Don’t practice Stoicism, live it!
The ultimate reason why Stoicism is not about life hacks
Recently I appeared on yet another radio show / podcast to talk about Stoicism. I love doing it, and I’ll keep doing it until people will stop calling on me. I think Stoic philosophy is one of the most useful (though certainly not the only one) frameworks for navigating life ever devised by human beings, so the more people are exposed to it, the better.
Almost unfailingly, one of the things I’m asked about is a variant of the following: “Okay, enough with the theory, how does one practice Stoicism?” This emphasis on practice may be largely an American thing, though at the same time it may also be responsible for the popularity of Stoicism. Heck, I’ve written (together with my friend Greg Lopez) a whole book about Stoic exercises. And yet, this relentless focus on practice has had me wonder of late, so much so that I wrote a post a few months ago that makes a good companion to the one you are reading now.
I’ve being mulling over the wise words of my colleague John Sellars, with whom I co-teach in-person seminars on Stoicism and related philosophies. John is the current moving force behind the Modern Stoicism organization, the folks who bring you both Stoicon and Stoic Week every year. He is also a fellow faculty at the online Stoa Nova school, which I have the privilege of directing.
In a recent article posted at the site of the Stoa Nova, John wrote, in part (apologies for the long excerpt, but it’s well worth it):
“I would be inclined to say—perhaps controversially—that there are no Stoic techniques, there’s just the philosophy. Most of the things people tend to call Stoic techniques are not really that at all. … The idea of ‘Stoic practice’ makes little sense. As a philosophy, Stoicism is concerned with what and how you think, which ideally will impact how you live, but specific Stoic practices? What are they? …
Seneca famously talked about evening reflection. But there’s nothing distinctively Stoic about it and indeed it was a Pythagorean practice that Seneca adopted, and so not Stoic at all. Seneca doesn’t explicitly say that he wrote anything down, but famously Marcus Aurelius did in his notebooks, so the two things were quickly conjoined and ‘Stoic journalling’ was born. Yet there’s nothing especially Stoic about that, apart from the fact that Marcus did it. It would be a bit like suggesting that because Plato used to like to go for early morning walks (if he did), that this is a core Platonist practice. Just because Seneca or Marcus did something, doesn’t make it Stoic. For something to be distinctively Stoic it must in some way reflect core Stoic ideas. …
Pierre Hadot’s account of spiritual exercises has been influential. But most of these are indeed about how we think, not actual practices that we do. Many of the things he identifies are not particularly Stoic either, which is unsurprising given that his concern was with ancient philosophy as a whole. As just one example, the ‘view from above’ seems to be a mental exercise that Marcus did, but it was also widely used in the Platonic tradition. … So this isn’t especially Stoic either. …
The thing is, while I know what core Stoic values are, I’m not sure there are any genuinely Stoic practices that can be extracted and put to work on their own. In that sense, ‘Stoic life hacks’ often really aren’t Stoic at all, not just because they have been separated from the philosophy, but because they were never Stoic in any substantive way in the first place. …
The problem I’ve encountered a number of times is that when some people first encounter Stoicism and are curious about it, the first thing they want to know is what they are supposed to do. They want things to do, physical things, and often they like—or perhaps feel they need—a routine. So if you tell them to take a cold shower in the morning, meditate for ten minutes at lunch time, and write in a journal in the evening, they go away happy. If you tell them to rethink the fundamental values that govern their entire lives, they stare blankly, dumbfounded. Some people just want to feel a bit better; they don’t want to re-assess the deeper reasons why they are not feeling great in the first place.”
I think John is exactly right in the above. His historical point is well taken: in a number of cases what we call “Stoic” practices were actually introduced by other schools, like the Pythagoreans or the Cyrenaics, and sometimes adapted or endorsed by the Stoics. Here is another example, a practice that I actually have engaged in regularly for many years now:
