The Obstacle is the Way
And other lessons from the Stoics
As most of you already know, our podcast is out! The first two episodes of our latest theme — Collective Effervesnce — dropped today. Episode 6 features a great interview with St. Louis Post Dispatch columnist Ben Hochman and St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s Adam Flores, who are teaming up to bring the City of St. Louis a FREE Shakespearean play about the history of soccer in St. Louis this fall.
The show will take place September 14, 15, and 16th outside of the new CITY stadium (which is a beautiful addition to downtown STL). Be sure to check out the show and our conversation with Ben and Adam!
Are you the Theist or Atheist?
As a result of our podcast’s release, we have started getting some thoughtful questions from listeners. It’s been wonderful to hear from all of you about the moments in the show that have moved you, comforted you, challenged you, made you curious, or snapped you out of ways of thinking that weren’t serving you.
Kelley and I are both teachers at heart, and the thing we love most about teaching is sharing the things we find enlightening and exciting with others. For me, in particular, a big part of what I love most about knowledge work is researching and thinking about how humans come to live the good life. When I feel like I have found some of those gems, I try to figure out how to weave them into the fabric of my day-to-day and hope to bring others along.
All that being said — we have been delighted to find an engaged audience willing to come on this journey with us. So thank you! And please keep sending questions, thoughts, and ideas!
One of the conversations I have found myself in frequently over the last month, with listeners who are also friends and family, is that before we released the show, many people didn’t know which position I would hold — the theist or the atheist— since I often discuss philosophy and approaches to life with a kind of spirituality.
While not religious, I do subscribe to certain traditions that help me orient my thinking and make my way through life. One that I hold close to my heart is a philosophy I only came to learn about in the last three years or so through reading Marcus Aurelius’ journals, now known as the book Meditations (specifically the Gregory Hays translation) — and the practice of Stoicism.
I came across Meditations in my search for tools to help young people through the mental health crisis we face in all Western-style nations (the Anglosphere — aka where smartphones and social media have become widely used after 2011). Because this is a crisis of consciousness rather than an external force (such as a war or plague), I knew that the answers would likely come from practices of the mind (or habits of mind).
Stoicism
“The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength”
- Marcus Aurelius
While the former Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius is probably the most well-known practitioner of the Stoic philosophy, other less well-known figures carried and shared the tradition, such as Seneca (the Roman statesman), Epictetus (the former slave), and Zeno of Citium (the shipwrecked founder) - they all have excellent insights worth reading. Other great writers and leaders, such as George Washington, Walt Whitman, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Jefferson, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, have read and carried on these traditions since.
At the heart of Stoicism lies the notion of focusing on what we can control and accepting with grace what we cannot.
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.”
— Epictetus
As the most influential Stoic figure in history, Marcus Aurelius amazingly observed the philosophy’s core principles while leading Rome during nearly constant war, a deadly plague, a tumultuous personal life, and betrayal from his family and close advisers.
His journals show that he genuinely saw each challenge as an opportunity to cultivate, learn and grow in the Stoic virtues: patience, courage, humility, resourcefulness, reason, justice, and creativity.
He channeled the obstacles in front of him — whether those obstacles were simply the state of things, of his own making, or brought on by someone else — into the way forward. And did so while avoiding rising to hatred, anger, or bitterness — as he knew that those responses have a way of infecting our consciousness and have the power to turn us into the thing that has brought us pain in the first place.
“How much more harmful are the consequences of anger … than the circumstances that aroused them in us?”
— Marcus Aurelius
In Marcus’ writing, we see the virtues of a calm mind. That anger almost always makes things worse — and ultimately can compound the internal and external harm.
Each obstacle in our lives will be different — but the emotions that stem from those obstacles manifest in many of the same ways in all of us. It can be anger, depression, loneliness, helplessness, frustration, fear, confusion, or anxiousness.
Contemporary author Ryan Holiday, one of the most prolific contributors to the Stoic tradition in the 21st Century, puts it this way:
[Stoicism] teaches you how to get unstuck, unf*cked, and unleashed, how to turn the many negative situations we encounter in our lives into positive ones — or at least to snatch whatever benefits we can from them. To steal good fortune from misfortune. It’s not: How can I think this is not so bad? It is how to see that you can make it good. [It is not about “toxic positivity” but harnessing creativity and opportunity].
In the 21st Century, most of the obstacles we face are those that come from our own minds. Since the mid-1940s, especially in America, we have been on an uphill trajectory regarding prosperity, life expectancy, leisure time, equality, etc.
In 2023, our troubles are more often filed under a new category: Too Much.
Too Much
Designed for scarcity, we find ourselves ill-suited for environments of abundance: Too much information, too much unhealthy, calorically dense food, too many things we are told we need to acquire happiness, and too many other people to compare our lives with.
Holiday writes, “Great times are great softeners. Abundance can be its own obstacle … our generation needs an approach for overcoming obstacles and thriving amid chaos more than ever.”
So what is a good place to start on the search for a new approach?
1.
First, I’d start with the Stoic fundamentals: focusing on what you can control and accepting with grace what you cannot. (Also, not immersing ourselves in environments that compel us toward ruminating on the things we cannot is helpful).
Remembering that our perceptions — our thoughts, our beliefs, and our reactions are within our own power — and belong to no one else. That we are, thus, never powerless.
Now I recognize this is one thing to talk about in theory but much more challenging to apply in real life. Because when we encounter obstacles, we become emotional. Then we behave irrationally. When we are emotional, we make mistakes; our biological and hormonal systems shift into overdrive — and we stop thinking clearly because cortisol is flooding our bodies.
But here’s the trick. And it is a trick of the mind: You can train this reaction out of your system through exposure.
The Greeks would call this Apethia: a state of mind in which one is not disturbed by the passions. Rather than indifference, it is a kind of equanimity. It means eradicating the tendency to react emotionally or egotistically to external events, the things that cannot be controlled.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Jonathan Haidt might call it: anti-fragility. If you want a crash course, this video does an excellent job.
Ultimately, our minds are like our muscles — and become stronger when challenged.
Also, like muscles, our psychological immune system requires daily tending. We don’t think that if I finish running a marathon, I’ll be able to pick up and do it again ten years from now without staying in shape over the decade. This is true of our neural networks that drive our emotions — we must cultivate our thinking patterns to position ourselves for the outcomes we want.
These habits of mind can be adopted, not unlike putting on your tennis shoes and running around the block (speaking of which — 30 minutes of daily cardio is as effective [or in some cases more effective] treatment for depression than medication.)
And just like exercise — knowing something is good for us is not the same as actually doing the thing. We can know that certain habits of mind are healthy without actually practicing them with intention.
My wife has been trained to respond with a cool head in chaotic environments as an ER doctor. The more chaotic the environment, the calmer she becomes. This is a result of her training. Emergency Medicine residents train over the course of years to practice medicine in highly-stressful and highly-volatile environments — so that they’ve seen all the things that might surprise or scare them. (And there are a lot of things, as you can imagine, that fall into those categories)
On a much less intense scale, when I started my career as an educator, I was so unbelievably nervous to be in front of a classroom. My heart would pound, I would sweat, I would feel like a fraud, and my fight-or-flight system would be in overdrive. Eventually — after about five years — that biological response faded. [When I think about the fact that most teachers leave the profession within the first five years of teaching, I often wonder how much that stress response has to do with it].
Eventually, the emotional response was trained out of my system. Resilience was developed in small steps over time.
The reality is when we pursue environments that challenge us or make our way through obstacles we face, we can discover that we are stronger than we realized.
2.
The second step on the remedy path for emotional stability in modern times is to stop focusing relentlessly on pursuing happiness [or at least the quick hit version]. It seems counter-intuitive, but it’s true. Happiness, as a feeling, an emotion, is designed to be fleeting. We are better off pursuing a kind of contentment—deep satisfaction with what is.
Paradoxically, by pursuing happiness relentlessly, we end up more unhappy.
Harvard professor and psychologist Susan David covers this in her book: Emotional Agility, where she puts it simply — expectation = disappointment.
David contends that when we overvalue happiness — we set ourselves up for failure because we start to perceive every slight, every rejection, every disappointment, and every misstep as proof that we aren’t achieving our goal of happiness.
Instead, we need to move through the world with the recognition that it doesn’t owe us anything — and that it could all go away instantly. The Stoics also wrote and thought about this — it is called Momento Mori. And it means to remember that you will die. Not ruminate on it, but hold it in the background.
When you can hold in the corner of your mind that this might be the last time — you approach the things in your life with a different kind of presence, a different kind of contentment. You hug your kids a little longer; you take the time to tell your spouse why they are wonderful; you find gratitude in engaging with the projects in front of you. You think to yourself, “how lucky I am to be alive and experiencing this moment.”
So to find contentment — or our equanimity in our present — is to let go of how we think things should be.
There are a lot of barriers in front of us that make this kind of thinking difficult. We are bombarded by information about “the things we need.” And the hedonic treadmill [or hedonic adaption] will just keep going unless we can stop and savor — and recognize that this is enough.
The Stoics also wrote and thought about this: The power of recognizing that we already have everything we need.
We think we need “more” to be happy. If you just get X we will finally be happy. But humans are unbelievably adaptive to positive or negative events. In a 1971 study, Brickman and Campbell, found that “lottery winners and accident victims both returned to their pre-event happiness levels within a few months or years” (as cited in Diener et al., 2006, p. 306).
True happiness [or long-term satisfaction] is not contingent on external possessions or circumstances, as the Stoics wisely recognized. No matter how much one possesses, it can never be sufficient for someone who feels they have too little. But a person who can embrace gratitude and focus their minds on the good things in their life will discover happiness regardless of the situation they find themselves in.
“Love is learning to say yes to what is” — Richard Rohr
Keep looking for connection,
