The Stoic Habit by Dr Bob Robinson - Sample by cidermillpress

THE STOIC HABIT

HOW TO OWN YOUR CHOICES—EVEN WHEN IT’S DIFFICULT

DR. BOB ROBINSON

The Stoic Habit

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First Edition

For Jen, whose love inspires me to be better

Notes on Sources 5

Preface 6

Introduction 10

CHAPTER 1 Living in Accordance with Nature 21

CHAPTER 2 Ignorance 32

CHAPTER 3 The Desire for Externals 41

CHAPTER 4 The Desire for Virtue 57

CHAPTER 5 Virtuous Choices 74

CHAPTER 6 Habits 86

CHAPTER 7 Routines 102

CHAPTER 8 Pleasure 117

CHAPTER 9 Status 129

CHAPTER 10 Wealth 145

CHAPTER 11 Health 157

Conclusion 169

Endnotes 173

Bibliography 185

Acknowledgments 190

About the Author 191

NOTES ON SOURCES

Inline references to Stoic texts use standardized abbreviations and refer to section, fragment, or letter numbers rather than page numbers. The following translations have been used:

Epictetus, Discourses, Fragments, Handbook, trans. Robin Hard (Oxford University Press, 2014). Abbreviated inline as Dis., Frag., and Ench., respectively.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Gregory Hays (The Modern Library, 2003). Abbreviated in line as Med. I will sometimes make occasional use of an additional translation by A. S. L. Farquharson, The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus (Oxford University Press, 1944).

Seneca, Epistles, Volume I: Epistles 1–65, trans. Richard M. Gummere. Loeb Classical Library 75 (Harvard University Press, 1917). Abbreviated inline as Ep. with corresponding letter number.

Seneca, Epistles, Volume II: Epistles 66–92, trans. Richard M. Gummere. Loeb Classical Library 76 (Harvard University Press, 1920). Abbreviated inline as Ep. with corresponding letter number.

Seneca, Epistles, Volume III: Epistles 93–124, trans. Richard M. Gummere. Loeb Classical Library 77 (Harvard University Press, 1925). Abbreviated inline as Ep. with corresponding letter number.

Musonius Rufus, That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic, trans. Cora E. Lutz (Yale University Press, 2020).

PREFACE

“That guy is really pissing me off,” one of my students said as he watched the prison escort officer pass by the classroom window. “He speaks disrespectfully to us. That doesn’t go unchecked in here.”

“OK. Do you mind if I ask you a hard question?” I said.

“No. Ask.”

“Alright. I’m not trying to be rude or anything, so don’t take this question the wrong way. I genuinely mean it, because I ask it of myself when I’m in a similar situation. Why does it matter to you what he says about you?”

“I don’t talk to him that way. He has a job to do, so he should do it. Nothing in his job says that he should talk to us like that. He needs to learn that’s not OK.”

“Yeah, I hear you. I don’t like to be disrespected either. What do you think can be done about the situation?”

“Eventually someone is going to smash him.”

“That is how some people handle it. A minute ago, though, you said he speaks disrespectfully to you. Do you talk to people that way?”

“No.”

“Right. Because good people don’t do that. You don’t want to be that person—I believe that about you. So, let me ask, have you said anything to him? Have you said something like, ‘Hey man, I can see you’re having a bad day. I appreciate the difficult job you have to do. Dudes in here can be challenging—I think so too!’ I mean, I hear you guys say bad things about each other all the time . . .”

“Why should I show him that respect? He doesn’t show it to me.”

“Fair enough. But my advice helps him see he’s taking the low road. And it helps him see you’re taking the high road, that you’re the better person. That’ll change the way some people act. But maybe he doesn’t see it and keeps talking

down to you. Well, at least you know now you’re the better person. And then, I wonder, why care what he says anyway? If you smash him, you’re not the better person, and then I wonder why you’re complaining.”

The student sat back, shaking his head at me, and started laughing. He then slammed his hand into his fist, exclaiming, “Damn, Dr. Bob! You don’t let us get away with anything!”

I felt proud, but I also knew it wasn’t really me. I was just a mouthpiece of the Stoicism we’d been absorbing for the last few months. After decades of confusion about how to be comfortable inside my own skull, my thinking finally had clarity. I could see myself, and I therefore saw my students better. Remarkably, I felt like I could anticipate many of their thoughts. My mind was just like theirs, trying to extract happiness by bending a noncompliant world to my will. Inside of us, however, is a calling to always be our best person—absolutely no excuses about events or circumstances. That, in my opinion, is the distillation of Stoicism. When we don’t honor that calling, we aren’t aligned with ourselves, and no amount of satisfaction will make us feel right. The world won’t comply with our desires, and so we will always find someone or something to blame. It’s a strange thought, but your happiness doesn’t care about what you want. It cares about your character, and you should therefore strive to be excellent or “virtuous”—kind, generous, patient, moderate, and so on— no matter what.

Stoicism is an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy that thrived from around 301 BCE to 180 CE. Beginning with the wealthy businessman Zeno, who turned the loss of his fortune into the life lessons noted above, Stoicism gradually evolved until, hundreds of years later, it found itself elevated to the Roman throne of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism traveled across classes and across time because it is the most practical of philosophies. Philosophy, literally the “love of wisdom” in Greek (philo, “love”; sophia, “wisdom”), is ironically not often considered all that useful. Perhaps the oldest

recorded knock on philosophy is that it’s for people with their heads in the clouds.1 As an academically trained philosopher, I don’t disagree, but Stoicism is different. The advice of this “porch” philosophy (stoa, “porch”) has been validated not only by its rediscovery by new generations but also by findings in modern psychology that Stoicism itself anticipated.

For reasons to be explained throughout this book, Stoicism does have the power to sort us out. Isn’t that what we want from a practical philosophy? It doesn’t promise us pleasure, status, or anything else we desire, as none of those things make us better. If we desire happiness—which we do—there is no direct path to it; happiness requires owning your choices and choosing virtuously without exception. And the writings of the Stoics are filled with hard-hitting observations that can effectively rearrange and reorder what we care about.

The great practicality of Stoicism is likely the reason why this book is in your hands. Stoicism is having a bit of a moment. While this is fantastic, there is a danger. One bit of Stoic wisdom that seems to have captured some popular attention is that we are better off focusing on what is up to us rather than on the unpredictability of events and the minds of others. It is good advice. We feel better when we do this, and it motivates us to be better in many domains of life, including work and relationships. But that advice is incomplete and sometimes encourages Stoic soft-pedaling. Stoicism tells us to focus on what is up to us so that we become better human beings, not more pleased, wealthy, or successful. If striving for virtue leads to those things, then great, the Stoics are pleased. But if it leads to the loss of those things, including having your throat slit by some Roman tyrant, then great, the Stoics are pleased. Do you want to feel better about your life? Then be a better person, and let everything else sort itself out.

The goal of this book is to be practical, which is to say that it is far less concerned with teaching you historical and technical Stoicism than it is with framing its ideas so as to assist

you in being Stoic—in being someone who takes up the fight against making excuses for not being their best person.

And it is a fight. We want so much more out of life than virtue. We are friends and lovers; we want bosses and coworkers who don’t annoy us; we chase pleasure and avoid pain; we wish to be attractive and to live for a long time. We seek a great deal more in our lives than our own excellence. Collectively, these desires are the opponent. Stoic commentators could help matters by providing a scouting report so that we can fight effectively against such desires. I attempt to do just this by drawing on scientific findings about our nature, especially when it comes to mental shortcuts, sociality, habits, pleasure, status, wealth, and health. The Stoic ideal is encapsulated by the motto “living in accordance with nature,” so I use the science to give that motto a new look.

Rather than train you to be academically knowledgeable about Stoicism, my goal is to make its lessons stick in your mind. An aspiration I have for this book is that by the time you put it down, you will find yourself deeply uncomfortable with your propensity to avoid demanding the best from yourself. Additionally, I hope it provides you with actionable insights for making better choices. I suspect that some of my interpretations will be controversial with those familiar with Stoicism. That’s fine. I wish to give it the best possible chance of making a difference, so I interpret it accordingly while trying to stay faithful to it.

My interpretation of Stoicism tries to appeal to your whole person—the strange thoughts and muddy experiences that shape the choices that actually matter. I want to enhance that appeal by simplifying the Stoic framework in order to facilitate the habituation of making excellent choices. That is how we can experience the joy of witnessing ourselves becoming more admirable human beings, not just for ourselves but so that we might also be a gift—rather than a burden—to our family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances, and to the strangers with whom we share our lives.

INTRODUCTION

Iwas gathering my belongings to leave a maximum-security unit where I had been teaching Epictetus’s Handbook to a group of prisoners for the first time. As I was doing so, I noticed one of the guys stayed sitting at his table, just staring at his copy of the text. Without looking up, he raised his eyebrows, looking surprised, and asked, “What’s this guy’s name again? Epic-ah-tee-tus?” He stared at the page and then suddenly exclaimed, “This dude’s fucking legit!” and looked up at me with a huge grin. “Why do you say that?” I asked. “I don’t know—he says it how it is, no?” To his surprise, Epictetus—a onetime slave turned philosopher who had died nearly two thousand years ago—spoke the truth to him.

As we worked our way through the text, he and others resonated with Epictetus’s perspective that so much of life is not up to us. Indeed, they were living it. More than once I was told, “You gotta understand that they control everything in here. When we eat, when we sleep, what we watch, who my neighbor is. That makes people act out.” In response to their felt loss of control over the things most people live for—pleasure, money, social status, power—many inmates were motivated to get creative or just use brute force in order to acquire those things illicitly. But many resonated with Epictetus’s conclusion. “We don’t have anything in here but our character. That’s why things pop off when people get disrespectful. We have to maintain our respect. That’s what Epictetus says— that’s up to us.”

They had learned to live a nonnegotiable maxim: Never sacrifice who you are. If you feel everything is being taken from you, the only reasonable option is to confront any incursion by anyone, inmates or staff, into the one thing that is up to you. Who you choose to be is the one choice you have left. It seems to me more than a coincidence that the men I taught who expressed thoughts like this had a great capacity both for

violence and for withstanding suffering. Once they saw what was up to them, they’d rather have died than relinquish it.

The experience of discovering the value of what is still up to us seems shared among prisoners of all kinds. Concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl wrote that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”2 Navy pilot James Stockdale, shot down and tortured in a Vietnamese prison for seven years, clung to a faith in his ability to prevail despite the brutal nature of his confined existence, an experience that he said he wouldn’t have traded for anything.3 I hesitate to compare Frankl and Stockdale—both of whom found their purpose in nobility rather than aggression and violence—with the men I was working with in prisons, but the experience is the same: Strip a person of their comforts and pleasures, and they have nothing left to value but who they choose to be.

From the sedated perspective of our comfortable modern lives, all of that might sound pretty severe. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that our lives are so pleasant—it means we don’t have to suffer like our ancestors, with half of all our children dying, widespread famine and untreatable diseases, ruthless exercises of power leaving innocent people raped and pillaged, and so on. But it does come at a cost: We negotiate the selling price of our character on a daily basis and as a matter of habit. We have been trained to accept pleasure and comfort at the cost of who we are. At the same time, we’re extremely confused when we aren’t happy. By just about every objective measure our lives have improved significantly, but research shows we aren’t actually much happier. And when real difficulties arise, as they inevitably do, we are too scared, angry, upset, and generally unfit to rise to the challenge. We value things that might satisfy us but that don’t make us happy because we don’t actually know why we chase what we do. We’re deluded and ignorant.

Ignorance is often shaken by hardships, which motivate us to dig deeper and find solutions within ourselves. For many of

my students, hardship forced them to take ownership of their past, thereby precipitating positive change. Others, however, would cling to what they still had control over but without owning their responsibility for their situation. Those prisoners became more difficult, angry, upset, and isolated. There is great value in learning that we define ourselves, but the precise nature of our self-definitions also matters. Frankl and Stockdale discovered the value of good choices, choices that brought them peace no matter what horrors might be inflicted on them. They discovered that the only choices worth making are those that contribute to human goodness. It was becoming better human beings despite their circumstances that allowed them to prevail. Hardships strip us of our pretenses and reveal who we really are. At best, we will respond with a peaceful dignity and a commitment to others; at worst, we will be consumed by our rage at things not going our way. The advantage of the first is that no matter what happens, we can find joy in rising above our difficulties, as Frankl and Stockdale prove. When our attention is drawn to receiving from the world rather than giving to it, our natural response to the world’s resistance to our demands is fear, anger, and grief. By contrast, the more we attend to what is still in our power and to the good we might bring about in any situation—not just for ourselves but for others—the greater the pride and satisfaction we experience. We cannot have it both ways. This is a Stoic promise.

Ancient Stoicism

Stoicism packages the lessons of hardship into a life philosophy. Zeno of Citium (c. 335–263 BCE) founded the Stoic school after losing his fortune. The story is that he was traveling aboard a ship whose cargo contained his wealth in the form of an expensive shipment of clothing dye. The ship was wrecked, which cost him his fortune. Now broke, he found himself in Athens. He wandered into a bookstore, where he

discovered Xenophon’s Memorabilia, a book describing the life and acts of Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE), the legendary ancient Greek philosopher known for asking hard questions about how to live well. Asking the bookseller where he might find a man such as Socrates, the bookseller pointed to Crates, a philosopher who just happened to be passing by. Crates, unlike Zeno, voluntarily gave up his wealth in pursuit of becoming a good person. Inspired, Zeno studied philosophy for years and eventually developed his own ideas, teaching them on a famous Athenian porch.4

The book Zeno discovered, Memorabilia, wasn’t written by a traditional academic. Xenophon was a highly regarded military leader who became a student of Socrates. Socrates was executed for his beliefs and conduct, but he was tolerated for a very long time by the citizens of Athens—likely because he, too, was respected for his military service. These were two men spiritually united by the harshness of bloodshed. Crates, the philosopher Zeno chose to follow in his destitution, was part of a school called Cynicism, which was known for making a public example of anyone who pursued a life of wealth, status, and power. Crates voluntarily endured hardship by abandoning his inherited wealth in pursuit of wisdom. In Crates, Zeno found his spiritual kin: a man who had experience difficulty and extracted lessons from it.

Stoicism landed differently in a world that was less accustomed to pleasures and comforts than ours is. Its influence lasted almost five hundred years because it could speak to anyone, not just to philosophers: a bankrupted merchant like Zeno, a savvy politician like Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE), a slave like Epictetus (c. 55–135 CE), and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE).5 Everyone experiences difficulty, and Stoicism doesn’t turn people away from the losses and hardships of life. Instead, it encourages them to accept the cold, sobering reality that suffering is inevitable, while also offering tools to manage and thrive. Life is hard—so

stay steady and improve yourself. Stoicism endures because it provides actionable advice and shows you how.

All of this advice hinges on one immensely powerful idea: Life can take everything from you but your capacity to choose who you are, so choose wisely. Who you are, the qualities of your character—whether you are kind or mean, generous or stingy, courageous or cowardly—is entirely up to you. Some of my students recognized this but chose unwisely, fighting anyone and everyone in order to preserve their character but nonetheless ending up upset about the outcomes. It’s hard to believe you’re making the right choices when you struggle to live with the results. The only reasonable way to respond to life’s ongoing assault on us, then, is to become a better person: the kind of person who trains themself to respond to adversity (and for the Stoics this means any adversity) with dignity and honor. Nothing is promised to us, so we might as well choose the result of being satisfied with who we are, which is entirely in our power.

We needn’t put a price on our character, and every time we do so, we barter it for some personal advantage—be that riches, pleasure, recognition, or a longer life.6 We can always choose to be our best person regardless of what the world throws at us, up to and including death. Death isn’t the worst thing, the Stoics say, as it will happen to all of us—and it is far worse to die after living a dishonorable life.7

The powerful message of preserving one’s character at all costs goes back to Socrates. Socrates was put on trial because he posed difficult questions in order to lead his peers to seek wisdom and improve themselves. Confronted with the option of a reprieve, the acceptance of which would have meant dishonoring himself by ceasing to ask such questions, Socrates chose to honor his convictions and die. He even had the opportunity to flee and didn’t take it, believing it would sully his character. In his final hours, a cheerful Socrates consoled his followers about his impending death. His lifelong pursuit of wisdom had prepared him for that moment, to accept his

death nobly. The alternative, selling out his character, would have been far worse.8

Stoicism transforms the person of Socrates into a generalizable life principle. The goodness of your character is always up to you. “As the expression goes,” Epictetus says, “be ready to lose your head, man, for the sake of happiness, for the sake of freedom, for the sake of greatness of soul” (Dis. 2.16.41). There are likely two meanings here. We must figuratively “lose our heads” for greatness of soul. To be happy, free, and great, one must do things society deems foolish or crazy, like denying oneself pleasure and status when those things might injure one’s character. But Epictetus also means it quite literally. In the first book of his Discourses, a series of public lectures annotated by a student, Epictetus argues we should “make the best of what lies within our power” (Dis. 1.1.17). He focuses on preserving one’s character “in everything,” which is to say that there is no condition in which we cannot make the best of those things that are up to us. He is clear, too, that “everything” means preserving one’s character to the death. To make his point, he tells us the story of the Roman politician and Stoic Helvidius Priscus clashing with the emperor Vespasian:

When Vespasian sent word to [Priscus] to tell him not to attend a meeting of the Senate, he replied, “It lies in your power not to allow me to be a senator, but as long as I remain one, I have to attend its meetings.”—“Well, if you do attend, hold your tongue.”—“If you don’t ask for my opinion, I’ll hold my tongue.”—“But I’m bound to ask you.”—“And I for my part must reply as I think fit.”—“But if you do, I’ll have you executed.”—“Well, when have I ever claimed to you that I’m immortal? You fulfil your role, and I’ll fulfil mine. It is yours to have me killed, and mine to die without a tremor.” (Dis. 1.2.19)

In a later statement that might as well be an interpretation of Priscus’s response, Epictetus says, “No, it isn’t what you’re threatened with that compels you, but your own judgement

that it is better to do this or that than to die” (Dis. 1.17.25). Had Priscus valued life above his obligations as a senator, he might have bent to Vespasian’s tyranny, but then he would have been complicit, and so he judged it better to die than do wrong. “Socrates didn’t save his life at the cost of dishonour” (Dis. 4.1.164), Epictetus says. Socrates and Priscus, integrity to the death—the standard of the truest Stoic.

Moral Training

I am simultaneously drawn to and terrified by people who make the hardest choices. Ownership of that magnitude— taking total accountability for who we are and what we choose—is frightening. My character is entirely up to me and may never be broken by any adversity, but my mind nonetheless quickly calculates my selling rate—I am aware of just how weak I am. But the fear that such people inspire is important because it speaks to something in our nature of which we might otherwise be unaware: that we are dependent on nothing but ourselves for who we choose to be.

The constraints on our ownership are self-imposed. We find excuses to limit our ownership. For some it’s money, for others it’s pleasure, for still others it’s status—we can all find reasons. The simple truth is that we don’t always take ownership of our choices. We want things that aren’t up to us and yet when our desires aren’t satisfied we’re upset. No one forces us to roll the dice, but we don’t have the honesty to admit that by making our happiness dependent on these desires we’re gambling against a house that never loses. When we receive pleasure we need more; status is a competition that produces only losers; wealth is secretly about status; and health gives us at best a fit, attractive body that nonetheless must decay. None of it is what it seems. The consequences of trusting our desires is guaranteed disappointment, and yet we invest much more in those desires than we do in being virtuous.

But we love the idea of being someone others admire, don’t we? Isn’t that why some of us buy these kinds of self-help books? For a few minutes while reading in bed or at a busy coffee shop, we get to imagine being someone different, that admirable person we really wish we were. We experience the joy of success in our imagination, without needing to confront ourselves or make any real effort. We can enjoy making plans that we don’t carry out. We can feel the pleasure of making resolute commitments we won’t honor. The exuberance of motivation that will soon fade when the reality of the work sets in. We feel courageous at the beginning of our fight to change ourselves, only to later submit to the status quo. Why do we lose to ourselves like this? Why is it so difficult to become the person we aspire to be? What is the secret of someone like Socrates or Priscus, or anyone we admire for that matter? How can we expect to become our best person when it feels so hard to make and sustain improvements, especially when others make it look easy?

Finishing his thoughts about Priscus, Epictetus offers us what might be the only solution. When a lion attacks a herd of cows, he says, “the bull alone is aware of its own might. . . . And yet a bull doesn’t become a bull all at once, any more than a man acquires nobility of mind all at once; no, he must undergo hard winter training, and so make himself ready” (Dis. 1.2.30–32).9 If we want to be our best person, it doesn’t just happen to us; it takes training. The people we admire most appear to do the right thing spontaneously and without effort. We’re not wrong in thinking that they make it look easy, but we tend to ignore the fact that those people have put in a great deal of effort. Our moral heroes aren’t possessed of a magically powerful will; what the Stoics teach us is that those heroes have developed the habit of not making excuses. This habit encompasses a mistrust of one’s desires and an awareness that our relationships with others are what matter most. Virtuous choices realize qualities that enable us to prioritize our relationships above our desires. Vice, the opposite of virtue, is

a signal to others that we aren’t trustworthy and reliable, that if the conditions are right, we will sacrifice others for what we want. By habituating complete accountability for our choices, Stoicism aspires to avoid that.

No one is excellent by accident. We don’t just show up in the world ready to score moral touchdowns all day. It takes practice. Like a trained chef, we must experiment with ingredients and techniques over and over again until our skill becomes natural and effortless. We can do the same for our character. We find it soothing to our fragile egos to assume that virtue is some kind of moral magic, when in fact it requires serious effort. That’s the bad news. The good news, so the Stoics say, is that none of this is a mystery: It’s just a skill, like everything else in life. Through the training of confronting our minds with the facts about what is up to us, we can arrive at the point where making good choices comes naturally and where bad choices seem less rewarding because we are keenly aware of the costs that they incur.

How This Book Is Structured

Stoicism offers us principles for training ourselves to be our best. Just as muscles require resistance in order to grow, our predisposition to prioritize our desires above virtue is the resistance we need in order to build our ownership muscles. At this point, we’re like an unfit person who has wandered into a gym by accident and is only hovering at the reception out of sheer awkwardness. So let me give you a pitch to keep you from walking out the door. In the next chapter, I introduce the Stoic concept of moral fitness—or what the Stoics called “living in accordance with nature”—by describing my introduction to Stoicism after my most serious failure in life. The central idea, which I had to learn rather painfully, is that when we oppose rather than align with nature, we are the cause of our grievances.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Chapter 2 provides a Stoic account of ignorance, which the Stoics believed to be the cause of all moral failures. When we fail to distinguish between what is good and bad, we ultimately do things that oppose our nature. I use the psychology of bias and overconfidence to give this Stoic account of ignorance some modern grounding. Bias blinds us to information that is relevant to forming clear judgments of goodness while also increasing our confidence in our mistaken judgments.

Chapter 3, “The Desire for Externals,” digs deeper into ignorance by locating its primary engine in our desires. Our desires for things like pleasure, status, wealth, and health are highly rewarding as a result of the pressures of natural selection. Because these desires forcefully and naturally capture our attention, the Stoics say, we assume that by satisfying them we will be happy. But in the vast majority of cases the satisfaction of our desires is not something over which we have any power. At any time we can be deprived of it by forces beyond us. This introduces us to the Stoic dichotomy of ownership: We don’t own the objects of our desire, or “externals,” but we do own our relationship to our desires, and we can choose to adjust them to nature.

We can modify our desires in this way by using desire itself. We do, as a matter of fact, desire good relationships with others, as I explain in chapter 4, “The Desire for Virtue.” It is here that I introduce the Stoic idea that virtue is desirable because of how it benefits our relationships with others. Naturally, we want relationships that are predictable, trustworthy, and reliable. Only someone who cares more about virtue than desire can provide those things, whereas anyone who prioritizes their desires presents inherent risks.

Chapter 5, “Virtuous Choices,” uses a passage from Epictetus to frame a simple Stoic decision procedure: First, mistrust externals; second, trust that relationships matter most; finally, always choose what is admirable.

Making virtuous choices can be tricky because our attention is habitually focused on our desires. So chapter 6, “Habits,” draws on research into habits to discuss how we might form a habit of ownership—a proactive approach to transforming our relationship to our desires. Our desires arise in contexts in which we have already built associations with specific kinds of rewards. When our brains recognize these associations, desire is triggered, and we feel compelled to act. If we can understand those associations, we can exercise greater ownership of our desires.

Desires are ultimately appraisals of our judgments about what is good. Since the desire we care most about is our desire for good relationships, we need routines that activate our mistrust of our other desires and create the opportunity to attend to what is virtuous. Chapter 7, “Routines,” therefore provides a few Stoic routines that I use in my own life to maintain a grip on my desires.

My assumption is that no amount of argument up to this point will have convinced you to mistrust your desires. The final chapters are designed to provide a final push. The Stoics often identify pleasure, status, wealth, and health as desires that trip us up. These chapters draw significantly on applicable research in order to drive you to take ownership of these desires—to see their false promises—so that you no longer have any excuses that allow them to set a price on your virtue.

At that point, the work is up to you. More work will undoubtedly be necessary, and the work will be persistent. Our desires are the motor force that we can adapt to our moral purpose, so there is always ownership training to be done. Hopefully, though, by the end of this book we will move beyond joyfully imagining our moral greatness to seeing why the Stoics believe that moral greatness is possible for you, here and now. You, too, can avoid putting a price on your character. But first of all, bear with me as I pull some Stoic lessons out of just how low of a price I once put on my own.

CHAPTER 1 LIVING IN ACCORDANCE WITH NATURE

OneOctober day in 2009, my athletic twenty-seven-yearold wife woke up with a mysterious pain in her hips that progressively worsened. A couple of months later it was so severe she required assistance in order to walk and could not lift our toddler. Then, less than a year later, and completely unrelatedly, she was diagnosed with cancer, initiating months of chemotherapy, surgeries, and radiation treatments. It was a horrendous two years for her. Consumed by my career as a newly minted PhD in philosophy and by my unwillingness to do difficult things, I didn’t take care of her. By making my wife feel isolated and abandoned, I inflicted a great deal of trauma. I was a bad husband.

I fought my responsibility for a while. Finally, it occurred to me that she was so hurt that she might judge our relationship wasn’t worthy of repair—she might very well leave me. She could certainly do better than me; I can be an idiot at times, but I’m smart enough to know there are nicer, taller, more successful guys out there. Thankfully, she stayed. She wanted more from me than I wanted of myself. I knew I had hurt her, and I accepted that. I understood that my behaviors were hurtful, and when we had identified those hurtful behaviors I started to change them. But, honestly, I didn’t

understand why they were hurtful. My mind was really twisted. I worked in ethics and loved teaching it, so I thought I must know some things. What I really knew was how to bullshit myself and others into believing I was a good person, even though I habitually missed opportunities to actually be one. Good people don’t hurt others like I did. I had to own it, even if I didn’t understand the underlying causes. So any thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that I associated with my hurtful behavior became targets of my skepticism. Why would I trust my judgments about what’s good?

About five years later, as I made slow personal progress, I was recruited to teach philosophy in a maximum-security prison in New Mexico. I took the job in the hope that the “love of wisdom” might help my students more than it helped me. I had no idea what I was doing. I frequently fell on my face. The hardened convicts I was teaching at the time were exceptionally gracious. They just liked that I was devoting time and energy to talking about things they’d never had the opportunity to learn about. But if I wanted to keep earning my paycheck, I needed to figure out how to make real, meaningful progress with them, so I started studying what works in prison programs. I came across research showing the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which says, in short, that if we can change the way we think about things, we can change the way we feel and behave. Can philosophy do this? It obviously hadn’t worked for me.

And then, by chance, somewhere in that research on CBT, someone (I can no longer remember who) mentioned the philosophy of Stoicism as a precursor to CBT.10 Naturally, this caught my interest. The Stoics may not have been the first philosophers ever to notice that we do not react to events themselves (say, a public insult) but rather to our own judgments about them (the public insult is bad because it jeopardizes group status), but no other school of thought had organized itself around that insight to the same degree. Given the well-known effectiveness of CBT in prison settings and the

connection of CBT to Stoicism, I decided I probably wouldn’t find anything better than Stoicism to support my efforts. So, I decided to learn it by teaching it.

It made sense that if Stoicism could change convicts, it might be able to change me, too. In that first course we all immediately gravitated to the core Stoic idea that so many of the things we trust to make us happy—pleasure, status, and wealth—aren’t trustworthy at all. We desire things that the universe and others can withhold from us, leading us into negative emotions. And we are further upset by the consequences of our choosing to pursue these desires, which my students knew better than anyone. We could see we had wrongly judged the objects of our desire to be unqualified good things when there were in fact many reasons to be doubtful about them. My students had been addicted, slept around, and abused their bodies. They’d killed for money, and yet they would have made more working fast food for the amount of time they’d be incarcerated. They craved status but regularly talked about how it left them always looking over their shoulders and frequently feeling uncomfortable with others. The most common and emotionally charged consequence was the loss of relationships. My students professed that their so-called friends had abandoned them. They struggled to connect to their families. Their children grew up and their parents died, all beyond the walls.

Many of my students shared their regret and shame at not having known better. They understood that they’d deceived themselves. They hadn’t mistrusted their desires as they should have done, and so they had held inaccurate judgments about what is good. They had believed that more pleasure, status, and wealth would deliver them happiness, no matter what the relational damage; it was just a matter of things breaking their way. As a result, these judgments had propelled them to think, feel, and do things that harmed others and, in the end, themselves. They had inflicted their own misery.