How to Live a Happy Life by Massimo Pigliucci

 

 

A Field Guide to a Happy Life

With its lessons for resilience in the face of hardship, ancient Stoicism is beginning to seem like a very modern philosophy. As Massimo Pigliucci, a leading scholar and practical philosopher, puts it in his book, A Field Guide to a Happy Life: “One thing that hasn’t changed much is human nature itself, which is why the words written for and by people who lived two millennia ago still resonate so clearly with us today. Those people did not have smartphones and social media, airplanes, and atomic weapons. But they loved, hoped, feared, lived, and died pretty much like we do today.”

While Stoicism has much to offer modern readers, Modern Stoics have struggled with some of the philosophy’s stranger claims. Should we really be indifferent to the death of a loved one, or to our own demise? Is it truly unacceptable to care about one’s work? In A Field Guide to a Happy Life: 53 Brief Lessons for Living,  Pigliucci brings the classic epitome of ancient Stoicism, Epictetus’ Handbook, up to date.

 

 Selected lessons of A Field Guide for Happy Life

• It is not change itself that disturbs us, but our judgments about what change means. The more we see change as natural and a collective experience, the better we’ll be able to handle it.
• Shift goals from external to internal: Focus not on getting the job promotion, but rather, on becoming the best candidate for it. The latter is under your control, the former isn’t.
• Base self-esteem on doing your best, not on material acquisitions: A fancy car, big house, or the latest technology might be desirable, but having them (or not) doesn’t determine your value as a person.
• It is better to not be well regarded, then to lose your serenity and your self-worth. Practical application: Don’t twist yourself into knots trying to show off on social media.
• Focus on factors in your control: You can’t decide whether you’ll become sick or suffer heartbreak, but it is up to you how you react to those situations.

Offering what Pigliucci calls “Stoicism 2.0”, A Field Guide to a Happy Life: 53 Brief Lessons for Living shows that Stoicism is a philosophy for everyone, and its goal is to make us better and happier human beings.

 

Transcript of selected topics

The draft below is edited for online reading.

What is Stoicism?

Stoicism is an ancient Greek-Roman Philosophy. According to the Stoics, the two fundamental aspects of humanity that differentiate us from every other animal species is that we are highly sociable. That is, we and we’re capable of reason. That is, we can actually apply our minds to solve problems. For the Stoics, it followed from these two premises that a good human life is one in which we apply our reason to improve social living, to make this a better world for everyone. So that’s in a nutshell the goal of Stoic philosophy.

 

What are the updates in a Stoic tradition?

Well, a major update is that the ancient Stoics believed that God is the same thing as the universe. And they believed that the universe is a living organism, endowed with reason, what they call the logos. Well, today that kind of view doesn’t really go well with the scientific worldview. We don’t think of the universe as a living organism. The universe is a set of dynamic processes that follow cause and effect, but it’s definitely not a living organism. And so there is now that the distinction between modern Stoicism and ancient Stoicism is at the level of metaphysics.

Stoics prefer to see whatever happens to them as an opportunity, an opportunity to exercise their judgment. The most important thing that we have as human beings, according to the Stoics, is good judgment.

 

Stoics believe in putting in one’s best effort regardless of being attached to the result. In the U.S., we are a result-driven nation. How do you explain that?

There is research, there’s modern research in social psychology about happiness, about different ways of approaching life, etc. And guess what? Americans come up usually near the top of the most unhappy people in the world. I would say the reason for that is precisely because of what you just said, because Americans tend to think that failure in the outside world, when things don’t go well in the outside world, they take it personally, they take it as a mark of personal failure, which it isn’t.

Modern social psychology is pretty clear. If you do that, if you put your sense of self-esteem in the hands of fate, essentially, because you don’t control all of those things, you’re in for a root awakening. You’re going to be badly surprised by it. Yeah, for a good reason, bad is surprising for a good reason.

 

So if I am a woman and I want to practice stoicism, which one of the lessons do you think I should focus on?

Oh gosh. Well, the very first lesson that we’ve already discussed. The first lesson is about “what is up to you and what is not up to you.” So distinguishing where you can act as opposed to where you cannot act and not get frustrated by the fact that you cannot change certain things, at least not immediately. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that we should just lay back and accept everything that happens to us. This is not the quietest philosophy at all. In fact, the stoics, particularly the ancient stoics, were very politically and socially involved. So it’s not like this is not a council for not doing anything. It’s just a council for trying to figure out where you can act and where you can be efficient and effective to conserve your energy and do nothing.

Another important lesson in stoicism relates to when you’re going through a really difficult time. For instance, there are some practical exercises that I would suggest.

Epictetus, the second-century stoic philosopher who wrote the original version of the manual. He says that we should never let our eyelids, our tender eyelids, close before we examine our day. He thinks we need to take a few minutes every night and ask ourselves:  where did I go wrong? What did I do right? And what can I do better the next time around?

This is not a diary where you say, oh, today I did this, then you focus on the mistakes you might have made, the things that you did right, and your interactions with other people.

This is a philosophical diary. It’s an ethical diary. It’s a moral diary in a sense. But one of the important ways in which people actually don’t do it right.

A lot of people make the mistake of writing the diary in the first person and in a very emotional way. That is not helpful because what you’re doing there is you are revisiting your negative emotions, your unhealthy emotions, and they entrench themselves. If you get upset about something or angry about something, writing it down in that fashion just makes you angry all over again.

 

So the trick here is to write your diary in the second person as if you were writing a letter to a friend. So, well, you did this today. And what did you think about that? And how why did you react this way? As if you were talking to a friend and giving advice to a friend, except that you’re writing a thing about things that you did and happened to you. That helps to distance yourself emotionally from what’s going on. Why? Because you want to learn from the experience. You don’t want to relive the experience, you want to learn from it, right?

 

The book has been designed in three sections. So what was the logic behind creating three sections and what are, what is each section?

Yeah, I’m glad you asked that question because it’s actually a fundamental aspect of the book. Yes, the 53 lessons are divided into three broad categories. That’s, reflects Epictetus’s original philosophy. Essentially, the three sections correspond to what are sometimes referred to as the three disciplines of Epictetus. These are three kinds of exercises, three kinds of, three types of training that we want to do on ourselves.

The first discipline is called the discipline of desire. The second one is the discipline of action. And the third one, is the discipline of ascent. The discipline of desire is made up of exercises that allow us to reframe our priorities, to reshape our priorities. Because according to the Stoics, we, often, in life have wrong priorities. So, now that people think that the whole mark of a good life is if you have a house and a good job and a good career and money and so on. For the Stoics, those are the wrong priorities. The right priority should be to become a better human being and arrive at the best judgment possible about your situation.

So, the discipline of desire aims to slowly reorient our desire to reorganize our priorities.

The second set of exercises deals with what the Stoics call action. And that means how to interact, and to behave in the world and especially how to interact with other people.

The ascent is the third discipline. Ascent is really about judgment. So, the notion of what you need to do to arrive at better and better judgments about situations. The best judgment you can possibly have. And so, the discipline of ascent is about how to improve your judgment, how to think better about situations, and not to get distracted by thoughts that may direct you toward the wrong decision.

 

Could you please close our conversation by sharing your thoughts about peace, kindness, and compassion?

Yes. Well, I’d like to share a fundamental thought in Stoicism, and that is the notion that people don’t do evil on purpose. When people do something bad, their reasons are misguided somehow. So it is a good approach to think that when people do bad, they usually make mistakes, as supposed to be evil. That means that they need help. They need to be explained about the right thing to do.

We need each other. Our lives are made meaningful by relationships, love, and companionship. So if we try to extend the Stoic side, we should extend that kind of approach, the kind of mental attitude toward not just our friends and family, but the entire humanity. That is the essence of cosmopolitanism. That means we consider the rest of humanity as our brothers and sisters. And that is a very positive, I think, and very helpful way of thinking about life.

 

 

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