What is Stoicism and how can people live like that?

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What is Stoicism and how can people live like that?

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5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

That nothing is good or bad and to live in the moment without being controlled by fear or pleasure; that’s to understand one’s place in the world.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Stoicism is about being content with your life regardless of circumstances. The book “The Tao of Seneca” is a series of the stoic philosophies written by the man himself. Tim Ferris frequently talks about Stoicism on his podcast and in his books.

One thing that Seneca talks about in his letter to his friend is about “practicing poverty” so that if he ever loses his wealth, he will be just as happy and content as when he had it. There’s a quote that I love and keep in my life it goes roughly like this: “all the while asking myself: is this the condition that I most feared?”. This is what Seneca would ask himself while practicing poverty.

I recommend listening to the Tao of Seneca audio book. Just get volume 1 and see what you think 🙂

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s an ancient Greek school of philosophy that teaches that virtue is the highest quality that a person can have, and a virtuous life can be achieved by not reacting impulsively to whatever life throws at you, but rather thinking about and trying to understand whatever’s happening, first. [Wiki article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism).

Anonymous 0 Comments

Addendum: I really enjoy what little I know and understand of philosophy but it is always so hard to grasp, so intangible.

I really like the concept of Stoicism but as with all philosophy I do not understand enough of it to be able to practice it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Ok, so what you need to work on is thinking about how you think/react to things.

Let’s say you’re driving on the highway and another driver cuts you off. You could get angry at the other driver (either in true “road rage” fashion or just fuming and being mad about it on your own all day) or you can just realize that, since no harm was done in the end, you can just let it go and not let it bother you.

You’re going to have an immediate reaction to the surprise of having the other driver cut in front of you quickly like that, and likely a burst of adrenaline. You cannot help this reaction.

What you *can* control is the response that you have to that reaction. Your own mental state is under nobody’s control other than you yourself. This means that the only thing that *can* make you upset is *you*. You have a choice and an option is to just… let things go. If you remove the thought of “I am hurt”, you remove the hurt itself.

So, when you have that immediate reaction to a stimulus, you get practiced at going through this thought loop of whether things “matter” or not and after doing it a lot you can get to the point where it takes almost no time at all and therefore hardly have outsized emotional reactions in the first place. A modern problem is that people often expect men to be “stoic”, by which they mean this lack of emotional response, but we do a terrible job actually teaching/practicing the mental work necessary to make this a natural response.