Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - Stoicism 101 | Nancy Sherman

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

What ancient Greeks and Romans figured out about stress reduction.You may have heard about stoicism, in the common parlance, as having a stiff upper lip, sucking it up, grinning and bearing it, suppressing your emotions, etcetera. Or you may have heard of Stoicism, the ancient Greco/Roman philosophy, that has become the de rigeur set of life hacks among millennial self-optimizers. In this episode, guest Nancy Sherman argues that Stoicism is way deeper than any of that. She will argue that, in fact, Stoicism is kind of the opposite of all the above. It’s a way to truly know your patterns of thought and emotion. Nancy Sherman is a Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. She is an expert in ethics, the history of moral philosophy, moral psychology, military ethics, and emotions. Her most recent book is called Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience.This episode is a rebroadcast from 2021: it’s one of our most-listened episodes, and we thought it might be particularly useful in this time of election-related stress. In this conversation, we:cover the basics of Stoicism, how and why capital “S” Stoicism is often misinterpreted, a meditation practice called “premeditation of evils,” which is far more practical than it may sound, and another practice designed to make you feel “at home in the world”.Content Warning: There is a brief reference to suicide.Related Episodes:Ancient Strategies for Managing Stress & Anxiety | Ryan HolidaySign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.happierapp.com/podcast/tph/nancy-sherman-rerunAdditional Resources:Download the Happier app today: https://my.happierapp.com/link/downloadSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. It's the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. You may have heard about stoicism, that word stoicism, in the common parlance, as you know, having a stiff upper lip or sucking it up or grinning and bearing it, suppressing your emotions, etc. However, you may have also heard about stoicism with a capital S, the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy that has become the de rigueur set of life hacks

among millennial optimizers. My guest today is here to argue quite convincingly in my opinion that Stoicism is way deeper than any of that. She will argue in fact that Stoicism is kind of the opposite of the above. It's a way to truly know your patterns of thought and emotion. The Stoics, she says, were sort of early cognitive behavioral therapists. They even developed a whole set of meditations designed to help people handle worst-case scenarios,

shave down their egos, and develop a sense of connection to the universe, all of which, said guest, is now going to teach us how to do. She, by the way, is Nancy Sherman. She's a professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and expert in ethics, the history of moral philosophy, moral psychology, military ethics, and emotions. Her most recent book is called Stoic Wisdom, Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience. Just to say we first posted this conversation back in 2021. It is one of our most listened to episodes of all time, but we have never reposted it, so we're doing it today. Not for nothing, many of the practices described in this conversation might be super

helpful during the turbulent aftermath of the American election. In this conversation, we cover the basics of Stoicism, how and why capital S Stoicism is often misinterpreted these days, a meditation practice called premeditation of evils, which is far more practical than it may sound, and another practice designed to make you feel, quote, at home in the world. Nancy Sherman, right after this.

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Visit audible.ca, audible.ca. Natsy Sherman, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Dan. Pleasure to be here. My memory is not the best, or as my wife sometimes describes me, I'm an unreliable historian. But to my memory, we have not done one show on Stoicism. Certainly, we have not dedicated an entire episode to it, which is probably a big mistake, but we're making up for it

now, I hope. And I will say that I know next to nothing about Stoicism. So let me ask an incredibly, embarrassingly basic question, which is, what is Stoicism? Well, that's a good question to start with. So Stoicism is an ancient Greco-Roman philosophy. So we all know Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, or the classical philosophers. The Stoics came after, sort of they follow after Aristotle, and they are both Greek and

Roman. Hellenization spread out. And so Stoicism became a philosophy for how to deal with our vulnerability, the fact that there are accidents, that there's bad stuff that happens. We're talking about one of the guys, Seneca, who was the spin doctor and speechwriter for Nero. And if you say the wrong things, you get asked to commit suicide early on in your career. But it was also times of enslavement, as well as times of imperial luxury. So people are trying to deal with having a lot, too much, you know, egos exploding, and also having very little.

And how do you temper yourself? How do you find calm? So some of it's about finding calm in a world of uncertainty, which really appeals to us now. I, as an ancient philosopher, classical philosopher, have to remind people it's about virtue. It's about being good and being good in a world where we're connected globally. They're the first cosmopolitan. They really believed in that word, cosmopolites, citizen of the cosmos or the universe. That's where

it came from. So what appeals to many is this idea of finding calm in a storm, of being the master of your ship, the captain of your ship. But sometimes people think of it only as an internal story and not about how you are in the world with each other, how you become resilient through social supports. So that's the piece I'm always trying to emphasize. Well, we'll get into that in a big way, but I'm just trying to compute how what you just described, vulnerability and virtue, squares with the common usage of Stoicism or Stoic as sucking it up or showing no emotion in the face of adversity.

So however that came to be, maybe through the British and Victorian stuff, or I worked with the military for so many years, suck it up and truck on is their mantra. That is an element of Stoicism, the idea of having really strong will and being tough no matter what. But the Stoics were also these amazing emotion theorists. They knew more about the emotions than most people know today. They were sort of our early cognitive behavioral therapists in a way. And so they were figuring out all the ways that we feel and all the ways that we feel and all the ways that sometimes our emotions run away from us. They are too

strong. So they are about tempering your emotions, but they're not about getting rid of them or sucking it up at all costs. The portrait we often get is a kind of self-reliance. Go it alone grit, you know, tough it out no matter what. That isn't it. They're about connecting. One of the most moving passages I know is from Marcus Aurelius. So he's the emperor. He's on a battlefield. He's seeing limbs strewn around. You know, when I talk to soldiers, I think of this a lot. They're body parts. And he's saying if you've ever seen an arm or a leg separated from the trunk of the body, that's what we make of ourselves when we cut ourselves off from each other. So there's

this social glue. And you can't be tough without being attached somehow, but you have to figure out a certain kind of balance so that if crap happens, you still have some equilibrium and some inner resources, as well as an ability to know where to turn, to turn to others and have cultivated those friendships and attachments, including family and all the communities we live in. So you're right, it isn't the common story,

which is typically tough it out at all costs and don't ask for help. That is really a misreading of stoicism. And I think it's a really dangerous one, if that's the message that's out there. I mean, there are potentially a few misreadings. There's the way Stoic is used in the common parlance, if you'll, I haven't looked it up in the dictionary, but I.

Little s, yeah, little s. Small s, yes. Yeah, yeah. Which is showing no emotion in the face of adversity or something to that effect, I think. And then there's what's seen, I haven't run the numbers on this, but just by observing, there seems to be a pretty robust embrace of capital

S stoicism, in particular among self-optimizing young men. I haven't looked at this closely and I think you have. Are you seeing that some people are really leaning into the suck it up ethos of it and not looking enough at virtue and vulnerability? Absolutely. So, leaning in is a good phrase. Yeah, they are leaning into your man, a view of manliness, and there's often misogyny in there, tough it out at all costs. It's almost the stoic military culture gets writ large over a general culture. Some of it's Silicon Valley has something to do with it. You're in tough circumstances. You got to get the angel investment next week. The numbers have to run clearly. Your Jack Dorsey and stuff is happening, you know, that you don't like, whether it's through Twitter or Square, and you need to find quiet and calm. And

so you sort of do it on your own. Or you take ice baths, that's one of his things, or you walk outside without coats. So the idea is you can handle no matter what adversity comes your way. That really isn't the Stoic story. The Stoic story is that you can't do it on your own and you've always got to think of a cooperative endeavor. So you're right, virtue gets sidelined for inner strength at all costs and also a kind of connectivity gets sidelined for there's no challenge that isn't one that you can handle. The idea of kind of mental discipline that matches athletic discipline. Now the Stoics have a lot of that. There's a lot of talk about being in the gym and there's no adversity that you can't handle, but they have so many other strands that get sidelined

by the idea of handling any circumstance that comes your way. I have to just add, you know, they're coming out of a tradition of tragedy, Greek tragedy, you know, horrible things happen. You lose your kids, you have to sacrifice a kid in order to set sail for the Trojan War if you're Agamemnon. So the Greeks and Romans know tragedy big time. And so they can't be forgetting it. They're just trying to figure out how do I deal with it and how do I deal with it while still being in a community. So like anything, people pick up stuff that they want to hear. And you're right, the manosphere, as it's sometimes called, can get pretty ugly and toxic.

Manosphere. I want to be clear that when I talked about self-optimizing young men, I didn't mean to denigrate them. Other than the young part, it pretty much describes me. I'm just so interested. One of the reasons why I wanted to have you on is that you really emphasize the parts of Stoicism that seem to have been shunted aside or given short shrift. When put through the filter of Western individualism, we

sort of like the do it on your own, don't show any emotions. I guess it's not just Western individualism, it's problematic masculinity in combination with Western individualism. Yeah, I think that's probably right. There's the can-do aspect and there's self-reliance theme that goes through the uptake of Stoicism. But what's really sort of fascinating is ancient

Stoicism came into being around the time of the Judeo-Christian birth in a certain way. And so some of it sounds very familiar to us. We're all children of God. They would say children of Zeus. But you know, we're all in the cosmos, we share humanity, we share humanity in virtue of having common reason. I mean, this is also enlightenment philosophy, right? It's our founding fathers of American constitution, Jefferson, Washington, all read this stuff. It was nighttime reading. So they've got this bigger picture in mind.

In addition to self-reliance, they've got a picture of how do you build a world of shared humanity. And so that doesn't get picked up. I mean, self-optimizing is a good way of putting it in the idea of what's the best flourishing life for me. The Greeks and Romans never talked about for me. They talked about for us. They were always thinking, you know, if you're a Greek, the small city state, you know, it's Athens. As soon as Athens started getting big and the Romans came along with an empire, it's a bigger world. It's almost the whole world. So they've got to figure out how to connect everyone. And they have to figure out how to connect everyone through

shared discourse, through reason, shared emotions, and also a sense that we're all vulnerable and we got to use each other as supports for helping ourselves get through it. So the idea of maximizing your potential, I'm not quite sure that's a very ancient idea. I'm going to ask another maybe embarrassingly basic question. We talk a lot on the show about Buddhism. I understand to a certain extent what Buddhism is and how you do it.

You've just described a little bit what Stoicism is. I'm curious, how do you do Stoicism? How do you operationalize this wisdom in your life? It's a great question and no one need to be embarrassed. Part of their appeal is that they have practices and some of the practices are meditations. And the meditations aren't like Eastern meditations of quieting all the babble in your mind, but they're rather discursive like talking, talking through it. So, you know, Freud, no surprise, is a kind of Western psychotherapist in the model of the ancients almost. So some of it is that at the end of the day, you keep a notebook and the quiet of the night, says Seneca.

When my wife's asleep, he says. And I think about things that really got me angry or afraid or got the better of me. Someone's really silly. Like he yelled at a member of his household for dropping a crystal goblet. Or he wasn't seated at the dais where he thought he should be at the head table, where all the important people were. He was put in the back of the room.

Or another one is that he should have been led into a house. The doorman didn't let him into the house. He's an important person. So yeah, his ego was offended. He got dissed, you might say. And he's trying to temper his expectations so that in the morning, he keeps some of this stuff in mind. So that's one thing, meditations at the end of the day.

Another one one which is really I think important, and I ran through this with my mother in a certain way, it's called pre-rehearsal of evils. It's a horrible phrase, but pre-rehearsal of bads. You dwell in the future. You anticipate things that could happen that could unmoor you. My mother hated to talk about death. Here she was, 97, in a nursing home. And she'd smile when I came in. She read about three novels a week. But death wasn't on her plate. So I said, Mom, did we sign up for the immortality plan when we put you in the Hebrew home, we put you there? Or remind me, because if we did, it's going to be really expensive. Well, this got a big rise out of her and it became our secret way of talking about the future and a future she clearly

dreaded. So rehearsing your mortality is a big theme in Stoicism. And that's like the ultimate for many people. How do you deal with leaving this world and your family? So I think it became, in our case, a kind of shared dance. We would have this little joke. Did we sign up for the Immortality Planet? It was a way of stepping into a dreaded future and we made it less toxic. That's a very stoic tool. Pre-rehearse the future and especially future outcomes you don't want to happen. Tim Ferriss talks about fear setting. They have you set your fears a little bit by anticipating them. Another thing they have is hedge your bets. It's called mental reservation.

When you start thinking of things you want to have, you always have to be adaptive and resilient through being agile. When you start to think about your plans, like will my book be a great success? Maybe it won't. You always sort of have this maybe it won't. You kind of have this clause that you stick in if things work out, but they may not. And so they're always trying to get you to think in advance about how to be flexible. And I think that really is for my life. It's so important.

You know, I have grown kids, I have grandkids. I can't control their lives at this point. They're terribly successful, you know, by all metrics, but they don't always do what I want them to do. And I gotta kind of always sort of say, well, maybe it won't be exactly like that. Very stoic. Doesn't sound stoic, right? It doesn't sound like

tough it out, you know, take on any challenge, get on the mat with the hardest opponent. No, it's just like you against yourself, trying to figure out what are some of the demons you have to face and are they as bad as they might be otherwise. Much more of my conversation with Nancy Sherman right after this. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. I'm always happy when Peloton sponsors this show because I'm authentically and organically

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I want to go back to these meditation practices because I think this is going to be of interest to this audience, many of whom are meditators. You kind of touched on three different practices there, but I'd love to go back and dive a little bit more deeply into each one of them. So the first was you described Seneca, one of the preeminent Stoic philosophers, at the end of the day after his wife had gone to sleep, running through all of the ego bruises he suffered during the day. Could you just walk us through how we might practice this in our own lives?

Sure. His list looks just like things we might be up against at the end of the day. Were you slighted by someone who you thought owed you a bit more respect? It could have all sorts of tones. In my classroom, it could be graduate students that I want to have respect me more than I think they are, or it could be my kids who I think said something that was hurtful and that bruised me a bit. I could start writing a letter to them or an email or a text, but have to hold myself back.

I sort of think, so what was in it for me? Why was I so invested in this? Stoics are very big on sticky attachments. My phrase, but this acquisitiveness where it's gotta work out the way I want it to work out. And I wanna think about it that way and that way alone. And I'm invested in this particular outcome or this particular way I want to see things go.

In the background of this meditation practice is that the things out there, they use a word that doesn't read well for us, indifference, but it really means they don't really change the balance of your happiness. You got to learn how to approach and avoid without all of that acquisitiveness that we have or outright fear. So yeah, be cautious. We're really cautious and yeah, invest in things so they matter, but don't invest in it so that it's the be all and end all.

That's very healthy. I mean that's healthy no matter what psychotherapy you believe in, I think. And so they ask you to run through your day a little bit like that. And in my case it's typically family members who, you know, I am the most invested in my immediate circle. And was there a remark there or a friend who's sort of had an off the cuff remark that just rubbed me the wrong way? Why? Let go a little bit. So we would say in an Eastern meditation, let go.

Quiet your mind of that. They don't have that language because remember this is Greek and Roman philosophy. They're all about discourse and chatter and reason. So they ask you to think about it, I'd say more in an older school Western psychotherapy way, you know, put words to it and think about why it's a narcissistic bruise. And some of them are so mundane, like you weren't the guest of honor at the banquet, but you know, you were put in the rear of a banquet hall. I find that extremely useful.

And you know, if you're a diary writer at the end of the day, you do meditation through writing in a diary, as many of us do. It's meant to carry over to the morning, not keep you awake. That's hard. It could easily keep you awake if you gnaw on it and get anguished over it. But the idea is that it would release you a little bit from a poor way of thinking about it or from the mis-evaluations. They think we really falsely evaluate a lot of stuff. You know, we have the wrong

estimates of things. We overestimate our reputation. We overestimate our ability to earn money to be rich. We overestimate that you want to live forever and make a huge impact on the world. And they go on, these are just the opposite of a kind of more ascetic lifestyle. And they're in that world, they are so in that world. They're in the height of almost decadent Rome at times. They're into power, politics, fame, and fortune. And so it's all the more appealing to them

to figure out how to deal with those demons in a certain way that are so interesting. I think it's different from Eastern meditation because it's chatty and talkative. But on the other hand, it gets at some of the real, I'd say bad values in many cases. Money's great, but just to accumulate it without helping the world become a better place, eh, I wouldn't go for that. Military strength, real courage is great, but just to be daring and just be able to be a parachuter and jump out of things or be a seal, you know, just so that you can endure under any conditions no matter how tough they are.

Not great unless it's aimed at something other than your own strength, a cause that you really think is worth it. So that's what they're asking you to think about. I like this a lot. And you have said a couple of times that it's not meditation in the Eastern sense. I think that's true to a large extent and slash,

but I would say if you look at the word that the early Buddhists used for meditation, it was, I believe, and people can send me a note on Twitter if I'm totally wrong about this, but I believe the word that was used was bhavana, and that word translates roughly into cultivation. And so what we're doing in meditation is cultivating mental skills. And what I'm hearing here is that at the end of the day, either through journaling or you're just lying in your bed or sitting on a meditation cushion and running through the parts of the day where you got your ego bruised, you got attached, that this has the

benefit of surfacing the, what you call sticky attachments, the psychic crampons on the rock face of life, where we're just holding onto things inappropriately and in a way that just blocks our ability to be maximally effective. That this can have the salutary effect over time of getting us to let go of stuff that doesn't matter? I think incredibly so. I mean, I've thought a lot more about how do I distance myself, put space between all the things that I know matter in my life, having healthy children,

a healthy grandchildren, a good marriage, a philosophy department that I love and really respect working in, colleagues. And what would happen if some of that kind of fell apart a bit through illness or things not necessarily in my control? How would I adjust a little bit? Some of it is, am I over investing in stuff I can't control? You know, a lot of the narcissistic injuries come from outside, not all, but many of them come from overestimating the way that those things matter. Right? Like length of life may not matter as much as the quality of the everyday. You know, that my kids do the things I want them to do

in this order and hitting these goals, that really doesn't matter as much as that they're good people and flourishing, right? You know, that sort of thing. So I think the Greeks and Romans are all about thinking of life as a whole. They're not about every single individual action. It's about flourishing life for us together as a whole. That's a really important

thing to do. That's like the bird's eye perspective on the whole thing. And I think coming away without those acquisitive attachments and all the grandpa stuck on the rock face, that's a great phrase, is a way of looking a little bit more broadly at what matters. It's also the value checks. Am I really valuing the right things? That is critical. Am I investing in the right things? Am I going just for more zeros after the dollar sign?

Or am I going for, that's a good person? I like this community because we do good things and that's why I'm part of this community. I've thought about this a lot lately because I think of who's very stoic in my world and a lot of them are military guys but they're not always stoic for the right reasons. They do all this social outreach, but they always think that what matters is their courage at all costs, strength. I will never break. I will be bulletproof,

and I can do whatever is asked of me, and that's the measure. Well, that's not the measure. And so if they are hard on themselves because they think they have to be bulletproof, that's another place where you would check yourself in journaling. Do I think I'm invincible? You'd be surprised how many people think they're invincible or a popular term these days, anti-fragile.

Who's anti-fragile? Who's invulnerable? But we like to think of ourselves as never breaking, especially in public. The Stoworks. Would dispute that. They would dispute the idea that you're invincible. They're trying to help you deal with vulnerability, but they're not trying to make you invulnerable.

We all want to deal with invulnerability. I don't know who doesn't. You show up at your doctor's appointment, and all of a sudden the blood work comes in and doesn't look so good. And that's crushing. You get the news. What's the next step?

How am I going to adjust to this? Or I thought I had a classroom that felt safe for everyone, but maybe it doesn't. You know, you're teaching on Zoom and you get everyone in their bedrooms, closets open, other people with four-poster beds and fluffy things all around. You see all the difference. You got to make it comfortable for everyone. And that's a challenge. It's being reflective. Now, I will say the downside of

being overly reflective is it could keep you awake at night. So you can't beat up on yourself. And so that's a fine line we have to find between wanting to be good and being good to yourself. So anyway, I think about that a lot because it's very easy to get a bit neurotic about all these challenges to become a better person. How do you personally walk that line in light of your study of Stoicism? I think I try to mix it a little bit with the Eastern idea of quieting my head.

I meditate in the morning. I don't talk to myself. Or if I catch myself talking to myself, I try to stop being so litigious through mantras or the like. And I often think in a journaling way that I definitely try to think what values matter the most to me and which ones are sort of holdovers of stuff that I really can let go of. I think as you get older, it's a little easier.

You know, you're not on the path of my career has got to go this way. And if I don't make these next steps and whatever ladder you're on, blank, that's that. I don't think I have that same push. So I think if you do, you have to keep asking yourself which values are you going for

and which ones should you sort of think are a little bit more, I don't know. It's a horrible word, indifferent, because we already say indifference, like apathetic. But what they mean is figure out how to select health, deselect bad habits or disease, but don't get so hooked on health that if you get some bad news, it's the end. You're done in. You can't let go. I think of it as the right kind of almost sort of like behavior modification approach

and be warily cautious in avoiding, but don't cling, you know, cling so that you can't let go. It reminds me of how the Buddhists use words like dispassion, non-attachment, disenchantment in a positive way. Yes, I think there's a lot of similarity, you know, and in a positive way? Yes. I think there's a lot of similarity. And in a future book, I actually want

to join up with a colleague and think about this. I practiced Buddhist meditation for a long time and have read a lot of sutras and also secondary sources. And there's a lot there. They do have this sense of selflessness that's just not Greek and Roman or Stoic. So the Stoics think of, you don't disappear. Your reason is what's going to be your guide in life.

They're Western philosophers in that regard and in a tradition of thinking about how to make the world a better place through your reason in conjunction with others, a commonwealth of reason. Cosmopolitanism really is about all of us together in cooperative rational endeavors. I don't think of that as particularly Buddhist. I may be mistaken on that. I think of the idea of disappearing a bit in meditation so that you become less important in the flow of things. As a student of Greek

philosophy there's always the best part of your psyche is reason, whether it's it shows up in your emotions through kind of emotional intelligence and smart emotions, or it shows up in being prudential, or it shows up in being planful, or as we were saying before, rehearsing some of these bad things you don't want to happen, but thinking about them dwelling in the future. So you're always really engaged with your mind. There's a lot of mental effort that goes into being a Stoic. In some ways, I think of retreats and silent retreats as ways of really tempering down some of the heavy mental lifting.

I might be wrong about this. I don't know enough to say whether you're wrong or right, but I'm intrigued by this thing you said about, you know, in Buddhism there's selflessness, which is an extremely difficult concept to Grok. It essentially, actually essentially is the wrong word to use because the argument is that we have no essence. That yes, on some level, Nancy Sherman exists. I can see you on my computer right now, and our listeners can hear your voice.

On some very obvious level, you, Nancy, exist. However, if you close your eyes and look for some core nugget of Nancy-ness, you won't find it. The analogy that sometimes gets made is, you can look at a chair, that chair exists. You can trust that you can sit find it. The analogy that sometimes gets made is, you know, you can look at a chair, that chair exists, you can trust that you can sit in it, but if you took a high-powered microscope you'd see that there is no essence of chair there, it's all spinning subatomic particles. And so, yes, as I understand it, Western philosophy doesn't go there either

intellectually or experientially, because that's the key part of Eastern practices, is they really take you to this essencelessness, this selflessness, experientially. But what's the practical ramifications? Well, one of them, as far as I understand it, one of the practical ramifications of seeing that you don't have a self in the way you thought you did, is that then you're a better player in the broader community. And that exists in a prominent way in Stoicism. And so, I'm wondering whether, on some level, the Stoics are reasoning themselves toward the same or at least one of the key outcomes that the Buddhists would have us experience ourselves toward? I think that's absolutely the case. Metaphysics aside of who we are and whether we exist because

of our essence or the essence is there because we exist, they are the first to really talk about a cosmic city, a global city, a way in which, now here's a bit of an essence, because of our reason, we all are players in the same world. Yeah, they have trouble, of course, with their social conventions. They believe in enslavement, that they have more servants than Downton Abbey would have.

It makes Downton Abbey look shabby. But they think that we all can contribute in some way and that the world works more smoothly if we think of ourselves as in, they use sort of Plato's term, a republic. By the way, it includes women. Women get educated on the stoic view because they have reason and have the potential for virtue, just like men. They also think in terms of holes, which sounds a little bit like the Buddhist story, that you're part of a hole. You're part of a breathing whole. They talk about breath. Pneuma, our word for pneumonia, P-N-E-U, is their word for breath, and it's what your psyche is

filled with breath. And we all share that breath, which sounds a little Eastern almost. We share kind of cosmic breath, and we share it with God. So they have an idea that the universe has some divine element in it as well. But that said, we're all neighbors. Marcus Tavrilius uses a wonderful phrase, we're co-workers, we're fellow workers, even when we're asleep, we're contributing to this larger whole. And that's a very important idea of diminishing a bit the importance of yourself, reducing your ego investment, and thinking about what's shared across all spheres. And they have practices for doing this.

They call it becoming at home in the world. And you take circles and you think of you at the center, but you at the center have these concentric circles around you and you think about the farthest circle and you bring through vivid imagination that outermost circle closer to your center and they say it takes zealous effort. So it's a real practice, a discipline, a habit and you imagine someone in the farthest reaches

who might be brought closer to you in the way that your kith and kin would be, your kinsmen, your family. And you have to practice that regularly. The connection isn't automatic. It's not magical. It actually requires quite a lot of practice and effort. So this idea of you're nothing if you cut yourself off from the whole, which was at Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor's thinking on the battlefield, comes with a way of making the connection more vivid for yourself through this practice of bringing outer circles closer to the center. Now there's a hazard for any philosophy, and that is you make the outer circles in your image and whatever is me is enlarged for everyone. We get very narcissistic about how we want the big picture to look.

But they're essentially saying, make it matter. Bring those outer circles inward. They're athletes of the psyche, is the best way to put it. They really believe in discipline for your mental training. And it's not doing a lot of logical exercises. It's rather doing these rehearsals. What are you anticipating that you think you're over attached to?

Let it go a little bit. Meditate at the end of the day. Imagine the world of which you're a part, that you're a global citizen. How would that work? Back to the question, is there a big ego in the center of Stoicism? Well, yeah, in the sense that they never diminish your reasoning capacity. You need it to get smart emotions.

They have all these trainings. You also need it to monitor your bias. I think this is a totally ignored part of Stoicism. They have this idea that you're interpreters of the world. That's one of the practices. You always have to remember you interpret the world. And so, you know, maybe the misfortune isn't as bad as you thought. But then they say, make sure you watch the impressions.

And this could be also your biases. Watch the biases and press a pause button, you know, phrase of Kahneman, Daniel Kahneman, so that you can think more slowly rather than just fast. Be more reflective. And practice putting some space between impulsive impressions and your spin on them. And are your spins, whether it has to do with how you view people in the farthest reaches of the world who have little connection to you versus how you deal with what you want

and need and what gets you really pissed off and what gets you angry. Put some space in between those impressions and your estimate of them. Much more of my conversation with Nancy Sherman right after this. Make this holiday season wow with a brand new way to play from Wondery Kids

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at amazon.com slash Wondery Kids. So there are a bunch of practices I want to make sure that we get back to and get more granular on. A while back, many, many minutes ago, you listed three practices, and then I said at the time, let's go deep on each one. We've only gone deep on one of them. So we'll come back to the remaining two of those in a minute. But you then went on to list two other practices, the circles practice, which I also want to talk about. And you referenced this practice that can help us shave down our biases.

Can you just say a little bit more about how exactly we would do that in a Stoic fashion? So the Stoics have this idea that you have all this stuff coming in and they call them impressions. And many of those impressions are really fast. Impulsive is their word. They call them impulsive impressions. And part of the attraction to stoicism is they put so much attention on your effort, your will, your discipline. And so they think that if you can, it's a technical term, I'll use it, not assent or say yes to some of those impulsive impressions that I've been dissed, that someone is inferior to me, that someone is the way they are because of their choices or you name your favorite

bias or prejudice, unreflected impression. They say monitor your patterns of attention. It could be through nighttime meditation practices. It could just be in the sense of learn how not to assent to them immediately, give into them immediately, and reflect on them so that you can change them. Seneca is really interested in anger. That's the one that he's really, really fastened on. And he has this whole conversation about the fact that we get angry really fast. And it takes us into tailspins. And that we do horrible things because of anger. And he says you should not assent to the idea

that you've been immediately insulted, not assent to the idea that someone is speaking in a tone that you don't like, you know, and that as a result, you should give them some lip or dismiss them as ignorant or as not in your camp or whatever. And so it's a kind of a higher order thinking that you lay on top of your lower order arousals. It's very much what Kahneman is talking about in many ways about fast thinking versus slow thinking and the Stokes aren't modernday neuroscientists, but they do have

this idea that you have different tracks, whether it's your brain or your emotions or your belief system. They think all emotions really are kind of cognitions. And so they think that you can introduce a higher level layer of reflection on those impulsive things. Some impulsive reactions you would never want to get rid of. Who would want to get rid of being really frightened if you see a bear? You want to either freeze or get out of there. Many of them are adaptive, many are maladaptive.

Unbridled fear is probably maladaptive. Unbridled fear of people that are not like you is probably highly maladaptive. They're meditators in this sense. They want you to figure out how to practice monitoring your patterns of attention. That's very, well, you might say it's kind of cognitive behavioral therapy of a certain kind, right? Because they think that your emotions are by and large cognitive, and they manifest in behavioral ways of behavior. You do this, you do that,

and that you should watch it more carefully. Now, some turning green in a storm, blanching when someone chains you, some stuff you can't control. It's your autonomic system talking. And they're all for that, they know that. But other things you might be able to control, like some of the expletives, they say, that come out of your mouth when they shouldn't.

I mean that's one of the examples Seneca gives. That's language that was impulsive. You should kind of curve it a little bit. So here's how I see it. All those people that think stoicism is just about me and my way of minimizing the impact of the world on me so that I can be in more control and I can just sort of the world is as it is and I'm the captain of my ship. No, the Stoics are actually saying we interpret the world and we interact with that world and it's through our interpretations and we control some of those interpretations and change the world. It's not just a philosophy of resignation and acceptance, which is often how it's interpreted as.

The world sucks. I'm here. I have to deal with this deprivation. I'm going to make the best of it. I'm a POW. People I've interviewed. That's my fate. I'll accept it.

I don't think so at all. I think they believe in changing the world, not just accepting it. And you change the world through the lenses that you wear. They think sometimes you better change the lens that you're wearing because you may be distorting the world. You may have mis-evaluations. They would call it mis-estimates of the world. The world's not just sort of this color and that color, they think you wear lenses as you see a lot. Long answer to, I think, a really important point that I don't think people think about when they think about stoicism. They typically think about resignation as a word I hear a lot, accept things as they are and just deal with it, as opposed to, I create the world in some way through how I see things. Which brings me back to one of the other practices you mentioned, which is this idea of thinking about circles of people and bringing the folks who are on the outer part of your circle close into you. I have two questions about that. One is, can you just say exactly how we would practice that?

Because it does sound close to some of the compassion or loving kindness practices in Buddhism. And the second question is, how would the Stoics square that with their warm embrace of slavery? Okay, so the Stoics have this idea that we are connected in the universe, so they've got to figure out a way of making us connected. And so they think it's a psychological habit. And I think the person who really sort of helped us understand the best, the Stoic idea was an Enlightenment

philosopher, Adam Smith, so Scottish Enlightenment. They were all reading the Stoics. He has this idea that you trade places in fancy is his phrase. Imagine in a vivid way. You imagine in a vivid way what's hard to imagine, or another phrase is you bring them to your breast. You bring them into your breast. That does get the compassion idea going. For Smith, it was empathy. He used the word sympathy. It's not our word, but it really is more empathy.

You feel what they're feeling. It's a kind of a mindset and not just a sense of benevolence, right? Which compassion is. It's you actually imagine, engage in almost a physiological way what those others are going through. Now, journalism, especially visual journalism, is an amazing way that we do this because we see images, we see pictures, we see suffering. But in the 18th century or for the Stoics, the turn of the millennium, they're asking you to do it in your mind as a visualization. We would call it visualization. And so it's a very graphic set of images. Now, the institution of slavery is a hard subject. Anytime you are a historian or a philosopher that deals with historical periods,

you always got to figure out what do you do with stuff that's distasteful to you? You whitewash it or not? So here's two things. Seneca sometimes, you know, What do you do with stuff that's distasteful to you? You whitewash it or not? So here's two things. Seneca sometimes, you know, he's writing the first century of the millennium, he's in Nero's court because he's the best speechwriter there is, man of letters. And he writes about enslavement and he says, you should treat your slave with humanity because

they too have reason. And you could be enslaved, and he means enslaved inside, not free inside. You have your demons. Or changes of fortune could easily put you in a role reversal. That said, some of his enlightenment, almost sounding claims, I think, are pleased to treat your enslaved kindly because in the Roman system, they could be in courts, they could claim that you were beating them.

If they're fugitive, you might not get them back, and so you'd have to deal with your vineyards, your household, your accounts all by yourself. I mean, so it's very prudential. They have a vested interest in treating slaves well, and some of the remarks that sound more enlightened might just be self-serving for an elitist class. So I can't justify Roman or Greek practices of enslavement. On the other hand, I don't think we should not read them as a result of that. But I think we should understand the social settings. I think when sometimes the Romans Stoics seem a lot more, they don't believe in natural slaves in the way that Aristotle always talked about them.

There's some people who are just by nature of inferior status. They don't believe that. They believe it's kind of conventional, that it happens through capture or circumstance. But sometimes what seems as more compassionate treatment is self-serving. They don't want to lose all the advantages of having a household retinue. So I mean, look, it's also the Roman Empire. Conquest, territorial gain, expand at all cost. There's a lot of barbarism and all that. So I think whenever you're dealing with

complicated texts from complicated periods, you can't cancel it out, to use a phrase, simply because it doesn't jive with our current views of what we know to be a better world and a better social structure. But we still can learn enormous amount about our own, in this case, kind of mental psychology or, you know, the psychology and mental habits and ethical habits through reading them. I am really of the opinion that in a classroom you put it all out there and you grapple and you don't cancel certain parts because you don't know how to deal with it.

I think you have to view it as historical records and try to put it in context. I want to go back to both of the practices that I failed to get us back to earlier. And again, I'm talking about the three practices you listed early, early on in this discussion. The first we talked about, which is thinking about the ego bruises that come up during the course of the day. The second was something about the premeditation of evil.

And I'd love to hear more about that, because it does sound like something I naturally do in my own life, is think about worst-case scenarios, and it's comforting to play out the worst-case scenario and see that even in that scenario, like, I can survive it. So that's a great way of putting it. They go in for a bit of shock and awe. I think Epictetus especially, one of the Stoics, and that is you imagine a worst-case scenario. So you imagine what would be the worst possible outcome and you try to live with it for a while, anticipate it so that you're not caught off guard.

A lot of this is so it's not totally unexpected. And some of it is a way of being prepared mentally. Some things I think it's hard to prepare for. I think, for example, with the pandemic, we should have been better prepared than we were. And if you're an infectious disease doc, you might've been better prepared and you got your infectious disease doc, you might have been better prepared and you got your social message out. We could have done better. But in our personal lives,

you're trying to imagine, okay, what would be the worst that would happen? And you live with it for a while and you ask yourself, is it so bad? Or how do you respond to it? So it's a bit like the phrase that Cicero uses. He's not a Stoic, but he's a fellow traveler and we get a lot of texts through him. Dwell in the future. Now, they don't think you have to dwell in the future when it's the case of good stuff happening. Dwell in the future when it's stuff that could really disarm you. So dwell in the future. And here's a horrible phrase. My students think I'm crazy when I tell them this phrase. It's very stoic from Epictetus and before him, the pre-Socratics. Kiss your child goodbye in the morning as if it's the last time.

I do that. I had never heard this phrase before, but it is on my mind and I have to imagine I'm not alone on this. Every time I send my kid off to school but it is on my mind, and I have to imagine I'm not alone on this. Every time I send my kid off to school, it's on my mind that something horrible could happen. And so I just try to keep that in my mind. I don't know if that's healthy or not, but I do notice myself doing it. Well, that is a prerehearsal of the bads.

That is a prerehearsal of evil. It's a way of anticipating and putting a bit of a cushion around you, should that eventuality happen. Now, if you're the kid, as my students often are, they do think that I'm telling them that their parents have this morbid fear, and that seeing the reactions in their face, they think, oh my God, my parents are so,

if they were to say that, it would be so unfeeling. So, you know, it gets uptake in a different way from different sides of a relationship, I think. But I do think it is a way of cushioning a bit, a dreaded possibility and living with it a little better so that you're not blindsided. Well, let me press on that for just a second because I do find myself using this homespun version of this with professional outcomes. I think about my company, what would happen if it was all to go pear-shaped

and what moves could or would I make, etc., etc. And I find it comforting to think through the worst case scenario. However, I don't know that I can do that with something horrible happening to my son. When I kiss him goodbye in the morning, I try to be, I don't know if it's coming from a healthy place. There's just a lot of fear every time he leaves my orbit. I don't know that I can generate any sort of cushion against the worst thing that I can imagine happening, which would be something bad happening to him. Well, I think that's right. It's a little bit like there's a cognitive and an emotional side to this. So some of it might just be a cognitive habit.

And the Stoics think that you can let it sink into your emotional framework. Now should something horrible happen, they also have this other, it's not a trick, but another tool in their toolkit. And that is that we have this community of support that we have to remember. And I think that is part of the mental apparatus. So they have this idea that you go through

worst case scenarios and almost live them so that should, would, could they happen? It's a little bit like, well, think of how you train folks on the battlefield. You're always going through virtual reality setups so that the scenario could be one that you would face then and how would you deal with it? So they're not unlike that, survive, evade, resist, escape,

this kind of training for folks that could be paratroopers or the like. You got to be able to live it a little bit in order to know how to deal with real deprivation. So I think that's a reasonable tap. Don't be blindsided. Don't be naive. Think about it. You know, I just will put a tiny little addendum to this idea of dwelling in the future or pre-rehearsing the bads. And that is they're non-consequential. They don't want you to dwell on consequences. They want you to dwell on the doing, on the striving, on the living as opposed to just the outcome. And that's a way of reorienting your head and your thoughts so that outcome optimization isn't all you're thinking about.

It's more, did I do my best? Did I strive the best way? Was I good? Not just in the sense of professionally good, but ethically good as well. And that I think is a rather important addendum, as I say, to the worst case scenario practice. I've made clear early on that I don't have the best memory. So I think the third practice you talked about was,

and this is at the beginning of the interview, was something having to do with mental reservation. How do we do that? It's a kind of hedging your bets. So here's a really simple example Seneca gives you. You want to go out for a boat ride, but you say, I will go out for a boat ride unless it rains. So you have this little clause, you stick into your thinking again where you're anticipating a bad outcome possibly or that it might not happen. So

you're imagining or getting yourself used to the idea that you might not do it. It might not work out that way. And when you set out with your intentions, your plans, your strategies, your life goals, you always stick this kind of hedging your bed in so that you can be agile or adaptive. You're not fixed on an outcome. You're fixed on rather doing your best, striving, putting your best effort out there as opposed to getting the desired outcome. I will have a picnic today unless

it's inclement weather. We typically don't think about that. You think about, I want to have a picnic or you're dealing with kids. I want, or yourself, I want this to work out well. I want it to be a glorious day. I'm planning a wedding. It's got to be outdoors right now. We're in a pandemic. I don't want it to rain. And you're so focused on that and fixed on that outcome that if it rains, you'll be really disappointed. Your face will just go crazy. You might burst into tears and you'll ruin it for everyone. It's a rather simple thing, but it's called mental reservation.

And they have it kind of in a way, stick an if clause in there or an unless clause. This will be my plan unless, da, da, da, da, da. I think of it as agility, adaptiveness. And when I think about being resilient, I think we know that it's a real key to resilience, to be able to switch your life goals, your life plans a little bit if things go a certain way, be able to imagine a slightly different course of action with regard to a family or you know if there's an unforeseen event. So it's a kind of agility, mental agility is really what they're out for as a mental habit, practice mental

agility. Sometimes Buddhism is called advanced common sense and I could see how you might apply that description to Stoicism as well. Let me end on a light note, or what I think might be a light note. I noticed in reading my prep doc, one of my colleagues, Gabrielle, put together a little document for me to prepare for this interview. And one of the things that I noticed in the document that caught my attention was teasing. Apparently, the Stoics thought a little bit about teasing. In what way? The Stoics are often portrayed as heavy, humorless,

and all about stiff upper lip, British style kind of Stoicism. But they're also about being able to face outcomes well, even though they're not the ones you want. And some of that requires a lightness. So I certainly was thinking of that when I was trying to prep my mom for her last days at age 97.

And we sort of made a joke of her, of mortality. It wasn't gonna be forever. And how are we gonna to get through it? And that, I think, is an important part of being stoic. Another way of, you know, you can think about this is, I think of the stoics as also creating partners in life. So, and this is not quite teasing or lightness, but they're really about forming a cadre, if you like, fellow partners. And you can't have fellow partners unless you sort of take yourself a little lightly. You're not the center of attention and you view them as really sort of on your wavelet a bit. So when you think about

stoics as creating partners that have zest and want to live well, that's part of it. Seneca was a letter writer. He was writing to his friend Leucilius. He may never have sent the letters, and he's a moral tutor. Some of it can be a little chastening, but he also sort of is joking around a little bit. I noticed you didn't eat your lunch today.

Maybe you should have eaten your lunch today. I mean, he's creating a social bond. I'm waiting for that letter to come. I didn't receive it. Did you forget to write to me? It's a sort of a reminder that this is a very human philosophy. It's also a reminder that the Stoics, you know, they have emotional skin in the game. They're not stripping us of that emotional stuff.

They know that you build social capital on many levels and one of the levels is clearly by knowing that humor comes from reason and reason is how we get connected and they're the stuff of emotions and having a light sense of life is kind of a part of it. I also just on that note, I think of Seneca, you know, and he's dealing with Nero, he's trying to meditate at how he's going to deal with the end of his life and the end of his life in a Rubens portrait, he's surrounded by his friends. He's not alone. He's not smiling, but he's surrounded by his friends.

And so friendship, connection, sometimes with humor is a way to think about being stoic, not just stiff upper lip, pull your socks up, that kind of thing. Nancy, thank you so much for Stoicism 101. Just as we close here, for people who want to learn more from you, can you please plug your books and anything else that you've put out into the world that people might want to access?

Nancy S. Nielsen Sure. So, the most recent book is Stoic Wisdom, Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience, and ancient lessons for modern resilience. And that will give you, I think, a really easy walk through Stoicism 101. There's an earlier book, Stoic Warriors, but I think Stoic Wisdom is it. I've got pieces that were in the New York Times, the Washington Post, but you can find much of that on my website, nancysherman.com.

Really appreciate your time, Nancy. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Dan. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Dan. It's been a pleasure. Thank you to Nancy. Great to talk to her. We'll put links in the show notes to Nancy's books, as well as my recent conversation with Ryan Holiday, a much younger writer who has also made stoicism the center of his work.

So if you want to go deeper, you can check out my conversation with Ryan. Thank you to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the Greek people over at PodPeople. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the Van Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now

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