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An Introduction to Stoicism

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Just imagine… it’s a cold winter morning. You can hear the wind howling outside the walls of your home – it’s dark outside, and the clock reads 5:00 am. You’ve made it your mission to get up early and get in a run on the treadmill before work, but you’re really thinking that maybe, just maybe, the you can wait for your second alarm to go off at 7:00 am, and get in a few more z’s.

Then you remember the words of a long-dead Roman emperor.

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself – I have to go to work, as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for – the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

-But it’s nicer here…

So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

~Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”

 

Stoicism, which has it’s roots as far back as the 3rd Century BC, is a philosophy to help people live their best lives. The word stoic if often used in reference to people who don’t show emotion, but that’s not really what it’s about. Stoicism is about taking mastering your emotions and your life by placing more value the actions of a person, rather than on the words a person spoke. Ironically, we learn about stoicism today by examining the words of the most famous practitioners, including people such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

I’m fascinated with the works of Marcus Aurelius. He was the Emperor of the Roman Empire – arguable the most powerful man on the planet – and his book, “Meditations” is filled with thoughts such as “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” and “That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.”

He practiced imagining that everything he held dear to him was taken away, and imagined how he would react, or how he could still find joy in that situation, and he wrote about peace, and valor, and virtue. It’s nice to think that someone so powerful was thinking so deeply about these types of things (though I’m sure there were still plenty of atrocities under his reign).

Many stoics regularly practiced living without luxury goods for periods of time, such as Seneca, who wrote

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”

 

Imagine living a week eating only Kraft Dinner or Spam, living in a single set of clothes, or walking everywhere you had to go, leaving the nice vehicle parked in the garage. Does the quality of your life really change that much, if you are still surrounded by friends and family, still have a driving purpose in your life, and are able to enjoy the sunrise and sunset each day? These are some of the basic tenets of stoicism. The idea is not to live in poverty, necessarily, but to realize that even if you had everything in the world, and you lost it all, you would still be able to wake up the next day and find joy in your breaths.

This type of thinking and mindset is incredibly useful today, when we have all these external pressures weighing on us and a drive to do more, own more, have more and be more ‘out there’ in social media or at work. There is joy in the small things, and we should seek to find it.

If you’d like to explore stoicism on your own, here are a few books and places to get you started:

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius (I really like the Gregory Hays translation)

Moral Letters to Lucilius – Seneca (translated by Richard Mott Gummere)

The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Steve Hanselman

r/Stoic ism- Reddit

 

After you’ve explored those, come back here and share your favorite stoic resources in the comments below.

The post An Introduction to Stoicism appeared first on The Genuine Man.


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