Philosophy

In his fabulous book, How to Be Perfect, Michael Schur says moral philosophy can be summed up in these four questions:

What am I doing? 

Why am I doing it? 

Is there something I could do that’s better? 

Why is it better?

It’s important to note that these are questions, not statements. To live philosophically is to live reflectively. 

Maybe you think you don’t need to reflect. You’re a good person, you always try to do what’s right. Maybe you don’t even give much thought to doing what’s right—you just do it. It’s automatic.

It’s here where Aristotle, or Marcus Aurelius, or Emmanuel Kant might have reminded you that you’re not perfect. None of us are. We can always improve. And since we can always improve, we must always make an effort to improve. And we can’t make a genuine effort if we’re not mindful and aware of our everyday thoughts and actions.

I’ve found journaling to be the most useful way to reflect. I have a morning routine that I’ve used for years. It consists of a little reading and a lot of writing. (Trust me, it’s not nearly as daunting as it sounds.) I read a page from The Daily Stoic and A Calendar of Wisdom. I use a prompt from one of these books to write an intention for the day in a notebook. Then, in a separate notebook, I write my morning pages (you can read about my experience with them here). Coined by Julia Cameron, morning pages are 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. The whole routine takes about 25 minutes, and it’s the most important part of my day.

The ancient Stoics knew the importance of journaling, of being reflective and mindful. Marcus Aurelius journaled in the morning to prepare himself for the day. Seneca journaled in the evening, appraising his actions, “concealing nothing” from himself. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” he said. Epictetus reminded his students to keep their philosophy lessons at hand day and night, write about them, and talk about them with others. The Stoics knew that philosophy involved daily mindfulness and work.

Perhaps they, like the Buddha and other philosophical and religious leaders, intuited what we now know to be scientifically true: left to their own devices, our minds pretty much run themselves. We have almost no control over the thoughts that pop into our conscious minds throughout the day. And this is why…

Reflective Thoughts are Truer Than Everyday Thoughts

Here’s a thought experiment, cited by Mark Manson in Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope, that nineteenth-century sociology founder, Emile Durkheim posed: What would life be like if there was no crime? If everyone was polite and respectful to others? If no one was violent or harmed anyone? What would happen? Would we all hold hands and sing songs?

According to Durkheim, no. The opposite would happen. We wouldn’t feel happier about not killing each other—we would just become equally upset over trivial things. As Mark summarizes, “Our minds simply amplify (or minimize) our problems to fit the degree of stress we expect to feel.”

I’m using this experiment to illustrate a common theme I’ve found: our brains have their own agendas. Evolutionary psychology confirms this. In Why Buddhism Is True (a remarkable book that shows how psychology intersects philosophy), Princeton University professor, Robert Wright, explains how our evolutionary wiring distorts our view of reality. Natural selection, he says, has one goal: to get genes into the next generation. That’s it. 

The problem with natural selection’s hardwiring is that it hasn’t caught up to the modern world. The sweet tooth that compelled hunter-gatherers to eat fruit (so they would survive and get their genes into the next generation) is the same sweet tooth we have today—only now we have processed sugar at our disposal. So, if this hardwiring produces thinking that’s not aligned with reality, if it creates feelings that are disproportionate to the situation, so be it. It has its own agenda.

The times during the day when we’re doing nothing in particular—not working, not watching a movie, not playing a sport—are when this agenda becomes most pronounced. Our brains enter into what scientists call the “default mode network.” In this mode, thoughts pop into our conscious minds seemingly out of nowhere. (And because thoughts cause feelings and feelings dictate behavior, it’s easy to see why an understanding of this is important.) Scientists can only speculate as to why, exactly, one thought and not another enters into our conscious mind. But one thing is clear: thoughts think themselves.

If you’re confused, we’re in the same boat. But the gist is this: we have a lot less agency over our thoughts and feelings than we typically think.

This is why, Robert argues, mindful meditation (or, in my experience, mindfulness and journaling) can be life-altering. Being mindful of our thoughts means being observant of them, instead of being controlled by them. When we observe anything—a plant, a table, a thought, a feeling—we create distance from it. This distance allows us to not become carried away by our initial impressions. It allows us to say to it what Epictetus advised: “Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent.”

By being reflective, we become better observers of our minds. We’re quicker to notice and discard untrue and harmful thoughts. We’re able to see—even if only slightly—a more accurate view of reality.

Holocaust survivor, Dr. Edith Eva Eger, was a young teenager when she was sent to a Nazi concentration camp. On the day of her arrival, her parents were ushered to the gas chamber by a guard who, later that same day, made her dance for him for his entertainment. In her incredible book The Choice, Dr. Eger—now a world-renowned psychologist—recounts how she was tested by a patient—a fourteen-year-old boy, sent to her by a judge, for car theft. The boy leaned on her desk and said, “I’m going to kill all the Jews.” He said he would also kill anyone who wasn’t white. He went on ranting about the blights to America’s purity.

“I thought I would be sick,” Dr. Eger says. “I struggled not to run from the room. What is the meaning of this? I wanted to shout. I wanted to shake the boy, say, Who do you think you’re talking to? I saw my mother go to the gas chamber. … My whole being trembled with unease, and I struggled with the inclination to wag my finger, shake my fist, make him accountable for his hate—without being accountable for my own. This boy didn’t kill my parents. Withholding my love wouldn’t conquer his prejudice.”

She prayed for the ability to meet him with love—the accepting and unconditional love she gave to all her patients. “I summoned every image I had of unconditional love.” She called to mind a story of one of the Righteous Gentiles, Corrie ten Boom, who was sent with her family to a concentration camp. Corrie’s sister died there, in her arms. Eventually, she was released (due to a clerical error) and a few years later, met with one of the vilest guards at her camp—one of the guards who was responsible for her sister’s death. She could have lashed out at him, spit at him, wished him the worst. Instead, “she prayed for the strength to forgive him, and she took his hands in her own. She says that in that moment, the former prisoner clasping the hands of the former guard, she felt the purest and most profound love.”

“I wondered if it was possible that this racist boy had been sent to me so I could learn about unconditional love,” Dr. Eger remembers thinking. “What opportunity did I have in this moment? What choice could I make right then that could move me in the direction of love?”

She decided to let the boy talk. She listened. She realized they had a lot in common. She had lost her parents, and so had he. “We both thought of ourselves as damaged goods. In letting go of my judgment, in letting go of my desire for him to be or believe anything different, by seeing his vulnerability and his yearning for belonging and love, in allowing myself to get past my own fear and anger in order to accept and love him, I was able to give him something [he] couldn’t [give himself]—an authentic image of his own worth. When he left my office that day, he didn’t know a thing about my history. But he had seen an alternative to hate and prejudice, he was no longer talking about killing, he had shown me his soft smile. And I had taken responsibility that I not perpetuate hostility and blame, that I not bow to hate and say, You are too much for me. … We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for—our inner Hitler or inner ten Boom—is up to us.”

Situations, circumstances, what other people say and think—these things cannot inherently affect you. You’re made no different by them. By themselves, they’re powerless. They need your interpretation to have any effect.

Ryan Holiday put it like this: if someone sends you a scathing email, but you never see it, it wouldn’t affect you, right? That’s because the power of an external thing, like an email or contentious remark, depends entirely on your awareness of it and your opinion about it.

Epictetus said that your impression of an external thing is a value judgment. So if you blame someone for being rude to you, realize you’re blaming your own judgment.

Whoa.

Epictetus also kept a sense of humor about it. If someone insulted him, he’d say, ‘Well, thank goodness they don’t know about my other faults, or they’d really have something to say!’

When a man collided with Marcus Cato (a senator of the first century BC and Stoic Philosopher, revered as the most ethically wise philosopher since Socrates) in a public bath, he apologized afterward for his insolence. Cato replied that he didn’t remember being bumped. “It is the mark of a great mind,” Seneca said, “to disregard injuries.”

This is similar to another (and perhaps better) technique Epictetus used to handle an insult: he would forget about it—because it didn’t concern him. It concerned the person who said it.

“Choose not to be harmed,” said Marcus Aurelius, “and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.”

“Would not anyone admit how much better it is, in place of exerting oneself to win someone else’s wife, to exert oneself to discipline one’s desires; in place of enduring hardships for the sake of money, to train oneself to want little?”

-Musonius Rufus

Last month I read That One Should Disdain Hardships by Musonius Rufus, a Roman Stoic. I got so much out of it. The book’s title chapter struck me the most.

Living virtuously is hard work. To more cheerfully and readily endure the hardships that go with pursuing the worthy aim of virtue, Musonius Rufus reminds us of the hardships people willingly endure for much less worthy aims.

Think about how people exert themselves to make a profit, the toil and pain they inflict on themselves pursuing fame, or the sweat they pour into achieving a different kind of pleasure. “Is it not then monstrous,” asks Musonius Rufus, “that they for no honorable reward endure such things, while we for the sake of the ideal good—that is, not only the avoidance of evil. . . .but also the acquisition of virtue—are not ready to bear every hardship?”

Why is it that, to pursue virtue (the key to happiness and contentment), we are so much less willing to exert ourselves than those who pursue empty things? People will argue until their veins pop, but when it comes to attempting to understand a different perspective, it’s too hard. They’ll work and scheme their entire lives to find ways to make more money, instead of training themselves to know when enough is enough. They’ll study every way in which they’re different from others, instead of holding fast to the truth that we’re all the same.

“People strive in this world,” said Leo Tolstoy, “not for those things which are truly good, but for the possession of many things which they can call their property.”

Musonius uses acrobats to demonstrate his point:

“When we see acrobats face without concern their difficult tasks and risk their lives in performing them, turning somersaults over ruptured swords or walking ropes set at a great height or flying through the air like birds, where one misstep means death, all of which they do for a miserable small recompense, shall we not be ready to endure hardship for the sake of complete happiness? For surely there is no other end in becoming good than to become happy and live happily for the remainder of our lives.”

We’re going to struggle either way. Why not struggle for something that’s actually good?

“Understand that while the pursuit of such indifferent objectives [money, fame] is natural,” said Epictetus, “neither failure nor success in attaining them has the slightest bearing on your happiness.”

“Not ‘some way to sleep with her’— but a way to stop wanting to. Not ‘some way to get rid of him’— but a way to stop trying. . . .Redirect your prayers like that, and watch what happens,” Marcus Aurelius said.

What are you really working for?

What are you getting for all of your hard work?

When Theodore Roosevelt faced a problem, he would look at the painting of Abraham Lincoln on his office wall and ask himself, If Lincoln were in this situation, what would he do? Stepping outside himself, he gained clarity.

But this can seem daunting. How are we supposed to know what someone as wise as Abraham Lincoln, or Cyrus the Great, or Marcus Aurelius would do in situations similar to ours? First, we can read great books. We can immerse ourselves in the lives and thoughts of some of the best leaders and thinkers who have ever lived.

Second, we can be humble. We can stop thinking with our egos. We can allow a higher intelligence to act through us. But most of the time, says yogi Sadhguru, we don’t do this. “Instead of trying to tap into this all-powerful intelligence that pulsates within each of us, we opt to use our logical intellect, which is useful in certain situations, but essentially limited.”

In The Authentic Swing, bestselling author Steven Pressfield found himself stumped by a question similar to Roosevelt’s: How can I write the thoughts and actions of a fictional character who’s smarter and wiser than me? He realized he had to think beyond his ego. He had to be “tapped into a source whose wisdom far exceeds our own. All we have to do is trust it.”