Ancient Wisdom in a Changed World
Nearly two thousand years have passed since Epictetus taught his students how to live a good life. Many aspects of our lives have changed since then. We have countless things the ancients could hardly have imagined, including electricity, cars, airplanes, the internet, smartphones, and modern medicine. In many ways, life is safer, easier, healthier, and more comfortable. The environment we live in has changed dramatically.
Our bodies, our brains, and our basic human tendencies, however, have remained largely the same. We still worry, make mistakes, desire things, fear things, and make poor decisions. We are still human, with all the strengths and flaws that come with being human.
And here is where things get interesting. Although our basic human tendencies remain much the same, the environment in which they operate has changed enormously. Some of those changes give our minds more opportunities to become distracted, anxious, frustrated, angry, or overwhelmed.
Three changes in particular have a significant effect on our everyday lives: we interact with more people, we receive far more information, and we have more choices about what to buy and how to spend our time. All three are largely positive developments, but they can also create new challenges that affect our mood and state of mind. And in all three areas, Stoicism can be surprisingly useful.
For those unfamiliar with it, Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BC. Stoic philosophy covered three main areas: logic, or how we reason; the natural world and how it works; and ethics, or how we should live. At its core, Stoicism is a practical philosophy concerned with living a good and meaningful life.
For the purpose of this article, what matters most is what the Stoics taught about where we should focus our attention and how we should deal with the world around us. They believed that a good life depends on how wisely and virtuously we act, rather than on what happens to us. We cannot control everything in the outside world, but we can examine our judgments, question our first impressions, and choose how we act. In this way, Stoicism can help us maintain a calmer and more rational state of mind when dealing with the challenges of everyday life.
As mentioned earlier, three aspects of modern life can make some of these challenges more pronounced than they were in the past. Let's look at each of them more closely.
We Interact with More People Every Day
In ancient times, most daily interactions were limited to family, neighbors, coworkers, local merchants, and other members of the community. Of course, there were large cities. Rome, for example, was home to hundreds of thousands of people. But even there, geography and the lack of modern transportation and communication naturally limited how far their interactions could reach. Fewer daily interactions would also mean fewer opportunities to encounter someone they might find unpleasant or annoying, and fewer opportunities for arguments and disagreements.
Today, things are very different. Many of us live in large cities. Those who work for large companies may interact with dozens of people at work and then encounter many more during their commute. And to those happy campers working from home who think this doesn't apply to them: think again. The digital world works much the same way. Even without leaving home, we can interact with countless people through email, social media, online shopping, news websites, discussion forums, and messaging apps. If we zoom out, the picture is clear. Modern communication gives us opportunities to interact with far more people, including people far beyond our immediate surroundings. The math is simple: more interactions = more opportunities to encounter someone we find unpleasant or annoying, and more opportunities to become angry, annoyed, or irritated.
The Stoics understood this well. They knew that we cannot choose how other people behave, what they say to us, or how they act toward us. Their advice was surprisingly simple: look more closely at how you judge other people's behavior and, more importantly, choose what you do next. When someone annoys or angers us, we can ask ourselves: Am I judging this person fairly? Is it really the person's behavior that is making me angry, or is it my judgment of that behavior? We may not control what the other person does, but we can examine and question our own judgment and decide what to do next. We can choose not to argue out of anger or retaliate, and we can decide whether the situation deserves a response at all. This is one of the central lessons we find in Stoicism, and the more people we interact with, the more often we have a chance to practice it.
We Receive More Information Than Ever Before
The ancient world moved slowly. Information at that time traveled at the speed of, well, people, horses, and ships. For most people, much of the information they received concerned their immediate surroundings, such as their town, city, or local community. Events from distant lands could take weeks or months to reach them, if they heard about them at all.
Today, our phones can show us news about events from every corner of the world within seconds. I would argue that only a small percentage of the news we receive every day is actually useful to us. The rest is often information about natural disasters, political events, public figures, scandals, and countless other things happening around the world. Some of this news comes from places we may never visit or may not even know much about. It often concerns things that have little or no effect on our own lives.
On top of that, advertisements, recommended content, notifications, and endless updates are constantly put in front of us. Much of this is information we never asked for. The sheer amount of information we encounter in a single day would have been unimaginable to most people in the ancient world.
But the amount of information is only part of the problem. Much modern media has an incentive to capture our attention, and it is pretty good at doing so. Emotionally provocative news is particularly effective at getting our attention. And this is where things become interesting from a Stoic perspective.
Every new piece of information can create a new impression. A headline or photograph can trigger anger or distress. A political story can leave us anxious or worried. Someone's Instagram post can lead us to compare our life with the lives of others and feel inadequate.
This is exactly the kind of problem Stoicism can help us deal with. The Stoics did not teach us to ignore everything happening around us. Instead, they taught us to pay attention to how we judge what we see and hear. Our first impression may come automatically, but we do not have to immediately accept it as true. We can pause, look at it more closely, and question whether our first interpretation is reasonable. Does this information actually affect me? Is there anything I can do about it? Does it deserve my attention at all?
We cannot control how much information exists or everything that is constantly being pushed in front of us, but we can be more deliberate about what deserves our attention and how we deal with it. The more information we receive, the more important this becomes.
We Have More Choices Today
Without modern technology, life in the ancient world was often harder, but for the same reason, it was also simpler in some ways. People still worried about many of the same basic things we worry about today: their health, families, food, work, and money. But the paths available to them were much more limited. For example, many people's occupations were heavily constrained by family, social position, and location. The goods and services available to them were also limited by what could be produced locally or transported to them. And let's be honest, they did not have nearly as many things to spend their money on or activities to choose from as we do today. Simply put, people at that time did not have the enormous range of choices that surrounds us today, whether in the things we can buy or the activities we can pursue.
Today, we have an enormous range of choices when it comes to how we spend our money and our free time. We can buy all sorts of electronic gadgets, clothing, cars, and countless other products. We can also choose from an almost endless variety of activities, hobbies, sports, and entertainment.
Having more choices gives us more freedom, but it also gives us more things to want. Every new product, activity, or experience becomes another possibility we can pursue. And while having more options can certainly improve our lives, it does not necessarily make us happier or more satisfied. It can also add unnecessary headaches, hesitation, and stress to our everyday lives.
This is where the Stoic view of desire, or simply wanting things we do not have, becomes particularly relevant. The Stoics talked a lot about desire and how it can affect our happiness and satisfaction. They were not against owning things, enjoying ourselves, or pursuing activities that interest us. The problem begins when we start believing that our happiness depends on getting something we want or having a particular experience.
The enormous range of choices available to us can make modern life richer and more interesting, but we do not have to desire everything placed in front of us. We can be more deliberate about what we choose to pursue, question whether we really need or want something, and avoid allowing every new possibility to become another source of dissatisfaction.
In Sum
More than two thousand years separate us from the first Stoics, and the world around us would probably be unrecognizable to them. Yet many of the struggles taking place inside our minds would undoubtedly be very familiar to them. We simply have not changed nearly as much as the environment in which we live. We have more opportunities to interact with people, receive more information than ever before, and have more choices about what we buy and how we spend our free time. Overall, these are positive developments, but they also give us more opportunities for irritation, worry, distraction, desire, and dissatisfaction.
Stoicism offers us a way to better handle these challenges. It does not ask us to reject modern life. Instead, it gives us a way to navigate it more deliberately. Look more closely at how you judge other people's behavior and how you react to it. Pay attention to the kind of information you consume every day, and limit it when necessary. Take time to contemplate your life, and be more deliberate about what you buy and how you spend your free time. None of this is particularly complicated, but that does not mean it is easy to put into practice. In my opinion, however, it is worth the effort.
And perhaps that is exactly why this ancient philosophy still has so much to offer us today. Stoicism is not relevant despite how much the world has changed. It is relevant because of it.