The One You Feed - William Irvine on Applied Stoicism

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

William Irvine, a professor at Wright State University, thinks, teaches, and writes about philosophy. He is the author of many books and publications including the one he and Eric discuss in this episode, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient.In this episode, Eric and Bill discuss what it means to live and practice Stoicism.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!Professor William B. Irvine and I Discuss Applied Stoicism and…His book, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More ResilientThree sources from which your desires can arise The limitations of our rational brainTechniques for harnessing negative emotions and using them for good purposesThe practice of stoicismThat as humans, no matter what we have we will take it for grantedRemembering that for everything we do, there will be a last timeA better goal in life than being happyThe role and benefit of having a grand goalThe trichotomy of controlWilliam Irvine links:Bill’s WebsiteBill’s WritingsWhen you purchase products and/or services from the sponsors of this episode, you help support The One You Feed. Your support is greatly appreciated, thank you!If you enjoyed this conversation with William Irvine, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Everyday Courage with Ryan HolidayConscious Leadership with Eric KaufmannSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Professor William B. Irvin from Wright State University. He not only teaches, thinks, 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, A 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 at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is 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 grandparent

and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent 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. 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 described the two wolves. In 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 biological 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 the human part that's responsible for emotions, and there's 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 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? It 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 your gut should be able to do what your gut wants to do, and that is get angry and clobber 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 a cause of a lot of human misery. Yeah, there's a lot in what you said there. And I'm 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 you're angry, you have two choices. You can suppress your anger or you can express your anger, right? But you posit 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 that 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 can feel it starting to boil, and then it erupts within a matter of seconds. So you got to act quickly. And I describe 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 a psychologist named Jonathan Haidt, last name spelled H-A-I-D-T, has this story about the mahout. 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 trees, 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 could 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 got to act quickly because once the full anger is stirred, game over. You know, your anger is going to 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'll 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, the 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 rider, the analogy makes is sort of like your conscious brain. It's your conscious brain and 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's 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 other parts of our brain do have valuable information to give us. And that emotions often are valuable information. So how do you see the role 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, it'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 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 what I was trained to do as a functional male, you know. 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? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. 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 going to 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. 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 read about Stoicism and know Buddhism and not see a lot of overlap. There are some differences, obviously, but some of the core ideas are very similar. There is an idea, you know, in Buddhism of wholesome and unwholesome emotion. What I found interesting is as I look at Buddhism, as I look at psychology,

as I read about Stoicism, one of the tensions that I talk 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 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 times to go, wait, hang on, I'm perceiving this incorrectly. You know, we're going to get to your stoic test challenge here in a minute. But we use tools like framing and anchoring 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 you're doing 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 there are any important ones, I leave out. The connection between Buddhism and Stoicism. I got into Stoicism by way of Buddhism, which sounds like, no, you couldn't possibly do that. But I got it in my mind that I was going to become a Zen Buddhist. 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 a 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 a Zen Buddhist, you're going to do lots and lots of meditations. You're going to practice solving koans. Although if you have Zen Buddhists in your audience, they're going to 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 down Zen Buddhism. But then I came across the Stoics, who happened to have been the preeminent 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-N. I asked him flat out, I said, are these two compatible? And he kind of rolled his eyes back and he said, well, of course. But the interesting thing is, if you're

going to give Zen Buddhism a fair try, it's a big undertaking. I'm a Zen practitioner, so I know the drill. I've done hundreds of koans. It is an undertaking. And a worthwhile undertaking, but a long-term undertaking. Stoicism, 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 a typical first meditation is you try to empty your mind of all thoughts. Well, and I assign that to my students and next time we meet, I say, okay, did you try the experiment? And they all say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'll 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 was 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 try it, you know, you think first five seconds, first 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 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. It's 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 the one I want to hit on is the practice of Stoicism, because you do make a good point that Zen Buddhism as a practice is 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 I 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. 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 times in your 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 21st 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 my reply is, well, are you practicing Stoicism? Because that's as good as it gets. 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 she made it clear, well, you kind of never do. You practice it. And that's true of stoicism. Well, you 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 strategies. 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, hmm, 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 pick the kid up and say, thank you for being part of my life. 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 a day, because the way we humans are wired, whatever we have, we start taking for granted.

Yes. So we're always dissatisfied because as soon as our life kind of flattens out and we've got stuff, then we say, well, this is good, but there's something that would be even better. And then 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 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 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 I do that, here's a personal revelation for you. Okay. I'm the guy who wrote the book on this. I've been a practicing Stoic for like nearly 20 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, 10 million books, you know? So, to get even to a thousand, number a 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 216. I watched, you know, oh, look, I'm 130. I watched.

I was at 100, the 100th 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 107. And I was thinking, oh, man, I wish I had hit double digits. In other words, I had that 100. And what did I do? For a minute there, it 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. Could I have gotten to 75? Oh, I know. It is. Yeah. Yeah. But 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 forestall that adaptation? Okay. 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. Yeah, 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 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 realize 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 hopscotch.

But there will be a last time you lay your head on the pillow, a last time you breathe. Now, it's like negative visualization. You know, somebody 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 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, ah, I'm doing another podcast. Or you can go through it 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 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 good old days, right? Things happen. And right now, you are living what someday to you will be the good old days. So, am I suggesting that you fixate on death? No, not doing that. 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 20-year-old approaches life compared to the way an 80-year-old approaches life. So to a 20-year-old, what's the value of today? You know, he can do the math on this and he can say, wow, let's see, I've got 30,000 days to live probably.

So this is one thirty000th of my life. So this day means nothing. So what am I going to do? I'm going to play video games all day long. Take the 80-year-old, you know. 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 going to 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 70th birthday. And the striking thing is I noticed myself becoming less tolerant, you know, if you go to somebody to do something simple and they can't do it. And I realized part of that is I realize 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 and the abilities you have right now. Yeah, Buddhism has similar concepts. You know you're going to die and you don't know when.

So what do you do with that? You know, because the 20-year-old might have 30,000 more days. He might have three hours. He doesn't know. Right? We don't know. So I may do 500 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 it 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. That's right. So what are you going to do? You're going to waste every single day. How come? Because you've got infinitely many of them. And to me, that sounds like a recipe for a miserable existence. Because you'd waste every day.

And on earth, if you're kind of a mindful individual, you're not going to waste it. You're going to 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. You want to say, no, I did good things. I did Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the

answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 it 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, 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, and this is evolutionary psychology, on the savannas of Africa 100,000 years ago, humans who were easily satisfied died. You know, let's just imagine one of them was kind of blissed out and he said, ah, the savannas of Africa. I think I'm going to sit here on this rock today and just take it all in and enjoy it. Oops, he became some lion's 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 we're 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 overeat once again. Can I hold off to my next meal before I have eight Twinkies?

Yeah. Yeah. So we're in a wildly different environment. You 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. 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 more comfortable using, is satisfied, being pleased, okay? So that notion of being pleased with what you've already got,

that level of satisfaction. 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 savannas of Africa. And we now have a 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 one morning and discovered 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 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? You know, because culturally we're just conditioned to your point, more, more, 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 I said a minute ago, we're in a different environment than our ancestors were. And in the last 20 years, we're in a radically different environment because social media have come along. do what? To get likes on Facebook, on Instagram, to get followers. And who are the people who are awarding them? Ah, complete strangers who might have radically different values than they do, who might themselves 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. create an impression so other people could admire them. And that's craziness because you don't know these people. 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 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, they've got such different values than I do that if they like what I'm doing, I'm doing something really wrong.

I've got to 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 him 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. And 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 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 agency 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 have 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 out 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 some place 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 you're aiming at. And because once you 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 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 a 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've 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 an intense anxiety can be a biological phenomenon. And intense anxiety can be a biological phenomenon.

If you're an addict, sorry, stoicism can't help you because it requires a very rational kind of strategy. Doesn't mean you have to have an IQ of 200. 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 were 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 in 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, oh, we've 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 these setbacks, and they are the leading cause of negative emotions that we experience. And that's sad because, you know, when you experience a setback, your emotional response to the setback

is likely to do you far more harm than the setback itself was. So 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 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 insulter. They want to ruin your day. And you've just laughed at their expense. And you've protected yourself against the negative kind of emotions that the insult could trigger. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

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podcasts. 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 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 it 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. Okay. They're going to take the high road.

So a parallel thing in my life, I've gotten a lot better at sleeping than I used to. But now when I exercise, I need a nap. than I used to. But now when I exercise, I need a nap. And I explained to my wife that when I wake up from a nap, I'm going to be quite crabby, that I need about 20 minutes, and then I'll be my old lovable self. But that first 20 minutes, I'm going to be crabby. I will tell her I've just woken up from a nap, 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. 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 going to 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, we're this vat 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, 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. 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 equanimous, because they've got a harder internal battle to fight to get to that place. Yeah, and people who are anxiety-ridden, like for me to say, okay, my goal for you, I'm going to be the guru, and you're going 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, well, just stop breathing. Here, we're going to put this bag over your head. 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 a cell phone is this 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 this five years ago, you can take it and drop it in a pitcher of beer and pull it out and it'll 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 cup 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-20th century. Reinhold Niebuhr, I think, is the person who came up with it. It's a total ripoff of the Stoics, in particular the one called Epictetus, who came up with it. But it's a good ripoff, because it's gotten a lot of mileage and spread the word. It's helped, yeah. 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 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 you're 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 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, well, the other person was better than you. End of 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 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 Ashe. 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, yeah, there's areas we have influence. You know, I cannot control my partner. I cannot control what partner. I cannot control 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 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, ad-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 at whenyoufeed.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 exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their

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