Reed Magazine | Going Stoic - Reed Magazine

Reed Magazine | Going Stoic - Reed Magazine

Reed Magazine | Going Stoic - Reed Magazine

Posted: 28 Feb 2020 05:02 PM PST

Arts & Humanities

Can a philosophy that is more than 2,000 years old help you cope with your life right now?

By Cecilia D'Anastasio '13 | February 28, 2020

On my first morning as a new Stoic, I was groggily leaving my bedroom to wash my face when I noticed three fish belly-up on the bottom of the living room fish tank. The night before, my partner and I had transferred our three painted tetras into a more spacious home and replaced our gaudy plastic decorations (including one yellow SpongeBob SquarePants pineapple) with a more adult underwater bonsai and living plants. It was a meticulous, controlled process that we weren't totally meticulous about. A longtime friend from Reed came over partway through and, in an effort to play host, we forgot to check the tank's ammonia balance.

Dragging the net through the bottom of the tank and spiraling a little, my first thought was, Damn me for getting so attached to the critters.

It was a bad day to crack open A Handbook for New Stoics, a 52-week master class in, its cover reads, "how to thrive in a world out of your control." Some 2,300 years after the ancient Greeks brought Stoicism into this world, and thousands of years into its reputation as a hard-boiled philosophy for the unfeeling and aloof, A Handbook for New Stoics summons the wisdom of ancient Stoics Zeno, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius for a more modern practice. "The basic idea," the book reads, "is that it is imperative to use our mental energy to focus on what is under our complete control, while regarding everything else as indifferent."

Lesson one, I read in a cloud of melancholy on a crowded morning-commuter M train, dealt with a central Stoic tenet, the "dichotomy of control." According to the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus (55-135 CE), "Remove aversion, then, from all things that are not in your control, and transfer it to the nature of what is in our control." For the most part, you can't control the outside world; you can only control your reaction to it. When it comes to what we can't control, the ancients' advice is to be at peace with the fact that anything could happen, and accepting of that "anything" outcome.

"Feeling devastated over my dumb fish," I wrote under Wednesday's exercise. Then, I was to write what I could not control: "the impact of every new factor on my fish."

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