William Irvine on Applied Stoicism

us how the Wolf parable applies to your life. Go to one you Feed dot net slash message by May one and leave us a voicemail. We're excited to celebrate this milestone with you, our dear listeners. Gosh, a newer model iPhone just came out, and if only I had extra money, I could get that. It's a recipe for a dissatisfied life. What's tragic is there's another way you can go where you're going to have maybe not more things, but more satisfaction, and that just seems like the obvious

path to take. Welcome to the One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true, and yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Professor William b Irvin from Right State University. He not only teaches things and writes about philosophy, but has adopted a philosophy for living, namely in the ancient philosophy known as Stoicism.

William is the author of many books and publications, including the one discussed here, The Stoic Challenge, a philosopher's guide to becoming tougher, calmer, and more resilient. Hi, Bill, welcome to the show. Oh it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I am really happy to have you on. We're going to be discussing your book The stoic challenge of Philosopher's guide to becoming tougher, calmer, and more resilient. And I've seen your name around for years.

Whenever I'm looking at like what does it mean to live a good life? Like you pop up a lot. So I'm happy we're finally getting to have this conversation. And let's start like we always do with the wolf parable. In the parable, there is a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the others a bad wolf, which

represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents says, well, which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, it's a great parable, And of course I'm going to side with you, know the things you do. What's the best way to be loved is

to love? What's the best way to feel a sense of self worth. Be a kind person, be an understanding person. I have conversations in which you actually listen to what other people say. You don't simply wait until they're done talking, so you can reveal the truth to them. And you know, you describe the two wolves, and a lot of my research I've actually done a kind of a variation of that. So instead I described three different sources from which your desires can arise, and so you can put it into

by a logical terms. You've got what has been called a triune brain, a brain with three parts. There's the reptile part that's responsible for reflexive actions, there's the mammalian part that's responsible for emotions, and there's a the human part that's responsible for the higher rational process. Now, I've been told by people who know their brain physiology better than I do that that's a a sort of a crude way to put it, but it makes this important point.

And the important point is we're wired biologically to have these components in us. They've been there for literally millions of years, and it's a fact about us, you know, like our need for oxygen, and we also the next thing is we humans being so proud of ourselves, we think, well, you know, our rational component is in charge of these

other components, except that guess what its simply isn't. Normally, it can have a certain degree of control over them, but it spends so much of its time making up clever reasons why you're got should be able to do what your gut wants to do, and that is get

angry and clouder this guy right now. And it can say, oh, yes, you know, that's a sensible thing to do, or you know, for the emotional things too, it can come up with justifications, so it could be reasoning its way through the world, but it spends a lot of its time as a lackey, and it rationalizes its way through the world, and that's the cause of a lot of human misery. Yeah, there's a lot in what you said there, and trying to think of which direction I want to go first with that.

One of the things that I was struck by in your work that came up a couple different times was this idea of you first reference it that I noticed in terms of anger, and you said, you know, the typical storyline is your anger. You have two choices. You can suppress your anger, or you can express your anger, right, but you pause it a third way, which is not to get angry in the first place. And I'd love to dive in there because, while I think makes a ton of sense, how do we start to head off

an emotion before it even starts? Because that process is kind of like that. Yeah, it's quick, you know when anger, when you feel it in you, you know, you know, you can feel it starting to boil, and then it erupts within a matter of seconds. So you you got

to act quickly. So in the book The Stoic Challenge, what I do is I describe these deeper emotions, these very destructive and negative emotions that lurk within you, and I described techniques developed by the ancient Stoic philosophers for not only kind of containing them, but for harnessing them and using them for good purposes, which is a real twist.

The analogy here of psychologists named Jonathan Height last name spelled H. A I. D. T. Has this story about the mahout that's the man who sits behind the head of the elephant and by tapping the elephant can get the elephant to move tree. You know, things it's heavy construction equipment in some parts of the world. But of course the elephant could simply knock him off and trample him at will. But the mahout can actually control, can

sort of say, okay, elephant, you've got all this power. Yeah, you can use it to trample those villagers, but hey, here's a log that needs to be moved, so let's do that instead. So the stoics came up with the idea, you can do that with those angry impulses, but you've got to act quickly because once the full anger is stirred, a game over. You know your your anger is gonna win, and your brain is, like I say, it's going to rationalize. It's not going to try to reason. You can't reason

with the anger. You can't reason with your gut because your gut is irrational. It would be like trying to reason with a tree. You can't do it. So what can you do? Maybe divert it for better purposes. You know, in the analogy you just used of the elephant and the rider, that take that I got from that is very similar to yours, is that you know you've got the rider up there and he's trying to steer the elephant, and they say that the writer the analogy makes it

sort of like your conscious brain. It's your conscious brain, and it it says, let's go this way, let's go that way. But if the elephant really wants to go a certain direction, the elephant is going to go that direction. And so the key is to train the elephant to go in the direction that you want it to go. And you know, this shows up a lot in stoic talk also about desire, which we're going to get to in a minute. It's about, you know, learning to desire

quote unquote the right things. However, there's a lot of people who say that these lower if we want to call them lower mammalian reptile, these these other parts of our brain do have valuable information to give us, and then emotions often are valuable information. So how do you see the role of of rationality interplaying with the other parts of the brain in a way that is, I guess, for lack of a better word, harmonious. Yeah, that's a great question. So the whole question of the role emotion

should play in your life. I think what would be really nightmarish is to be in a body that lacked an emotional sense, because that's the human experience. What does that mean? That means you could never fall in love? Well, you know, falling in love is one of the great human experiences. Being loved is wonderful, and it's what we're always looking for, is somebody who's going to love us. But the capacity to love is itself a wonderful power.

It helps you get outside yourself. The ability to empathize with other people is a wonderful thing as well, And I wouldn't want to lose that one thing I've been paying attention to because I've reached a stage of life where I can be watching something, watching a movie, you know, and and they kind of string you along and then the emotional thing is delivered, and then the question is what do you do. Well, I don't want to choke up.

I don't want to shed any tears. This is the what I was trained to do as a as a functional male, you know. Um. But now the interesting thing is it's a delightful moment, you know, where you're connecting with your humanity. I wouldn't want that to go away. So lately I've been watching and so if you watch enough documentaries and so on, you can see people being interviewed that break into that emotional state. You can see before your very eyes that the emotional state has been triggered.

And what's interesting to me is they always apologize to the interviewer. You know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Let's let me No, they shouldn't be sorry. They just had one of the key human experiences and you basically have to embrace it. So that whole notion of your emotions, you know what, You can use them to enrich your life, but of course they can also trample your life because some of the emotions are these terrible emotions like envy. You can be gripped with envy. It can distort you

and it can transmogrify you into this monster. But it can also enrich your life. And you have some control over which of those directions. Like you say, you know which wolf are you gonna feed? You have some control. And the thing is you aren't taught by anybody in the normal course of life how to control it. But there have been some very wise individuals who have come up with suggestions on how to do that. And the Stoics were not alone in doing that, but I would

say they are among those who did that. Yeah, my primary philosophical background, if you would call it such. I mean, I'm not trained in any real way, but has been a student of Buddhism for a lot of years. And you can't you can't read about Stoicism and no Buddhism and not see a lot of overlap. There are some differences, obviously, but but some of the core ideas are are very similar. There is an idea, you know, in Buddhism of wholesome

and unwholesome emotion. What I've found interesting is as I look at Buddhism, as I look at psychology, as I read about Stoicism, one of the tensions that I talked about on this show a lot is kind of what we're talking about now. It's this tension of on one hand, you want to allow and feel the natural human emotions that come up, and you don't want to shut them off. You don't want to shame yourself, you don't want to drive them away, you want to allow them to be there.

And there's a very clear sense in which they're like you said, we don't want to be slave to our emotions, right. There is a very clear sense in stoicism and Buddhism and cognitive behavioral therapy where we work with our thoughts and emotions in a skillful way. And I'm always kind of thinking about which tool to use at what time. Right, there's a time to let the human emotion come out and let it be there. There's time to go Wait,

hang on, I'm perceiving this incorrectly. You know we're gonna get to your stoic test challenge here in a minute. But we use tools like framing and anchoring to to change the way we're seeing things. What's the right tool to use in what circumstances. And this may lead us into some of your work, your you and on decision making, or this may not even go there in that direction at all. But I'm kind of curious what you think

about my very long question. Yeah, I'm going to break apart some of the parts of your question, and if they're any important ones, I leave out the connection between Buddhism and stoicism. I got into stoicism by way of Buddhism, which your sounds like, no, you couldn't possibly do that, But I got it in my mind that I was going to become as en Buddhist, and then it dawned on me that I could improve my academic standing by writing a book on that. And then to do that,

I had to investigate Stoicism. And the shocker for me was they both were aimed at the same goal. They said, the goal of your life, the long term goal should be a life living a life of equanimity, of tranquility. But the word tranquility is dangerous word to use. So they had the same goal, but they had radically different strategies for attaining that goal. So if you want to be as in Buddhist, you're gonna do lots and lots

of meditations. You're gonna actus solving Cohan's although if you have Zen Buddhists in your audience, they're gonna say he doesn't know what he's talking about. But you're going to take that route. And I think that is a route that can successfully be used. So I'm not putting downs

in Buddhism. But then it came across the Stoics, who happened to have been the pre eminent psychologists of their time this would be the first century a d. And they came up with psychological strategies for reaching the same goal. Now one difference between the two, and the two are also compatible. I've gotten to know a Zen master in the United States named Henry Shookman s h u k m A Henry Uh. I asked him flat out it said, are these two compatible? And he kind of rolled his

eyes back and said, well, of course, right. So, But the interesting thing is, if you're gonna give Zen Buddhism a fair try, it's a big undertaking. I'm a Zen practitioner, so I'm I know the drill. I've done hundreds of coons. It is an undertaking and and a worthwhile undertaking. What a long term undertaking? Stoicism My my sales pitch is on a three day weekend. You can learn enough about it and its strategies for you to be able to decide, hey, this is working for me, or hey this isn't working

for me. I would call it as a lower price of admission. You can very quickly test drive it and find out whether it's going to work for you or not. But it's interesting that two so different approaches would be two different solutions to the same problem. And when I encounter stoics, I recommend that they try meditation simply because meditation is one way for you to get a front row seat to the operations of these deeper forces that

we're talking about. And you know, typical first meditation as you try to empty your mind of all thoughts, well, you know, and I assign that to my students, and next time we meet, you know, I say, okay, did you try the experiment? You know? And they all say yeah, yeah, yeah, And I'll call on one of them, how did it go? And he said, oh, it's easy. I emptied my mind of all thoughts. And I did that for five minutes.

And I know then that he didn't do it because if you if you try it, you know, you think, first five seconds, for seven seconds, this is easy, and then you realize, oh, I'm thinking about what I'm going to have for dinner tonight, right, and uh, and they just keep flooding in and so you realize how your consciousness is a stage on which these different desires will trot out, or these different emotions, or these different resentments will trot out, and then you've got a choice of

what do you do with them? Now? Do you act on them? And a lot of desires people act on them because they say well, it was in my mind, so it must be what I want. The answer is no. So well, one component of your brain that's very ancient has decided that you want and you know better than that you shouldn't want that. So many things in there that we could hit on. But to what I and to hit on is the practice of stoicism, because you do make a good point that Zen Buddhism is a practice.

As an ongoing thing, we keep doing it, and some of the goals, particularly in Zen, are aiming even somewhere different than just tranquility or equanimity. But setting that aside, you know, you say that for a weekend, you can kind of, you know, go get the stoic thing in a weekend, right and agree totally, like you can get

the basics of the philosophy very quickly. The place that I'd like to ask you about is it's one thing to have a philosophy that you read about and you shake your head in agreement with and you go, yeah, that makes sense. That's where I should live that way, that's the way I should think. It's an entirely different animal to actually bring that to mind in the moments of your life. And so I'd love to hear a little bit about you use this phrase a couple of

times and books the practice of stoicism. So can we talk a little bit about what some of the practices are and how do people as they're on this path remember to actually practice in the moments that it matters most. Right. I consider myself a practicing stoic. I'm a twenty one century practicing stoic. So what does that mean? And I also have I get emails from people and they say, how do I know when I'm a stoic? And um, my reply is, well, are you practicing stoicism? Because that's

as good as it gets. H. I know a woman who's a very skilled oboist, and at first I was puzzled because she had to practice for like an hour or two a day or maybe more than that. And I would kid her and I'd say, well, when are you going to learn it? And you know, she made it clear what you can kind of never do you practice it? And that's true of stoicism. So you're practicing,

it means what you're using certain psychological strategy. And it's important that your listeners realize that this is not a religion. It's psychology in the sense that I'm interested in it. It's psychology. So there are practices like negative visualization where some odd moment in your day you don't have to sit down in a darkened room. You can do it

in the middle of a crowd. It's perfectly worth doing there, and you take a moment to think about the things in your life that you value, and you allow yourself to have a flickering thought about if they suddenly ceased to be part of your life. You don't dwell on that. That would be a really good way to get deeply depressed, but you allow yourself to have a flickering thought about. How about losing your job, how about being told by

your doctor that you have some kind of cancer. How about getting a phone call, Hey, your child has been involved in an accident. Right, figure out what is important to you, what you value. Now let yourself have that second or two where you really sort of let that

sink in and now go about your business. And it can be a really transforming thing because the next time you encounter the child, instead of just sort of ignoring it so you can check your email, you might you know, pick the kid up and say thank you for being part of my life. This is this is wonderful. So it's easy to do, and the interesting thing is you can reapply as needed. I will go through that exercise

maybe five times in the course of the day. Because the way we humans are wired, whatever we have, we start taking for granted. So we're always dissatisfied because as soon as our life kind of flattens out and we've got stuff, and then we say, well, this is good, but there's something that would be even better, and and then we we embark on that. So we spend lives of dissatisfaction when satisfaction is within our grasp. If only we would learn to appreciate the things we already have,

and negative visualization is one way to do that. You have a line that I absolutely love about this. You say, one key to happiness then is to forestall the adaptation process. And the adaptation process that you're talking about is the exactly what you said. It's often referred to in psychology as hedonic adaptation. Basically means once I get something, I

take it for granted. I mean there's a positive side to our adaptability also, which means we can adapt to very difficult things and we just Okay, now it's normal. But the downside is hedonic adaptation. We get something and we suddenly take it for granted. And I just love that line. Forestall the adaptation process. So negative visualization is one way to do that. Are there other stoic practices that help forestall the adaptation process? Yeah, let me tell

you some others. But before do that, here's a personal revelation for you. Okay, okay, the guy who wrote the book on this, I've been a practicing Stoic for like nearly twenty years. Okay, So this was a few weeks ago. I was on a podcast that drove the sales of the Stoic Challenge book. And you know, on Amazon you can look up the ranking of a book. The lower the better. I mean, they have what ten million books, you know, so uh, to to get even to a

thousand number of thousand, that's a major accomplishment. But I did a podcast and just idly checked and realized that the sales were improving dramatically. And so I watched the sales. Oh look at that, I'm number two hundred and sixteen. I watched you know, oh look I'm a hundred and thirty. I watched I was at a hundred, the hundred best selling book on Amazon, and this was far better by

hundreds than I had ever been before. And then the next time I checked it was like at a hundred and seven, and I was thinking, oh, man, I wish I had hit double digits. In other words, I had that hundred, and what did I do? For a minute, there was the biggest thrill? And then what was the next thought that came into my mind? Ah, if only I had done one better than that, And that's crazy, I've got Oh I know it is. Yeah, yeah, so that's human. It's totally human. So then how does a

stoic recognizing that, like recognizing what you just did? What's the practice then to sort of try and forced all that adaptation or reverse it in that case, because you kind of didn't even forestall it, right, it sort of happened, so now we're in reverse. Negative visualization is one such technique, because what you're doing is you're imagining the loss of things you value. So suppose you know, so you can

you can go through all of these mind experiments. Suppose I hadn't been able to find a publisher for the book. Another way to think about it, is realized that for everything you do in life, there will be a last time you do it. There have been last times you've dialed a telephone, remember the good old days when we had dials, last time you played hop scotch, But there will be a last time you lay your head on the pillow, a last time you bring Now it's like

negative visualization. You know somebody who will come to this and say, well, that's a recipe for depression. You're just having all of these negative thoughts. Shouldn't you try to keep out the negative thoughts? Isn't that the trick to being a happy person? And the stoics said, no, they should play a role in your life, but just a kind of a peripheral role where you consider them, because what it'll do is it'll make you more satisfied with

the life that you're living. So, in this particular one, doing this exercise and thinking, you know, right now you and I are doing a podcast, and uh, you've done tons of them. I've seen and I've done a fair number as well. And so you can go through the podcast and you can think and doing another podcast, or you can go through it and realizing there will be a last podcast you do, there will be a last

podcast you do. It has to be the case, because unfortunately we're we're mortal, and there will be a last podcast I do. And if you go into a podcast thinking those terms, it puts an entirely different spin on it. Another related exercise is there will be some time in your life should you live long enough, and I sincerely hope you do, where you'll look back on these as the as the good old days. Right, things happen, and right now you are living what some day to you

will be the good old days. So am I suggesting that you fixate on death? No, not doing that. So so what's the point here? The point is to realize that life is a precious commodity simply because it has an end point. Right, there will be a last time. So think about the way a twenty year old approaches life compared to the way an eighty year old approaches life. So to a twenty year old, what's the value of today?

You know, he can do the math on this and he can say, wow, let's say I've got thirty thousand days to live, probably, so this is one thirty thousands of my life. So this day means nothing. So what am I gonna do. I'm gonna play video games all day long. Take the eighty year old, you know, uh, And he says, Oh, I've got X number of days, and that number isn't so big, so this day is a good portion of those. So I'm gonna be thoughtful on how I spend this day. I'm not going to

squander it. This day is going to be full of time well spent. I'm getting on in years myself. I recently had a seventieth birthday, and the striking thing is I noticed myself becoming less tolerant. You know, if you if you go to somebody to do something simple and they can't do it. And I realized part of that is I realized time is valuable in a way that it didn't used to be as a kid. So those seem like negative thoughts, but they can make you appreciate

the moments in the abilities you have right now. Yeah, Buddhism has similar concepts. You know you're gonna die and you don't know when, So what do you do with that? You know, because the twenty year old might have thirty thousand more days, he might have three hours. He doesn't know, right we don't know, you know, so I may do five hundred more podcasts or this could be my last podcast. To your point, like very literally, it could be. Life is uncertain in that way. Here's an analogy for you.

So suppose I gave you a vessel, a big jug and you wanted to be full. For it to be full, it has to have a maximum capacity, otherwise it can never be full. And you could say the same of a life. For a life to be full, it has to have a capacity. That is, there has to be a value of x to the number of days you've got left. I did a sort of philosophy of religion. Course we're talking about heaven. And the thing about heaven is it seems wonderful because how many days? What's the

value of x? Infinite? So what are you gonna do? You're gonna waste every single day? How come? Because you got infinitely many of them? And to care that sounds like a recipe for a miserable existence because you had waste every day and on earth. If you're kind of a mindful and individual, you're not gonna waste it. You're gonna have time well spent, a life full of time

well spent. Will be a life well spent. And when you are on your last days, you don't want to look back and say I had a chance at life and I wasted it. Do you want to say, no, I did good things, I did meaningful things. Let's use that as a place to pivot to desire what it is that we want because our actions tend to be geared at getting what we want, right, That is sort

of the way that we go about things. You say that the easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have. It feels to me like very much a Buddhist idea. There's this sense of yeah, be happy with what you have, and another tension that I often feel. I felt that in Buddhism is that sense of like, be happy with what you've got. You know, it's wanting things that you

don't have that causes you to be unhappy. That strikes me as unalterably, fairly true thing to say, And it does also strike me that there seems to be a human desire for moving forward. Some of it is the adaptation we talked about, but some of it feels natural and healthy. Right, So, how do you think about the question of wanting what you have and balancing that, you know, being happy right where you are, with the desire for more, different, better,

you know, in whatever way you want to phrase those up. Yeah, you're wired to want more because us. And this is evolutionary psychology. On the savannahs of Africa, a hundred thousand years ago, humans who were easily satisfied died. You know, if let's just imagine one of them was kind of blissed out and he said, Ah, the savannahs of Africa. I think I'm gonna sit here on this rock today

and just take it all in and enjoy it. Oops, he became some lions lunch right, And the same thing back then that the struggle would have been what am I going to have for my next meal? Will there be a next meal? And so we're wired to always want more, to always try to improve our circumstances. Except where in a radically different environment. Now, you know, it isn't where's my next meal going to come from? It's whether I'm going to over eat once again? Can I

hold off to my next meal before I have eat twinkies? Yeah? Yeah, So we're in a wildly different environment. Use the word happiness, and I've used it too, but I've become more careful about my use of happiness because I'm not quite sure anymore of what it means. I think it's something that is a byproduct of other things in your life. So to say you know that my goal is to become happy, I'm not sure that's a fully coherent notion. But one thing a word I'm I'm more comfortable using is satisfied

being pleased. Okay, so that notion of being pleased with what you've already got that level of satisfaction. Uh. Now there are people who say you shouldn't settle for that, and to me, that's crazy talk because those people are saying you should go through life dissatisfied. And why because you have these desires within you and you should act on them. And then the thing is, well, that's just

an accident. We're wired crazy because we were wired on the savannahs of Africa, and we now have rational component to our brain, and we should attempt to outthink those impulses that we have. We should put that brain to good work and try to get around them. You have an analogy I think is so good. You say, suppose you woke up. When we're in Discover, you were the last person on the earth, right, and in that situation, you could satisfy as many material desires as you want.

You could drive any car you want, you could live in any house you want, You could have everything, and then would you still want it? So I love that analogy talk about how we go about getting clearer on wanting. And I'm putting this word in in quotation marks the right things, the things that do lead to satisfaction. What

are those things? And then what's the retraining process look like? Yeah, you know, because culturally we're just conditioned, to your point, more and more and more better, better, bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, right, So there has to be some process that retrains that, it seems. So this would be in the book on Desire where I made the point we all want to be rich and famous. By rich, that means more affluent than the people around us, and by famous I mean,

I guess I mean social status. And again there's an evolutionary reason for that. Our ancestors who are wired that way were more likely to survive and reproduce than those who weren't. So it's wired into us and it feels good when other people look up to us, when other people admire us. Oh, and you know what really feels good is when they envy us, which is terrible. Envy

is one of the worst emotions there is. But we now have, as we said a minute ago, we're in a different environment than our ancestors were, and in the last twenty years were in a radically different environment because social media have come along. So there are now people who are living their lives to do what to get likes on Facebook, on Instagram, to get followers, and who are the people who are awarding them, uh, complete strangers who might have radically different values than they do, who

might themselves to be living miserable lives. A few years back, my wife and I were in Paris. We went to see the Mona Lisa and it was just the most striking thing because people weren't looking at the Mona Lisa. What people were doing is doing selfies with the Mona Lisa in the background. And so what were they doing. They were spending this time in this museum posting stuff so they could create an impression, so other people could

admire them. And that's craziness because you don't know these people, and and why should they play this role in your life. You're spending the one life you have to live trying to impress complete strangers. That's crazy, That's crazy. But here we are. And uh, I'm the outlier in talking this way, and I know that there are some people I want

very very much to please. There are other people who if they like what I'm doing, I will rethink whatever it is I'm doing and think I've got such different values that I do that if they like what I'm doing, I'm doing something really raw. Right. I gotta gotta think this through again. Also, the desire for affluence. It's easy to go overboard on this. We're living in the dream

world of our ancestors. You own right now, I will predict you own something that the richest man on the planet Earth could not have owned half a century ago. A good chance it's in your pocket. You call it your cell phone. You've got one, right, And the richest person on the planet, you know, a mountain of gold, could not have bought it him, that that device, and you've got it. And yet so how are you responding? Gosh, a newer model iPhone just came out, and if only

I had extra money, I could get that. It's a recipe for a dissatisfied life. What's tragic is there's another way you can go where you're going to have maybe not more things, but more satisfaction. That just seems like the obvious path to take. So how do we change what we want? Because, like you say, I mean, I can hear, and I'm sure a lot of people listening can hear everything you're saying and go, I totally that makes complete sense to me, and yet I still find

that I'm wanting. It's there, and I might think virtue is the way to be. I should want virtue. I read about it. It makes sense to me, and yet emotionally I'm still wired over here. So what's the process of unwinding the desire to the things that are crazy right, that don't lead to happiness, that don't lead or whatever word we want to use in its place, that don't lead to a good life, and beginning to want the

things that do lead to a good life. One thing is you should be suspicious of the desires you find lurking in you. And one question. When you find a desire, because they float into your mind, it's they're like they're like viruses. They float in try to plant themselves in your mind and grow into full fledged desires. And so one of the things you've got to do is when you detect a desire, do a little bit of detective

work where did this come from? So if you find yourself reading the car ads in the newspaper, you know you should stop and say, why am I doing this? I didn't choose to do this. I noticed that I'm doing this. I noticed that I have this desire for a new car. Do I really want to do this? And if I'm not the author of this desire, then why would I let some sales agencies somewhere take control of me and plant this in and shame on me

for letting it grow. Now, As a Buddhist, one part of meditation is to recognize a thought within you, and you acknowledge it and you dismiss it, and you know, another rational strategy is to say, oh, you know, it's like I caught a cold, And in this case, I guess you can't just make the cold go away, but just recognize it for what it is. Another thing about desires is there are things that you might not of it in your control self control. It's a difficult thing

to accomplish. And one thing, though, is you do have it in your power not to put the objects of

your desire right in front of you. So, for instance, if you tell me that you're trying to lose weight, that that's your goal, but you're going off for a cup of coffee, then one thing you have complete control over is whether you get the cup of coffee at a donut shop or at someplace else, Because if you go to the donut shop, then those desires are going to become incredibly powerful and you're probably going to act

on them. And so is the heart of this really recognizing that some desires lead to happiness and others don't, so being able to rationally see that and then, like you said, try and watch for the ones that we know don't lead to happiness and try to redirect ourselves to the ones that do. Yeah, Stoics and other ancient philosophers as well said, you should have a philosophy of life. You should have this grand goal that are aiming at. And because once you've got that, then you can fill

in the lesser goals. And if you detect a goal in yourself, you can ask yourself. Is that more likely to lead me toward the grand goal or away from the grand goal? And if the grand goal is this equanimity or this tranquility, or this absence of negative emotions from you, then you look at the desire that's popped in and say, okay, if I act on this desire, will that take me toward that ultimate goal or away from it? Problem is, most people don't have a grand goal.

What they do is they just wing it. Day to day. They make up stuff, and so tomorrow they undo what they accomplished today because the goal changed, because the goal changes from day to day. So to have a kind of a coherent hierarchy with at the top the grand goal and then below that the goals that are going to get you to that grand goal. And what would stoicism say the grand goal is or would it say? It would depend on who you are, They would say

tranquility or equanimity. What's the successful life? It's a life that was full of positive emotions, like feelings of delight, like feelings of joy, like that rush of a sense of awe about the universe that we're in, and the avoidance of negative emotions like anger, like jealousy, like envy, like anxiety. So you just kind of do a weighing act. Okay, so I've got these negative emotions, I got the positive emotions.

The positive are okay. In fact, I should try to fill my life with those, and then there's going to be certain actions you can do to increase the chance, you know, like loving, like being full of sympathy for the people around you. And then how do you avoid the negative emotions? Well, you know, just by trying to put yourself in somebody else's life, it becomes a lot harder to hate them. You know, you don't have to experience those emotions. So the stoics were rational. You know.

Occasionally I get contacted by people who tell me they have these intense anxieties, and my reply is, stoics can't help you because they have rational strategies, and uh, an intense anxiety can be a biological phenomenon. If you're an addict, sorry, stoicism can't help you because it requires the very rational kind of strategy. Doesn't mean you have to have an i Q of two hundred, just means you have to

be willing to get your head in the game. That's a really fascinating thing that you just said there that I'd like to explore a little bit more, which is, yeah,

where does something like stoicism help? And this gets a little bit to what we hit on a little bit earlier, and we kind of moved out of it because there are a lot of interesting places to go, which was sort of how we work with emotion and thought and what we do because, as you're saying, stoicism is a rational thing, and oftentimes our emotions overtake our ability to

be rational. You know, does stoicism have anything to say about how you work with a highly activated state of emotion like an anxiety, how you work with a very highly emotional state. So the book The Stoic Challenge is applied stoicism and it says life is challenging. In the course of our daily life, we encounter setbacks. Some of them are tiny, like we realize we run out of sugar, right. Some of them are big we get a diagnosis, you

know that one of our kidneys is in trouble. So the setbacks and they are the leading cause of negative emotions that we experience. And that's sad because you know, when you experience the setback, your emotional response to the setback is likely to do you far more harm than the setback itself was. So you're you're driving to work and somebody cuts you off in traffic and you find yourself yelling at the other person angrily. Well, he can't hear you, he doesn't even know you're yelling. So who

are you hurting? You're hurting yourself. And if that gets your day off to a bad start, you can spend the rest of the day in a bad mood. And if you let that happen, shame on you, because it's self inflicted misery. So what do you do? You instead treat it, So this is what I'm describing. You can reframe it. You can laugh it off. You know, you can treat it as a kind of a test where to pass the test, what you have to do is you have to come up with a workaround to the test,

a successful workaround, and keep your cool as you do. So, Now, if you laugh something off, it actually is interesting because it turns what could be a negative experience into a positive experience. Somebody insults you, A great defense is to make a joke in response, because it will devastate the insult or they want to ruin your day, and you've just laughed at their at their expense, and you've protected yourself against the negative kind of emotions that the insult

could trigger. I want to go into the Stoic test challenge a little bit more in a minute, because I think there's a lot of great stuff in there. I want to give you an example from my life over the last couple of days and just kind of hear your reaction to it. So, for whatever reason, I don't quite know what it is. I am a person who has dealt with depression over the years, but for whatever reason, the last several days I have just been more irritable

than normal. And so I've had a couple of experiences where normally I would just do any of the number of things you just described, right, I'd be like, this is no big deal, Eric, let it go, and I would just let it go, or you've handled this before, don't worry about it, or laugh a little bit. But

I found myself unable almost to do those things. Those things weren't working because I felt like there was some emotional energy that was stronger or darker or heavier than normal that made the strategies that work for me, when I'm in a okay place, harder to implement or actually ineffective. Yeah, once the reptilian feelings come into play, it's game off. You know, they're they're gonna take the high road. So a parallel thing in my life, I've gotten a lot

better at sleeping than I used to. But I I now when I exercise, I need an APP. And I explained to my wife that when I wake up from an APP, I'm going to be quite crabby. That I need about twenty minutes and then I'll be my old, lovable self. But that first twenty minutes I'm going to be crabby. I will tell her I've just woken up from an APP and she should tread very lightly. I would appreciate it. And the interesting thing is I know

that when I'm in that state, I can work. It's just really hard to keep your cool in that state. And that's a case where you aren't thinking clear, you know it's just not quite right. But anger is the more dramatic example, where you find yourself shouting and then you know you want to say, well, why am I doing this? And of course you shout even louder than So there are these inner forces that can break through, at which case your mind just says, okay, well I'm

out of here. I'm gonna go into the back bedroom for a while. And when you calm down. So we are biological creatures. We have hormones. I mean another thing is just the hormone level. Once the hormones are there, you know where this that of neurons, right, And that would be weird enough, except that we're bathed in hormones, and you change the hormones and it affects what we think,

it affects how we think. That's the heart of the question really that I'm wandering around and not articulating, great is that very thing? It's like, I feel the ability to be We all do this. Like there are times where it's like, yes, I can have some degree of equanimity, even in difficult circumstances, you know, like I'm just like, Wow, I'm I've got it going on, right, you know, And then another day, identical situation and I'm like, I'm not

handling this well. I just often think like we're a bag of chemicals and we're trying to apply strategies to work with that bag of chemicals the best we can and I see this in Buddhism a lot. We talk about equanimity as the ultimate virtue, and then when people find that they're unable to have as much equanimity, they feel bad about themselves, when in reality they may actually be better at practicing equanimity than the person next to them who looks more equanimious, because they've got a harder

internal battle to fight to get to that place. Yeah, and people who are anxiety written like for me to say, Okay, my goal for you, I'm gonna be the guru and and you're going to to be my follower. And our goal is to overcome our desire to breathe, you know, And you say, yes, Master, So how do I do it? And I said, We'll just stop breathing here. We're gonna put this bag over your head and then and then you just work with that. Biology does not allow that

to happen. It's a simple matter of biology. You have this precious, powerful reasoning brain awash in this chemical fluid that can change from minute to minute. And if you want to see what happens, if you want to unleash, if you want to get your rational mind out of the picture and just see what your emotions and your heart and gut can do. Get drunk, the higher brain checks out and what's left and some people start crying

when they get drunk. Some people start fighting when they get drunk because the head is out of the game. They make a cell phone. We talked about cell phones a minute ago. So cell phone is is ultimately rational calculator, right, and they're very careful all the circuitry to encase it, to isolate it from the outside world. So it's literally true that you can take a modern cell phone you

couldn't do the US five years ago. You can take it and drop it in a picture of beer and pull it out and it will function just as well. That didn't used to be the case. I know that because my son, when he was a teenager, dropped his cell phone in a couple of lemonade. We tried dramatic measures, but we could not bring it back to life. So they know, you know, the environment. So here you've got this human brain in this pool of changeable chemicals that

will affect how it works. But that's evolution, you know, That's how it works. And so we do the best we can with the tools we have. Essentially, yes, I can't let you go without talking about another of my favorite topics that you've written about to a certain extent, And I've often said that I think the Serenity Prayer is one of the wisest things ever written. Right, we accept the things we cannot change, we change the things we can. We try and have the wisdom to know

the difference. Stoics talk about this also, They talk about a dichotomy of control. Things we can control, things we can't control. You, in what seems to me to be a very wise thing, created the trichotomy of control. Can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, First, the Serenity prayer is mid twentieth century Reinhold Neiber, I think is the person who came up with it. It's a total rip off of the Stoics, in particular the one

called Epictetus who came up with it. But it's a good rip off because it's gotten a lot of my leg and spread the word. It's helped. So Epictetus said there are things you can control and things you can't control, and that's called the dichotomy of control, and I I thought, well, you know, that can be a bit misleading, because then people will say, Okay, if I can't control something, Epictetus says,

just don't worry about it. Well, I can't control whether I keep my job, so I just won't worry about it. I'll just do whatever I want. So I suggested that you should think of life in terms of there's things you have absolute control over, like your values, you get to choose them. Okay, like your character you get to choose that. There are things you have absolutely no control over, like whether it's going to rain tomorrow you just can't control.

But then there's this beautiful, sweet middle section of things you have some but not complete control over. So I describe it in terms of a tennis match. So suppose your scheduled to play a tennis match against your arch rival in a week. So what can you control. Well, you can control how hard you train, you can control how you train, you can control the strategy you go into the game with. You can control what you eat the day before the game, So that's what you should

focus your attention on. What you don't have control over is how the other person trains the strategy they have, So you shouldn't be thinking so much about those. But it's the middle ground where you have some but not complete control, like during the game, how hard you play, like during the game, whether you change your strategies. So you should certainly devote attention to things you have complete control all over. You should also devote attention to things

you have some control over but not complete. But this last thing, you know what, if you took advantage, if you did everything you had some control over as well as you could, and you lost the game anyway, probably the other person was better than you and a story, So should you feel that you failed? Well, in one sense, obviously you lost the game, but in another sense, you did the best you could. And there's a saying for that.

You did what you could with what you had where you were, and that's all you can ever do in life. And if you do that, you walk away. You should be proud. You should be proud. I took what I had and I did the best I could with it,

and it didn't pan out this time. But if I go through my life with that in mind, with that saying in mind, do what you can with what you've got where you are, in the long run, my life is probably going to be much better spent than if I didn't follow that advice if whenever something bad happened, if I simply played the role of victim and wallowed and said, everybody pity me, No, do your best. Yeah, I've always loved that phrase. I think I've heard it

attributed or something like it to Arthur Ash. But yeah, I think that's so true. And I love that you talk about that third category because the serenity prayer, I've often said, is very wise, but when people talk about it, they set it up in these really sort of silly ways, like well, I can't control the weather, but I can control what sweater I wear today, as if it's easy

to figure out. And it's that last line for me, that's the payoff, the wisdom to know the difference, and that seems to be the part that's a little bit trickier. And that's why I love how you introduce this sense of like that, Yeah, there's areas we have influence. You know, I cannot control my partner. I cannot control what what she's going to do. I do have influence on our relationship, you know, to say that I don't would be silly.

You know, the the way I behave does influence the way our relationship goes so I love that trichotomy of control. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post show conversation, more about the Stoic test strategy and decision making. So listeners, if you'd like to get access to lots of great post show conversations, add free episodes, a special episode I do each week called Teaching Song and a Poem where I share a song I love, a poem I love, and I try

and dispense some bit of wisdom. You can get all that and other benefits it when you feed dot net slash join Bill. Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this. Lots of great stuff. Oh you're very welcome. I've had fun here. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of glusive members only benefits.

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