Stoicism: The art of not Caring
“Life is long if you know how to use it”
-Seneca
There once was a wealthy man named Zeno who was on a voyage between Phoenicia and Peiraeus. His ship sank along with its cargo. Zeno survived the shipwreck but saw all of his fortunes sink into the seawater. Zeno while walking around town, went into a bookstore where he was introduced to the teachings and philosophy of Socrates. This changed the path of his life forever and gave birth to what is known as “STOICISM”.
Today as stated in the dictionary, the word stoic refers to a person who can live through pain or hardship without showing their feelings or complaining. But the original idea of stoicism was way beyond that.
Stoicism is about acceptance. Epictetus says: some things are in our control and others are not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and our actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and whatever are not our actions. We cannot control what happens to us, but we can control our reactions.
Zeno and his disciples taught the philosophy of stoicism in a decorated public colonnade called Stoa Poikile through which anyone and everyone could learn and become a stoic. Some of the most famous stoics include Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. The stoics believed that perception is the basis of true knowledge.
“Learning to live with less will create space in your life for the things that truly matter to you”
In a world full of unexpected things and events our emotions get into the way of living. Every day by various means of Social Media, Society, and Advertisements, we are expected to behave a certain way or look a certain way or achieve certain things to be happy. We constantly try to seek material things because we think that will make us happy. And if certain plans don’t work out, we are disappointed. We’re just looking at things externally without understanding their internal value.
Stoicism teaches us that Everything bad that can happen will happen. The attachment to achieving unrealistic expectations will always lead to disappointment. All we have to do is focus on improving ourselves and remember no matter how hard the days and nights are, we will still survive.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response”
-Victor Frankl
There are four main virtues of stoicism:
· Wisdom
· Courage
· Temperance
· Justice
As described by the Stoics, wisdom is the knowledge of what is good and evil and knowledge of what is neither good nor evil…knowledge of what we ought to choose, what we ought to beware of, and what is indifferent. Wisdom simply means our ability to know and choose our reaction to what happens to us.
Courage is the act of overcoming the feelings which cause cowardice. It is not the elimination of fear, desire, or anxiety, it is acting in the right way despite our fear, desire, and anxiety. It is doing the right thing even if we are afraid to do so.
Temperance can also be called moderation. It relates to self-restraint, self-discipline, and self-control. We can choose long-term well-being over short-term satisfaction. Seneca once wrote, “Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using it not because we needed them but because we had them”.
There is no stoic virtue more important than Justice because it influences all others. It’s about doing the right thing. No one should harm another because we are all born for each other. A stoic sees the world clearly and sees what the worldcan be. And then they are brave and strategic enough to help bring it into reality.
In Modern day medicine Stoicism is at the core of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy(REBT) and Logotherapy. REBT focuses on changing self-defeating attitudes people form about their life’s circumstances. Logotherapy is based on the stoic principle that we can use our willpower to fill our lives with meaning and in finding the right answers to problems even in the harshest situations.
Stoics teach us to measure success on the amount of work we put in and not on the outcome of our external hopes. Trust the timing of your life. Humans are driven by purpose. We can achieve relief from misery by simply finding our purpose in the darkest of times. By shifting our attention to things, we can control, we can stop focusing on what we cannot control. Whatever has a beginning has an end.
“When the longest- and shortest-lived of us dies, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any of us can be deprived is the present, since this is all we own, and nobody can lose what is not theirs .”
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Points of references:
Ted-ed- The philosophy of stoicism
Aperture - Stoicism: Become undefeatable
