A Guide to the Good Life : The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (29 page)

Seneca, I am certain, was right when he pointed to laughter as the proper response to “the things which drive us to tears.”
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Seneca also observes that “he shows a greater mind who does not restrain his laughter than he who does not restrain his tears, since the laughter gives expression to the mildest of the emotions, and deems that there is nothing important, nothing serious, nor wretched either, in the whole outfit of life.”
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B
ESIDES ADVISING US
to imagine bad things happening to us, the Stoics, as we have seen, advise us to cause bad things to happen as the result of our undertaking a program of voluntary discomfort. Seneca, for example, advises us periodically to live as if we were poor, and Musonius advises us to do things to cause ourselves discomfort. Following this advice requires a greater degree of self-discipline than practicing the other Stoic techniques does. Programs of voluntary discomfort are therefore best left to “advanced Stoics.”

I have experimented with a program of voluntary discomfort. I have not attempted to go barefoot, as Musonius suggested, but I have tried less radical behavior, such as under-dressing for winter weather, not heating my car in the winter, and not air conditioning it in the summer.

I have also started taking yoga classes. Yoga has improved my balance and flexibility, reminded me of the importance of play, and made me acutely aware of how little control I have over the contents of my mind. But besides conferring these and other benefits on me, yoga has been a wonderful source of voluntary discomfort. While doing yoga, I twist myself into poses that are uncomfortable or that in some cases border on being painful. I will, for example, bend my legs until they are at the very edge of a cramp and then back off a bit. My yoga
teacher, though, never talks about pain; instead, she talks about poses giving rise to “too much sensation.” She has taught me how to “breathe into” the place that hurts, which of course is physiologically impossible if what I am experiencing is, say, a leg cramp. And yet, the technique undeniably works.

Another source of discomfort—and admittedly, of entertainment and delight as well—is rowing. Shortly after I began practicing Stoicism, I learned to row a racing shell and have since started racing competitively. We rowers are exposed to heat and humidity in the summer and to cold, wind, and sometimes even snow in the spring and fall. We are periodically splashed, unceremoniously, with water. We develop blisters and then calluses. (Whittling down calluses is a favorite off-water activity of serious rowers.)

Besides being a source of physical discomfort, rowing is a wonderful source of emotional discomfort. In particular, rowing has provided me with a list of fears to overcome. The racing shells I row are quite unstable; indeed, given half a chance, they will gleefully dump a rower into the water. It took me considerable effort to overcome my fear of flipping (by successfully surviving three flips). From there, I went on to work through other fears, including a fear of rowing in the predawn darkness, a fear of pushing off from the dock while standing up in the boat, and a fear of being out in the middle of a lake, hundreds of yards from the nearest shore, in a tiny boat (that has thrice betrayed me).

W
HENEVER YOU UNDERTAKE
an activity in which public failure is a possibility, you are likely to experience butterflies in your
stomach. I mentioned above that since becoming a Stoic, I have become a collector of insults. I have also become a collector of butterflies. I like to engage in activities, such as competitive rowing, that give me butterflies simply so I can practice dealing with them. These feelings are, after all, an important component of the fear of failure, so that by dealing with them I am working to overcome my fear of failure. In the hours before a race, I experience some truly magnificent butterflies. I do my best to turn them to my advantage: They make me focus on the race that lies ahead. Once a race has begun, I have the pleasure of watching the butterflies depart.

I have also turned elsewhere in my pursuit of butterflies. After I began practicing Stoicism, for example, I decided to learn how to play a musical instrument, something I had never done before. The instrument I chose was the banjo. After several months of lessons, my teacher asked if I wanted to participate in the recital his students give. I initially rejected the offer; it sounded like no fun at all to risk public humiliation trying to play banjo in front of a bunch of strangers. But then it occurred to me that this was a wonderful opportunity to cause myself psychological discomfort and to confront—and hopefully vanquish—my fear of failing. I agreed to take part.

The recital was the most stress-inducing event I had experienced in a long time. It isn’t that I have a fear of crowds; I can, with zero anxiety, walk into a classroom of sixty students I have never met and start lecturing them. But this was different. Before my performance, I experienced butterflies the size of small bats. Not only that, but I also slipped into an altered state
of consciousness in which time was distorted and the laws of physics seemed to stop working. But to make a long story short, I survived the recital.

The butterflies I experience racing in a regatta or giving a banjo recital are, of course, a symptom of anxiety, and it might seem contrary to Stoic principles to go out of my way to cause myself anxiety. Indeed, if a goal of Stoicism is the attainment of tranquility, shouldn’t I go out of my way to avoid anxiety-inducing activities? Shouldn’t I, rather than collecting butterflies, flee from them?

Not at all. In causing myself anxiety by, for example, giving a banjo recital, I have precluded much future anxiety in my life. Now, when faced with a new challenge, I have a wonderful bit of reasoning I can use: “Compared to the banjo recital, this new challenge is
nothing
. I survived that challenge, so surely I will survive this one.” By taking part in the recital, in other words, I immunized myself against a fair amount of future anxiety. It is an immunization, though, that will wear off with the passage of time, and I will need to be reimmunized with another dose of butterflies.

W
HEN DOING THINGS
to cause myself physical and mental discomfort, I view myself—or at any rate, a part of me—as an opponent in a kind of game. This opponent—my “other self,” as it were—is on evolutionary autopilot: He wants nothing more than to be comfortable and to take advantage of whatever opportunities for pleasure present themselves. My other self lacks self-discipline; left to his own devices, he will always take the path of least resistance through life and as a result will be little more
than a simple-minded pleasure seeker. He is also a coward. My other self is not my friend; to the contrary, he is best regarded, in the words of Epictetus, “as an enemy lying in wait.”
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To win points in the contest with my other self, I must establish my dominance over him. To do this, I must cause him to experience discomfort he could easily have avoided, and I must prevent him from experiencing pleasures he might otherwise have enjoyed. When he is scared of doing something, I must force him to confront his fears and overcome them.

Why play this game against my other self? In part to gain self-discipline. And why is self-discipline worth possessing? Because those who possess it have the ability to determine what they do with their life. Those who lack self-discipline will have the path they take through life determined by someone or something else, and as a result, there is a very real danger that they will mislive.

Playing the game against my other self also helps me build character. These days, I realize, people smirk at talk of building character, but it is an activity that the Stoics would heartily have endorsed and would have recommended to anyone wishing to have a good life.

One other reason for playing the game against my other self is that it is, somewhat surprisingly, fun to do. It is quite enjoyable to “win a point” in this game by, for example, successfully overcoming a fear. The Stoics realized as much. Epictetus, as we saw in
chapter 7
, talks about the pleasure to be derived from denying ourselves various pleasures.
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Along similar lines, Seneca reminds us that even though it may be unpleasant to endure something, we will, on successfully enduring it, be pleased with ourselves.
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When I row competitively, it may look as though I am trying to beat the other rowers, but I am in fact engaged in a much more significant competition: the one against my other self. He didn’t want to learn to row. He didn’t want to do workouts, preferring instead to spend the predawn hours asleep in a warm bed. He didn’t want to row to the starting line of the race. (Indeed, on the way there, he repeatedly whined about how tired he felt.) And during the race, he wanted to quit rowing and simply let the other rowers win. (“If you just quit rowing,” he would say in his most seductive voice, “all this pain would come to an end. Why not just quit? Think of how good it would feel!”)

It is curious, but my competitors in a race are simultaneously my teammates in the much more important competition against my other self. By racing against each other, we are all simultaneously racing against ourselves, although not all of us are consciously aware of doing so. To race against each other, we must individually overcome ourselves—our fears, our laziness, our lack of self-discipline. And it is entirely possible for someone to lose the competition against the other rowers—indeed, to come in last—but in the process of doing so to have triumphed in the competition against his other self.

T
HE
S
TOICS
, as we have seen, recommend simplifying one’s lifestyle. Like programs of voluntary discomfort, lifestyle simplification is a process best left to advanced Stoics. As I have explained, a novice Stoic will probably want to keep a low philosophical profile. If you start dressing down, people will notice. Likewise, people will notice if you keep driving
the same old car or—horrors!—give up the car to take the bus or ride a bike. People will assume the worst: impending bankruptcy, perhaps, or even the early stages of mental illness. And if you explain to them that you have overcome your desire to impress those who are impressed by a person’s external trappings, you will only make matters worse.

When I started experimenting with a simplified lifestyle, it took some getting used to. When, for example, someone asked me where I had gotten the T-shirt I was wearing and I answered that I had bought it at a thrift store, I found myself feeling a bit ashamed. This incident made me appreciate Cato’s manner of dealing with such feelings. Cato, as we have seen, dressed differently as a kind of training exercise: He wanted to teach himself “to be ashamed only of what was really shameful.” He therefore went out of his way to do things that would trigger inappropriate feelings of shame in himself, simply so he could practice overcoming such feelings. I have lately been trying to emulate Cato in this respect.

S
INCE BECOMING A
S
TOIC
, my desires have changed dramatically: I no longer want many of the things I once took to be essential for proper living. I used to dress nattily, but my wardrobe has lately become what can best be described as utilitarian: I have one tie and one sport coat that I can don if required; fortunately, they are rarely required. I used to long for a new car, but when my sixteen-year-old car recently died, I replaced it with a nine-year-old car, something that a decade ago I could not have imagined myself doing. (The “new” car, by the way, has two things that my old car lacked: a cup holder
and a working radio. What joy!) There was a time when I would have understood why someone would want to own a Rolex watch; now such behavior puzzles me. I used to have less money than I knew what to do with; this is no longer the case, in large part because I want so few of the things that money can buy.

I read that many of my fellow Americans are in deep financial trouble. They have an unfortunate tendency to use up all the credit that is available to them and, when this doesn’t satisfy their craving for consumer goods, to keep spending anyway. Many of these individuals, one suspects, would be affluent rather than bankrupt—and far happier as well—if only they had developed their capacity to enjoy life’s simple pleasures.

I have become dysfunctional as a consumer. When I go to a mall, for example, I don’t buy things; instead, I look around me and am astonished by all the things for sale that I not only don’t need but can’t imagine myself wanting. My only entertainment at a mall is to watch the other mall-goers. Most of them, I suspect, come to the mall not because there is something specific that they need to buy. Rather, they come in the hope that doing so will trigger a desire for something that, before going to the mall, they didn’t want. It might be a desire for a cashmere sweater, a set of socket wrenches, or the latest cell phone.

Why go out of their way to trigger a desire? Because if they trigger one, they can enjoy the rush that comes when they extinguish that desire by buying its object. It is a rush, of course, that has as little to do with their long-term happiness as taking a hit of heroin has to do with the long-term happiness of a heroin addict.

Having said this, I should add that the reason I have so few consumer desires is not because I consciously fight their formation. To the contrary, such desires have simply stopped popping into my head—or at any rate, they don’t pop nearly as often as they used to. In other words, my ability to form desires for consumer goods seems to have atrophied.

What brought about this state of affairs? The profound realization, thanks to the practice of Stoicism, that acquiring the things that those in my social circle typically crave and work hard to afford will, in the long run, make zero difference in how happy I am and will in no way contribute to my having a good life. In particular, were I to acquire a new car, a fine wardrobe, a Rolex watch, and a bigger house, I am convinced that I would experience no more joy than I presently do—and might even experience less.