How can you be satisfied and content with life?  Even when it seems rotten on the whole?  With this post I conclude my thread on the ancient Stoic view of life and how to live it.

Thus, Stoics understood that the way to live – and to live with eudaimonia (recall: that means a kind of “happiness,” in the sense of a full satisfaction and contentment about how one’s life) – was to focus on personal choice, freedom, and avoidance, choosing not to be disturbed by things we cannot control, even if everyone around us thinks that hardship, pain, and suffering create ultimate misery.  They don’t.  Or at least they don’t need to.  In the end, they are not the things that matter. We need to train ourselves to be “indifferent” to them.  And indifference cuts both ways – we should not be wrought by things we can’t avoid and we should not be desperate to obtain what we don’t have.  One of the key terms among Stoics was adiaphora, literally “things that make no difference” one way or the other.

Among the adiaphora are those things most people passionately desire: health, wealth, beauty, pleasure, respect, justice, reputation, and even life itself.  For the Stoics, if we focus our lives on gaining these things, thinking they will ultimately provide eudaimonia, we are certainly bound for frustration and unhappiness.  You may think that if you were wealthy, famous, and able to indulge any pleasure, then you would be happy.  But look around you.  How many wealthy, famous, pleasure-seeking people are ever satisfied with what they have?  How many are content with their lives?  By contrast, how many are constantly seeking for more, more, and more – since they can never have enough?  If you never can have enough of something, or of anything, why should you think having it would make you happy?

The problem is not that you don’t have enough of such things.  The problem is that you think having them brings eudaimonia.  The solution, then, is not to want them.  Or for that matter, not to care if you do have them.  And certainly not to care if any of them is taken away from you.  Nothing external to you can bring happiness. Even health is an external thing: it is something beyond our ultimate control.  You can obsess about staying healthy, doing “all the right things” as currently prescribed, but the reality is that when a bad diagnosis comes you may well say, “Whoa.  I never saw that one coming….”  And so why obsess with what we cannot control?  We should not be working to obtain things beyond our control, any more than we should be agonized with whatever horrible things are now happening.  Being content with life means focusing on what you can control and considering other things indifferently.

The Stoic opposition to passion for external goods (which are not “good”), is only part of the opposition to “passion” altogether: for them, everything outside our control should be approached “dispassionately.”  That is to say, Stoics urged “apathy,” from the Greek word apatheia, literally “absence of passion.”  Nothing you don’t have or that you lose should matter to you in the least.  That includes the most extreme matters of life and death.  You may choose to live, and prefer not to die; but there is nothing frightful about the prospect of death and there may be times when it is more sensible to choose it.

Like many other ancient thinkers, Stoics thought there is probably not an afterlife.  We are here for a time; for Stoics, there is a reason for us being here; we should live according to that reason; and that is how we will find eudaimonia.  But as the Stoic philosopher Seneca argued, you were certainly not upset about not being alive 1000 years ago; why should you be upset about not being alive 1000 years in the future?  You didn’t exist before you were born and won’t after you died.  So what’s the difference?  In Seneca’s succinct Latin phrase: non eris nec fuisti.  Literally: “You will not be, nor were you”.

In my view there is a lot to commend these Stoic views.  Worry, anxiety, stress, dread, fear – these can eat us alive.  So too can pointless passions for more and more and more of anything that provides pleasure. Surely being self-contained, concerned only about what you can yourself control, not riled by circumstances or even disasters, can lead to greater peace of mind and, as we now know, medically, to longer and happier lives.

But there is an obvious downside to this Stoic view when taken to the extreme urged by Epictetus and others, as recognized already in antiquity.  Those who traThe Stoic opposition to passion for external goods (which are not “good”), is only part of the opposition to “passion” altogether: for them, everything outside our control should be approached “dispassionately.”in themselves to be completely free from mental anguish and to be oblivious or indifferent to accidents, natural disasters, unemployment, poverty, broken relationships, untimely deaths, etc. – how can they genuinely feel for others who are suffering or comfort them in their pain? Telling them just to get over it is not exactly a recipe for comfort, peace, and happiness.  You can’t comfort someone in despair if you despise their despair.  But for Stoics, the path to eudaimonia is precisely never to despair.  How then does that conviction not lead to seriously callous behavior?

It certainly led to callousness in some ancient circumstances, at least according to most modern standards.  In the passage above, when Seneca spoke about not caring if you die, he was giving advice to his younger correspondent Lucilius who had lost a good friend.  Seneca tells him not to grieve too much.  After all, what did it matter that he was gone?  He was a pleasure to be with when alive, and now the memory of him could be sweet. Why spend excessive grief on it?  What does one normally do when they lose something, for example, if their favorite tunic is stolen?  They simply deal with it, by going out and buying a new tunic. Instead of grieving over the one he had lost, Lucilius should simply find another friend to take his place (Seneca, Letter 43).

Seneca gave similar advice to people who lost family members, including parents who lost children (Consolation to Marcia).   Ouch.

This is why many have asked: even if this Stoic wall of indifference can provide a blockade against internal pain and anguish, is it fully human?  Where there is no “passion” (longing for something good) there can be no “compassion” (longing for the good for another). Without “pathos” (suffering) there can be no “sympathy” (feeling for someone who has suffered) or “empathy” (experiencing the suffering of another).  Is that how we want to live?

Despite this common and powerful objection, there are aspects of the Stoic approach to life that can still be and attractive to many people today, when practiced with some moderation. So many things happen to us in life that we can’t control and that, at the end of the day, don’t really matter.  Why be so bothered about them?  Aren’t there more important things in life?  Discovering what these are and living for them, rather than worrying about petty setbacks and losses, can help bring calm into our lives and help us understand what we really want to care for, live for, and devote ourselves to, for the good of both ourselves and others