43

was shot down, he self reports

5:45

saying that, you know, he knew that he was going to be stuck

5:47

there for five years at least, and he was entering

5:50

the world of Epictetus. So was the quote

5:52

that he had. Yeah, Now this was the Vietnam

5:54

War. So he became a prisoner,

5:57

not at all a very pleasant existence,

5:59

you know, not enough to eat, cruelty,

6:01

being beaten, and for

6:04

him it would have been a complete

6:06

turnaround, you know, just one hundred

6:08

and eighty return in the course of his life,

6:10

because he went from being an

6:12

airplane pilot. Presumably I must

6:15

have been a college graduate, went

6:17

from this life of being a star

6:20

in some sense, a rock star, and now

6:22

suddenly you're the low man on the

6:24

totem poll, and then you wake up

6:26

and then the question is what will

6:28

I find to eat today? And will I live

6:31

till tomorrow? So he

6:33

was an early adopter of stoicism.

6:35

But you know, think how fortunate he was to

6:37

have been exposed to it before

6:40

being shot down, because it gave him

6:43

a way of dealing with the

6:45

things he was about to experience.

6:47

And you know, this is a line from Epictetus.

6:50

It isn't what happens to us that

6:52

has the effect. It's how we frame

6:55

what happens to us. It's how we interpret

6:58

what happens to us. And so we may not have

7:00

a lot of power over what happens

7:02

to us, but we have considerable

7:05

power over what we do with

7:07

what happens to it, with the psychological

7:09

frame we put it in. And that was one of

7:11

the fantastic things about Epictetis

7:13

is that he was kind of incredibly practical. I mean,

7:15

I think it's one of the reasons that Stockdale brought

7:17

up Epictetis in particular and not just Stoics

7:20

in general, which it seems like he'd read, which

7:22

is the Epictetis was really

7:24

trying to give us almost like early self help

7:26

it but it's you know, I think the handbook almost

7:29

sounds like a self help book in some ways.

7:31

But one of the things I noticed in the discourses is

7:33

he talks about this idea that turning

7:36

to stoicism is sort of like going to the hospital,

7:38

and like what a stoics job, a stoic philosopher's

7:40

job is is to kind of be like a doctor in a hospital.

7:43

And he notes that like students ought not to walk

7:45

out in pleasure but in pain, right, And

7:47

I think this is sort of kind of coming to

7:49

terms with the Stoic philosophy and

7:51

what it means. It's like, you kin'd have to accept

7:53

that there are certain things that you can't control. And so

7:56

the Stoic view is that you can achieve

7:58

harmony in life, you can achieve happiness, but it

8:00

kind of takes a little bit of work. Yeah, So

8:03

a Stoicism had several different aspects.

8:05

So if you're a Stoic philosopher, you're interested

8:07

in science, you might be interested

8:10

in logic, because you know your students are

8:12

going to have to learn how to reason if

8:14

they want to be lawyers, if they want to be a

8:16

politicians. But beside

8:18

that, you're interested in a philosophy of

8:20

life, and most people lack that.

8:22

They just go from day to day, or they look around

8:24

at the goals other people are forming and

8:26

assume that the other people have done their homework.

8:29

Usually they have and they've just been copying

8:31

their neighbors. The Stoics,

8:34

though, were very careful to add that on

8:36

as a component in their philosophy,

8:39

and they didn't just talk about grand

8:42

theories and principles and everything

8:45

else. The question was is

8:47

their practical advice that

8:49

they had to offer. It should

8:51

have takeaways. There should be

8:53

lectures that people can come to and

8:56

then go away from thinking hard,

8:58

not about oh, some wonderful principle,

9:01

but about woe. The way I'm

9:03

living my life. I seem to be making

9:05

some basic mistakes because I kind of want

9:07

to dig into some of the Epictetus

9:09

insights. Specifically, one of the ideas

9:12

that comes out is this Greek

9:14

term. I'm going to mess up the Greek term, but it's this

9:17

term epihenum, something

9:19

that in our power. It's great. It's great

9:21

to me, great to you too. But

9:24

this is this idea of things that are sort of up to

9:26

us, right, And that classically

9:28

is how Epictetus started his book,

9:31

Give me a sense of how the Handbook starts. And this huge

9:33

insight that Epictetius brought to people in

9:35

English, what I call it, and a lot of people

9:38

do this too, They call it the dichotomy of control.

9:40

So a dichotomy is an either or, it's one

9:42

or the other, and the dichotomy of

9:44

control is, well, there are some

9:47

things you can control and there

9:49

are some things you can't control. And

9:52

if you spend your day thinking

9:54

about, anxious about, dwelling

9:57

upon the things you can't control, you

9:59

are the biggest fool on the planet. How

10:01

come because you can't

10:03

control it, You're wasting your time,

10:06

You're wasting your energy, You're causing

10:08

yourself. You know, when

10:10

you get up in the morning, you should realize that

10:12

today a number of things

10:14

are going to happen that simply go against

10:16

me. And if I expect to get up and go

10:19

through today without anything bad happening,

10:22

I'm a fool and I have a choice.

10:24

I can't control that, but I do have control

10:26

over something else, and it is my response

10:29

to those things that happen. You

10:31

can control your goals. Can you control

10:34

whether you achieve those goals? No? No,

10:37

But you can control what the goals are. You

10:39

can control your values. What

10:41

do you value in life? Do you value fame and fortune?

10:44

Do you value tranquility? That's

10:46

completely in your control. And

10:49

the Stoic insight was, if

10:51

you want to have a good life, number

10:53

one, you need to focus your attention on things

10:56

you can control. Number

10:58

two is when it comes to choosing your values.

11:01

When it comes to choosing your goals, you

11:03

want to choose values that are going to lead

11:05

me in the right direction, and its goals that I'm

11:07

going to be able to achieve. I know

11:09

so many people, and I used to be one of them, and I

11:12

still am, to some extent one of them. But I

11:14

know this one person I've known for a

11:16

long time, and he routinely says

11:18

to me, if only I made

11:21

X thousand dollars per year, then

11:24

finally I would be happy. And

11:26

then I'll encounter him a few years later

11:29

and I'll say, how's that X thing going

11:31

for you? He says, if only

11:33

I had Why? So, this is

11:35

this hedonic treadmill that we're

11:37

on. Don't get yourself on the hedonic

11:40

treadmill because you will never be

11:42

satisfied. You will always

11:45

want more. But back

11:47

to the dichotomy of control. So

11:49

there's things you can control things you can't

11:52

control. But I have fiddled

11:54

with it, and so

11:56

I've come up with what I call the

11:58

trichotomy of control. When

12:01

you say there are things you can control

12:03

and things you can't control, the

12:06

phrase the things you can't control

12:08

is actually ambiguous because there's two different

12:10

sorts of things you can't control. One

12:13

of them is things that you have absolutely

12:15

no control over, and

12:17

that would be like whether the sunrise is tomorrow.

12:20

I have absolutely no control over

12:22

that. But there are also things

12:24

you can't control in the sense that you

12:26

don't have complete control over them, but you

12:29

have partial control over them. What

12:31

would that be, Well, my weight, for

12:33

instance, Can I suddenly wish

12:36

that I became one hundred and sixty pounds?

12:38

Nope? Can I try to do

12:40

that? Yep? Do I have some control

12:42

over that? Yeah? Because every day I sit down

12:44

and eat, and I have control over what I do eat and

12:47

what I don't eat. It's this third

12:49

intermediate category. It's things

12:51

I have some but not complete control

12:53

over, So I would

12:55

argue that that's where as a practicing

12:57

Stoic you should be spending most of your

13:00

time. And I think one way that focusing

13:02

on what you can control is really powerful is

13:04

it means that if you get that right,

13:06

you're never really a victim, right Like,

13:09

you can't be a victim of your circumstances if

13:11

you're really tracking the things that just don't matter

13:13

to you right right. The notion

13:15

of being a victim, by the way, that touches on a

13:17

second stoic theme, and that is framing.

13:20

Sometimes you do have a say whether

13:23

bad things happen to you. If you never check

13:25

the gas gage in your car, bad things are

13:27

going to happen, and you're to blame and shame on

13:29

you. But there are other things where

13:31

a bad thing happens that you couldn't have foreseen,

13:34

but you do have control over the frame

13:36

you put around it. You've got

13:38

a very interesting choice of whether you're

13:41

going to play the role of

13:43

victim or play the role of target.

13:46

And it's a huge psychological

13:48

difference because if you choose to

13:51

play the role of victim, then you're going to feel

13:53

sorry for yourself. You're going to be asking

13:56

for people's sympathy, You're going to

13:58

be probably depressed. If you play

14:00

the role of target, then you

14:02

can rise to that challenge. As

14:04

a result of doing that, you can gain

14:06

character and you can change

14:09

the world. That difference between

14:11

feeling like a victim versus feeling

14:13

like a target was an important distinction

14:15

for James Stockdale. When Stockdale

14:17

came crashing down to Earth, he badly injured

14:20

his leg and was left lame, just like his

14:22

hero Epictetus. But throughout

14:24

all the pain and cruelty, Stockdale decided

14:26

that he was game for the challenge and he

14:29

was ready to take it on. After

14:31

the break, we'll look at the path that Epictetus

14:33

has laid out to help us all gain control

14:36

even in the worst of times, the

14:38

happiness, laugh, or turn in a moment when

14:53

trying to take control of our own lives, Epictetus

14:56

suggested adopting a state of mind that

14:58

he called apathea. We need

15:00

to become less bothered by the powerful

15:02

emotions that often cloud our judgment. Apathea

15:05

sounds a lot like our modern word apathy,

15:08

but that's actually a miss perception of stoicism

15:10

that it's about turning off our emotions

15:13

and not caring what's going on around us. So

15:15

I asked Bill to explain how apathea really

15:18

works. The Stoics weren't

15:20

anti emotion, they were anti negative

15:23

emotion. They embraced positive

15:25

emotions, they embraced feelings of delight,

15:28

they embraced joy. Those are all

15:30

positive emotions. But they

15:32

thought, what makes us miserable is

15:34

the negative emotions we experienced, like

15:37

anger, like regret, like

15:40

feelings of insecurity.

15:42

They realized that we are

15:44

essentially at war with ourselves.

15:47

And I use the roommate analogy. So

15:50

suppose the only place you could live

15:52

was an apartment and you realize

15:55

that moving in, you had two apartment

15:57

mates. One was this

15:59

utterly reflexive guy who was either

16:01

panicking or reacting

16:03

in dramatic ways to whatever the circumstances

16:06

were. The other one was just an emotional

16:08

basket case. You know, whatever happened,

16:10

you'd be saying, this is the worst thing ever, or

16:12

this is the best thing ever. And then

16:14

there was rational you, okay,

16:17

And the problem is you

16:19

couldn't escape them, you couldn't leave them.

16:22

You had to deal with them.

16:24

How do you accomplish that and here's

16:26

where stoic insight comes.

16:29

You manipulate them, you use your

16:31

brain power. I mean, you can simply

16:34

try, as an act of self control

16:36

to ignore what they're doing, ignore

16:38

what they're saying. Good luck with that,

16:41

because self control requires considerable

16:43

energy on your part. If you've ever

16:45

tried to do meditation, you

16:47

realize one of the very first things you

16:50

learn is how difficult it is

16:52

to just quiet your mind. Sit

16:54

there for five minutes in a common environment

16:56

and don't have thoughts, and within

16:59

thirty seconds outside, maybe before

17:01

that, you'll realize, Oops, a thought

17:04

just came into my mind, and a

17:06

lot of them are crazy ideas. Because

17:09

of that, we find ourselves

17:11

living not in the present moment, and

17:13

you know that's kind of been the ideal

17:16

is live in them now. It's rather

17:18

things like so and so said something

17:20

to me yesterday. Is he upset

17:23

with me? Is he angry at me? Is he going to do something

17:25

to make me even more upset? And oh,

17:28

the electrical bill has to be paid

17:30

and it's due this evening. Suppose you

17:32

had a neighbor who every five minutes

17:34

was showing up at your door, banging on the door

17:37

and saying you should be angry.

17:39

Now there's something you should worry about. Now,

17:41

you know, you would get a restraining order,

17:44

except it isn't a neighbor and you

17:46

can't go to a court of law. It's inside

17:49

your head. So the Stoics,

17:51

the beautiful thing was they

17:54

figured out a way not only to

17:56

kind of shut down those thoughts

17:58

in those emotions, but to

18:00

harness them and use them on

18:03

their behalf. And so in their goal to control

18:05

negative emotions, is this notion that we

18:07

talk a lot about today in modern effect science,

18:09

which is this idea of emotion regulation, this

18:12

idea that emotions really are in our control

18:14

and that we can take ownership to kind of downregulate

18:17

the negative ones. And one of the ways that modern

18:19

science has figured out that we can downregulate negative

18:21

emotions has to do with our judgments, right,

18:24

is to realize that we're in control of how we

18:26

experience an emotion. And this seems

18:28

to fit a lot with what Epictetus talked about

18:30

when he talked about these impressions. And

18:32

so what was Epictetus talking about about?

18:35

When you see something, realize that it's an

18:37

impression that you can control. Yeah, when

18:39

somebody insults us, there are two ways

18:41

we can respond. One is to get angry

18:44

and upset and maybe a seek revenge,

18:47

and another is to simply shrug

18:49

it off. It's just noise. If

18:51

you're out on a walk and a dog barks at you, you

18:53

know if you respond to that by saying, oh,

18:56

that dog, let's not approve of me.

18:58

That dog is so mean. Nah,

19:01

it's just barking. Well, you

19:03

can treat the things other

19:05

people say in exactly

19:07

the same frame of mind, because some of them are

19:09

not fully rational, coherent people.

19:12

That's why they're going around saying insulting

19:15

things. When you're insulted, you should just shrug

19:17

it off, or better still, make a joke out of it. And

19:19

you haven't your power to do that. And if

19:21

you make a joke out of it, you not only

19:24

will prevent the insult from hurting

19:26

you, but it's just almost

19:28

the worst thing you can do to the person who

19:30

insulted you. He wants to hurt you,

19:33

and if you laugh it off, it's proof that

19:35

he hasn't hurt you. So one thing I

19:37

do in class when we're up to this point

19:39

is I tell the assembled

19:41

group, and it might be thirty people, might be fifty

19:44

people. I say Okay, I want you to come up with

19:46

the worst insult of me that

19:49

you can think of, and

19:51

then I'm going to do a countdown, and when we

19:53

get to three, I want you all to shout

19:55

out your insult at the same moment.

19:58

So I do one, two, three,

20:00

and then the room erupts in this

20:02

giant insult, and

20:06

then I just smile and I say, it's just noise.

20:08

Now. Sometimes I'm too clever

20:11

by half, because one of the times when I tried

20:13

this, there's one student who waited

20:15

until the noise had subsided and

20:18

then said in a low voice, old

20:20

man. And

20:23

it's interesting because here I am a practicing

20:25

stoic, and yeah, yeah, that does mean

20:27

you're perfect. It means you've you've developed

20:29

your skills. And yet you know, you start thinking,

20:32

oh that hurt. Also

20:34

that and this really fits nicely with what we're learning

20:36

about these different emotion regulation strategies.

20:39

I think at first, when people think about emotion

20:41

regulation, they think about what you might

20:43

call like suppression, right, like I just don't

20:45

want to feel this emotion. But what we're

20:47

learning now from the neuroscience is the suppression

20:49

is really bad. It might shut off emotion in the moment.

20:52

But if you look physiologically, you hook

20:54

somebody up to a skin response, you find that

20:56

that emotion's coming out anyway. Turns

20:58

out a better strategy is exactly what a fictidius

21:01

was talking about, which is what neuroscientists are

21:03

now calling reappraisal. Right, you

21:05

know, you reappraise that frustrating thing. As

21:07

a test in one study, you

21:09

get folks to reappraise something

21:11

bad happening to you as like,

21:13

you know, you think about it how a doctor might think about

21:15

it, or I think about it, how you might think about it. If you're designing

21:17

a game, this is just a game in life. And

21:20

the research really shows that people who are

21:22

high on that ability to reappraise naturally,

21:24

because there's individual difference in this,

21:27

people who are high on that ability to reappraise

21:29

naturally, they tend to experience less

21:31

depression and they self report that their lives are

21:33

less stressful. The cool thing is if you teach

21:36

people how to reappraise in the laboratory. This

21:38

is some work by James Gross where he shows

21:40

people these really nasty videos like an

21:42

amputation or Hiroshima victims,

21:45

and he says, you know, try to watch this

21:47

documentary in a way, in a very metaway

21:49

right, like you're a doctor watching this or you're a historian

21:52

kind of looking at it from afar, And what he

21:54

finds is that people naturally experience

21:56

less emotion there, but again not in a like suppression

21:59

way where you're trying to run from the emotions. You

22:01

just take that new frame and then everything looks

22:03

differently. Yeah, the frame makes

22:05

all the difference. One of the things

22:07

you can do is simply get frustrated. I was set

22:10

back. There's something I wanted to do. I was prevented

22:12

from doing it, so I'm upset as a result.

22:15

Or a different way, you can frame it as

22:17

a test by imaginary

22:19

stoic gods, in which case then

22:22

instead of focusing on the setback, you

22:24

think about how you're going to overcome that setback,

22:27

and you're going to show those stoic gods who's

22:30

in charge. Ha, you

22:32

cannot defeat me. So

22:34

it's an interesting way. So we aren't

22:36

just trying to prevent the emotions.

22:39

We're harnessing them, making them work

22:41

on our behalf. Pay particular

22:44

attention to anger. It's an insidious

22:46

emotion. An event that happened to you years

22:49

before, can poke itself

22:51

into your head at three in the morning,

22:54

and then you find that the person

22:57

is long gone, not part of your life,

22:59

and yet you find the anger returning.

23:02

So one bit of advice that I offer

23:04

based on stoics is

23:07

doing your best to nip them in the bug. And so

23:09

I describe the three second rule,

23:11

or maybe it's a five second rule, you know how I when

23:13

food falls on the floor, and this

23:15

is an urban myth that turns out but if you pick it

23:17

up within three or five seconds that it's

23:20

going to be fine. But anger works that

23:22

way too. So something happens

23:25

and then you've got this beautiful interval

23:27

a matter of seconds, but a beautiful

23:29

interval where you get to very

23:32

quickly frame it. And then

23:34

how you do that. But you've got to be quick because

23:36

once the anger arises,

23:39

it's going to have a life of its own.

23:41

But then what you do is you say, oh,

23:43

it's a setback. Ah, you stow

23:45

it. Gods, you're shaking your fist at them. They're

23:48

using this person as part

23:50

of their mechanism to

23:53

test me, and I should throw this

23:55

in the stoic gods are actually good

23:58

guys and gals, because why

24:00

are they doing this? To you. They're doing it to

24:02

you to strengthen you. Like a good coach,

24:05

you take it as a compliment that they think you're

24:07

worth the attention, so that it's one of these

24:10

cases where you regard the person just

24:12

as this fool, this cog in this

24:15

machine that's being used as part of the

24:17

test of you. That gets to the

24:19

final thing I wanted to mention about Epictetus,

24:21

which is that he realized that this was going to be

24:23

work. You know, he realized that this was going to be a

24:25

path, and in that sense he was embodying this wonderful

24:28

psychological principle of a growth mindset.

24:30

You know, you're not going to be a perfect Stoic right

24:32

now, but you're working towards it in this right

24:34

way. And so talk about how Epictetis

24:36

and the other Stoics kind of embodied this idea

24:39

like, you know, we're not there yet, but we're kind

24:41

of working towards this goal over time. Yes,

24:43

So when life sets you back

24:46

and I describe these stoic tests, how do you

24:48

pass the Stoic test? First of all, the stoics

24:50

do not stoke. Gods, do not grade you.

24:53

You don't get an email saying that was a B plus.

24:55

But here's what you need to work on. So it's all self

24:57

graded. But you graded according to two

24:59

standards. First, did

25:01

you find a workaround? Doesn't

25:04

have to be a perfect work around, but

25:06

did you find the best work

25:08

around reasonably could? Did you use

25:10

your cortex to try to think

25:12

through the possibilities and come up with the workaround.

25:15

Second and more important component of the

25:17

grade, did you keep

25:19

your cool while you did it. That's

25:22

the most important part of the grade because

25:24

when you think about most of life setbacks,

25:26

it isn't the setback itself that causes

25:28

you the harm. It's your response

25:31

to the setback. It's allowing yourself

25:33

to get angry, to get up set that's

25:35

what causes the damage. So for

25:38

the stoics, it could look to the

25:40

entire world that the stoic

25:42

just failed big time in doing

25:45

something. So, for instance, there

25:47

was a tennis match and that the stoic

25:49

lost. Ah, he lost, and

25:52

that's failure. But if you ask the stoic,

25:55

the stoic could say, ah, I can see how

25:57

someone on the outside would look

25:59

at it that way, But my goal

26:02

was not to win this game. My

26:05

goal was to train for

26:07

this game to the best of my ability,

26:10

come up with the best strategy for playing

26:12

this game. As I could play

26:15

the game to the best of my ability, and

26:17

I did those things. I did not

26:19

win the game, but it was not a failure. Here's

26:22

the interesting wrinkle on that, and that is if

26:24

you approach life thinking

26:27

in those terms, you're more likely

26:29

to have external successes

26:31

because if you did the best you could,

26:34

that's all you can ever do. If you did

26:36

the best you could and routinely

26:39

do that, you're going to get better

26:41

and better, and so you'll actually have

26:43

not only the internal successes, which

26:46

is what the Stoics were primarily interested

26:48

in, but the external successes as well.

26:51

Yeah, even though it's an old strategy,

26:53

it's one that still works. I mean, I know again,

26:55

we started this episode with Stockdale, and

26:58

you know, he had to go through some pretty hardcore

27:00

Stoic god challenges but made

27:02

it through in part because he had this tool. Yep.

27:05

And you know what, So there's a lot that's

27:07

changed in the last two thousand years, but

27:09

human psychology has changed barely

27:12

an iota. So what would be surprising

27:14

if something that worked two thousand years ago

27:17

in psychological terms didn't continue

27:19

to work today. I

27:21

love talking to Bill. He always has a helpful

27:24

way of reminding me the stoic challenge

27:26

never ends. We're constantly being

27:28

tested, constantly being offered chances

27:30

to gain wisdom and to react with good

27:33

humor. In fact, you might have noticed

27:35

that my side of the interview sounded a bit

27:37

crappier than usual, and that was because

27:39

my recorder died right in the middle of the interview.

27:42

But did I get angry or frustrated. No,

27:45

because when you think about it, this is a

27:47

wonderful stoic challenge. Plus

27:49

we had a backup, so we were good. But

27:52

just to complete James Stockdale's story, he

27:55

was eventually released from captivity in nineteen

27:57

seventy three. Throughout his entire

27:59

imprisonment, he was guided by his understanding

28:02

of stoicism. His conduct as a prisoner

28:04

was so virtuous that he was awarded the

28:06

Medal of Honor. Upon his return, Stockdale

28:09

went on to lecture about his life behind bars. He

28:11

urged other people to implement the lessons of Epictetus

28:14

in their own daily lives. Stoicism,

28:16

Stockdale said, is a noble philosophy

28:19

that proved more practicable than a modern

28:21

cynic would expect, But

28:24

there's still one more episode in this current

28:26

season of Happiness Lessons of the Ancients,

28:29

So join me next time when we travel way

28:31

way back in time to meet the Buddha.

28:37

The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan

28:39

Dilley. The show was mastered by Evandiola,

28:42

and our original music was composed by Zachary

28:44

Silver. Special thanks to

28:46

the entire Pushkin crew, including

28:48

mil LaBelle, Carli Migliori, Heather

28:51

Fine, Sophie Crane, mckibbon, Eric

28:53

Sandler, Jacob Weisberg, and my

28:55

agent, Ben Davis. The Happiness

28:57

Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries

28:59

and meet doctor Laurie Santos